This week a tender is being closed to purchase land for the construction of 50 houses with gardens in the Park neighborhood in Beersheva. Next month a tender will be closed for 629 houses with gardens in the Rakefot neighborhood, which will be built at the northern entrance to the city, including lots of 700 square meters and even more.
In this way, slowly but surely, the government has given up on its efforts to make Beersheva into Israel's southern metropolitan region. Instead of densely built homes, jobs, commerce and urban amenities, the basic attributes of a metropolitan region, Beersheva is mainly offering a house and garden at a cheaper price than the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
In 2014, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "Beersheva will be the cybersecurity capital of the eastern hemisphere."
Two metropolitan areas cannot exist 30 kilometers apart
Nearly nine years later, Beersheva is struggling to maintain its status as the capital of the Negev. Only two weeks ago the Southern District Planning and Building Commission held a long debate to approve the building of a cybersecurity campus, with Dimona Mayor Benny Biton. Several days before that, Minister of the Interior Ayelet Shaked had said that Dimona would become a "cybersecurity power" and the capital of the Eastern Negev and Bitton declared that Dimona would be Israel's fifth metropolitan region. You din't have to be an experience town planner to understand that there can't be two metropolitan regions within 30 kilometers of each other.
Anyway, just 40 kilometers northwest of Beersheva is Kiryat Gat, which just signed its third roof agreement with the state to build 10,000 more homes, with a budget of NIS 1 billion. Kiryat Gat Mayor Aviram Dahari said, "The Kiryat Gat metropolitan area is being launched." Dahari also told the Southern District Planning and Building Commission that, "If the State of Israel is looking for more prisons to build and thinks that Kiryat Gat will be the latest sucker, then those times are over. Dump all the garbage, gravel, concrete, recycling, and stories on Beersheva."
In other words, if it wasn't enough that Beersheva has for years been unsuccessfully struggling with surrounding suburbs like Omer and Lehavim, it is even losing battles with other "metropolitan areas" in its own region. Another example of a poorly planned country.
The budget and the suburbs are delaying the railway
And here is another example of the weakening of Beersheva. Ten years ago the then Minister of Transport Israel Katz inaugurated the new fast rail link between Beersheva and Tel Aviv, which cut the journey to 55 minutes from 1 hour 15 minutes. Today, the train between Tel Aviv and Beersheva takes 1 hour 30 minutes. There are promisers that one day the train will do the journey in just 35 minutes but the approval and budget are being delayed, while more new stations are being opened in nearby suburban settlements, which will of course only lengthen the journey. A decision has been taken to build a light rail in Beersheva and final approval has been by the Ministry of Transport, but without anyone worrying about the budget.
Even when the country takes a step forward, it immediately takes at least one step back. In recent days, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi and Minister of Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited the cyber studies campus that the army is setting up in Beersheva. The government decided long ago that soldiers would study there at a branch of Ben Gurion University, but the army decided to turn to Tel Aviv University first. Because at the end of the day, soldiers expect a certificate from Tel Aviv, as long as there is no high-speed train that will whisk them back to the only metropolis in Israel.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 5, 2022.
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