"It's easy to say that the Buyer Fixed Price Plan failed, but it isn't true," Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon said today at the 2019 Union of Local Authorities in Israel conference in the Tel Aviv Convention Center. "The plan supplied tens of thousands of housing units. A young couple doesn't have to wait today. The selection is bigger and the supply is larger. There used to be 10 buyers for each apartment. Now contractors are chasing after buyers, not the other way around." Kahlon also commented on the transportation problem, which constitutes a barrier to increasing the supply of housing in many local authorities and arouses opposition from the residents and local authorities heads: "When I became minister of finance, I didn't know that transportation would become the next crisis. We know this now, and something is being done about it: new transportation in the north and planning the metro, on which work already began recently in Rishon Lezion, with the investment projected to reach NIS 150 billion."
Kahlon also referred to the upcoming Knesset elections. According to the polls, Kulanu, Kahlon's party, is having to fight for every vote. "In order to promote the things I'm fighting for, I had to found a political party get Knesset seats, and push for those things myself independently. Political power is what makes things go," he said. In this context, Union of Local Authorities chairperson and Modi'in-Maccabim-Reut Mayor Haim Bibas commented, "I wish Mosh (Kahlon) would return to the Likud; it's his political home. He always represented the social idea - what the old Likud once was." Bibas added, "I believe that quite a few of the people who have been in the local authorities for more than 10 years will be leading the country in the coming years."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 27, 2019
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