Urban planning in Israel is flawed, but that has not stopped the budget of the Planning Administration from expanding steadily. In 2016, its budget stood at approximately 300 million shekels, and within just one year, it surged by over 30% to nearly 400 million shekels. Two years later, in 2019, it had already reached 420 million; by 2022, actual expenditures stood at 334 million. A review of the administration’s budget over the years reveals that actual spending has consistently exceeded the original allocation by at least a third. That is, while the government sets a base budget for the administration, by the end of the year, it turns out that the administration has spent at least 130% of what was initially allocated—an ironic example of planning at its finest. For instance, the original budget for 2022 was 350 million shekels, but the final budget was 70 million higher. In 2024, the administration’s original budget is around 330 million shekels, so based on past trends, it is expected to reach about 400 million by year’s end. About a third of the budget is allocated to salaries for administration employees.
Much of the administration’s excess expenditures is concentrated in consulting and research services. In 2019, the original budget for consulting stood at 30 million shekels, yet the actual amount paid to external consultants and researchers was more than double—exceeding 61 million shekels. According to the State Comptroller’s data, about one-fifth of the personnel engaged in core planning activities within the administration are outsourced consultants. In the Southern District, this figure rises to nearly half. To put things in perspective, at the beginning of the 2000s, the budget for external consultants was about 4 million shekels; two decades later, it has soared to around 70 million—a staggering increase of approximately 2,000%. The Planning Administration claims it would prefer to employ more permanent staff but struggles due to bureaucratic obstacles in hiring new government employees.
“Spot Zoning Plans” Have Become the Norm
The “spot zoning plan” concept was introduced to alleviate the heavy burden on the Planning Administration and align with Regulation 101, which was designed to decentralize planning authority to the local level. This plan applies mainly to urban populations, which account for about 90% of Israel’s population (approximately 9 million).
The logic underlying Israel’s planning system is based on the premise that planning should be conducted broadly, considering all needs and interests and following consistent and transparent principles—not just for individual plots but for larger planning areas. Generally, planning should be driven by needs and objectives rather than a collection of spot zoning plans.
That’s the theory. Despite the importance of comprehensive planning, the Israeli system aligns with the country’s notoriously convoluted, inefficient bureaucracy, allowing for a workaround—planning from the bottom up rather than top-down. These plans, known as “spot zoning plans,” have become widespread. Although the law does not explicitly define a spot zoning plan, they are commonly understood as plans covering areas of up to five dunams.
However, this workaround has become the standard: between 2016 and 2022, spot zoning plans accounted for most (60%) of all local master plans and detailed plans handled by district planning committees. In absolute numbers, this translates to over 15,200 spot zoning plans. The Jerusalem District is the leading user of such plans, with over 80% of its plans applying to areas smaller than five dunams and about half-covering plots smaller than a single dunam. This explosion of spot zoning plans is a clear indication of the failure of Israel’s planning system. According to the State Comptroller, “The proliferation of spot zoning plans extends planning timeframes, increases the workload on planning institutions, and indirectly heightens their exposure to pressures or unnecessary interventions from interested parties, as each such plan must undergo the entire planning process.”
The warnings are not just theoretical. While spot zoning plans make up the majority of plans submitted for approval, their contribution to the housing market is significantly smaller than that of other plans: 6,442 detailed spot zoning plans have proposed an addition of only 86,277 housing units, whereas 2,828 other plans have proposed 958,222 new units. This means that each spot zoning plan generates an average of just 13 housing units, compared to approximately 340 units per regular plan—a disparity of 25 times. Moreover, spot zoning plans have contributed less than 10% of the total housing unit increase among all relevant plans reviewed by local and district committees.
A Year at the Local Level, or a Year and a Half at the Regional Level
To all of this, the issue of overload must be added: the average time required for the planning process of spot zoning plans that propose a critical mass of additional housing units (“significant change”) is about 60 days longer than the time required for plans that suggest only a negligible number of housing units. The most significant gap is in the Central District Planning Committee, which has the highest population density in Israel: the average time to complete the planning process for spot zoning plans with significant changes is 727 days (more than two years), compared to 570 days for insignificant plans. In the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee—the second-largest district in the country—the gap is 70 days, with a significant change plan being approved only after a year and nine months.
Most spot zoning plans that propose significant changes are submitted to the regional planning committees (about 76.3%), adding to their workload. Even among the spot zoning plans that did not propose significant changes, approximately 32% were under regional jurisdiction. These figures become even more problematic when considering that the planning process at the regional level takes significantly longer than at the local level: while the process at the local level takes about 12 months, at the regional level, it takes about a year and a half—a six-month difference. Ironically, the Central District, the most densely populated in the country, holds the dubious record for the most extended planning process—660 days, nearly two years. Among the local committees, the district with the longest average time for plan approval is Haifa, where the local committees took an average of about 410 days, a little over a year.
“The proliferation of spot zoning plans impacts the functioning of planning institutions, both at the local and regional levels,” stated the State Comptroller in 2023. “The more such plans exist, the more resources planning institutions must allocate to localized planning instead of initiating and managing broader, comprehensive planning.”
According to the findings, the large number of spot zoning plans extends planning timelines, burdens planning institutions, and indirectly increases their exposure to pressures or unnecessary interventions from interested parties, as each such plan must go through the entire planning process. In other words, rather than easing the lives of citizens and reducing the workload on planning committees, the opposite is happening: committee members waste most of their time and energy on spot zoning plans, which fail to deliver and add only a minimal number of housing units—if any at all.
Despite not significantly contributing to the housing supply, spot zoning has become the dominant tool in planning and building committees. Spot zoning could be beneficial if the various planning institutions promoted plans based on a comprehensive planning strategy, but that does not appear to be the case.
Policy Documents Are Not Transparent to the Public
During discussions on spot zoning plans, elected officials on the committee can receive briefings and assessments regarding the extent of spot zoning use and the resources invested in it compared to broader planning efforts. This could facilitate decision-making regarding advancing comprehensive planning measures to address the rising number of spot zoning plans on a particular issue or in a defined area. For example, discussions may highlight the need to assess existing public buildings in relevant areas and determine whether they can accommodate the additional population expected due to various spot zoning plans in the planning pipeline. Similarly, there may be a need for a transportation feasibility study for neighborhoods or areas with multiple spot zoning initiatives to assess whether, after the addition of new housing units, incoming residents will face endless traffic congestion, an overwhelmed water and sewage system, and a shortage of kindergartens or schools.
Policy documents resulting from these discussions enable planning institutions to establish policies with a broad perspective while utilizing a streamlined decision-making process. However, planning institutions’ approval of policy documents is not subject to a statutory planning process. This means that the institution does not always have to publish the policy before approval, does not grant the public the right to object to it, and allows planning institutions to modify it periodically.
The role of policy documents as a guiding tool in planning decisions is evident in national master plans, decisions of national planning institutions, and their use by regional planning bodies. At the local level, the requirement to prepare and approve policy documents is reflected in the provisions of comprehensive plans, which, in some cases, condition the advancement of detailed plans on the approval of policy documents. In practice, given the prolonged planning processes, particularly for comprehensive plans, and the need for planning institutions to have a broad planning framework for decision-making, policy documents serve as an intermediate step before approving a comprehensive plan and as a basis for approving a detailed plan.
In 2021, the Deputy Attorney General established guiding principles for advancing and approving policy documents. These principles included referencing the factual basis for the policy’s formulation, collecting public feedback, and publishing policy documents to ensure transparency and public awareness of local committee activities. These guidelines are particularly relevant to spot zoning plans, which may conflict with comprehensive planning efforts.
Despite these efforts, it appears that the Planning Administration did not distribute the Deputy Attorney General’s guidelines to local committees and refrained from formalizing procedures based on these guidelines for preparing, advancing, approving, and publishing policy documents within planning institutions, including local committees. Additionally, it was found that the Planning Administration does not monitor how local committees advance, approve, and publish policy documents. As of today, there is no unified and standardized framework for preparing and approving policy documents to ensure compliance with regional and national planning policies. The Planning Administration’s dataset also lacks crucial information regarding the various stages of handling spot zoning plans in local committees. For many procedural milestones—such as newspaper publication of plan depositions, the end of the deposition phase, and the final plan approval announcement—more than 90% of the data is missing. The State Comptroller also recommended that the Planning Administration consider formalizing the legal status of policy documents through legislation.
No Macro-Strategic Discussions
The lack of uniformity and forward planning trickles down from the top, impacting regional and local planning committees. “The National Planning and Building Council has not conducted proactive discussions regarding the overall number of spot zoning plans promoted within planning institutions,” stated the State Comptroller’s report published last year, which reviewed the years 2016–2022. The Central, Jerusalem, Haifa, Northern, and Southern regional committees followed suit. For seven consecutive years, their members avoided holding fundamental discussions on the scope of spot zoning plans submitted to their districts or exploring ways to provide comprehensive planning solutions. At the local level, the pattern repeated itself: committee members in Be’er Sheva, Bat Yam, Hod HaSharon, Netanya, Rishon LeZion, and Giv’at Alonim did not bother to conduct macro-strategic discussions before approving plans with significant impacts on the urban landscape and residents’ quality of life.
One of the most common purposes of spot zoning plans is the retroactive legalization of building violations—a practice euphemistically referred to as “regularization.” This purpose appeared among the ten most frequent objectives of spot zoning plans submitted in Netanya’s planning district and Shefa-‘Amr, Be’er Sheva, and Rishon LeZion. The State Comptroller’s report implied that additional local committees use spot zoning to legitimize illegal construction retroactively but avoid explicitly acknowledging this in official documents.
Beyond the obvious legal issues, building violations represent a massive disaster in planning terms. The ability to properly plan an urban area saturated with illegal construction is minimal to nonexistent, as unauthorized buildings establish new realities that were never accounted for in official planning frameworks. Demolishing illegal structures requires enormous resources—both financially and in terms of administrative and legal procedures—since construction violators always have the right to appeal in court, delaying, obstructing, or even preventing demolition altogether. Until such legal proceedings conclude, planning committees often have no choice but to consider illegal construction as an existing condition, which must be factored into comprehensive and localized planning decisions.
The conclusion is that the most effective way to address illegal construction is through prevention, which requires two primary approaches:
- Adequate planning that meets residents’ needs and does not “push” ordinary citizens into committing construction violations.
- Strict and uncompromising enforcement of existing building violations to deter future offenders.
Israel’s planning institutions are failing spectacularly on both fronts, as demonstrated by the widespread “regularization” of violations through spot zoning plans. According to the National Enforcement Unit’s data, 65% of local committees did not submit annual reports on building violation enforcement. This issue is particularly acute in the Arab sector, where many building violations occur. Until the mid-2010s, local planning committees in Arab municipalities such as Tira and Nazareth suffered from a severe shortage of detailed housing plans. This has changed significantly in recent years; since 2017, approximately 200,000 housing units have been approved in Arab communities. The Planning Administration has also led efforts to appoint strategic planners in 32 of 33 Arab municipalities by a government resolution. Additionally, training courses have been conducted for planners and local government representatives from the Arab sector.
However, the Planning Administration has identified a significant barrier to increasing the supply of legally buildable land: “Due to property ownership issues, it is difficult to streamline construction on land in these communities and to develop public spaces, infrastructure, and roads,” the administration stated. “Furthermore, there is a phenomenon of selling private agricultural land on the outskirts of towns, where residential buildings are then illegally erected.” In other words, even when the state attempts to bridge planning gaps—most of which are its responsibility—many Arab local authorities show little willingness to cooperate.
Construction Violators Thrive
The situation worsens when examining how planning committees handle building violations. In Hof Ashkelon, Givatayim, and Bnei Brak, there has been a sharp decline in enforcement cases. In Tira, a city of nearly 30,000 residents, enforcement and oversight were virtually nonexistent as of the late 2010s. In 2016–2017, 75 supervision files were referred to prosecutors, but no indictments were filed, no stop-work orders were issued, and only two administrative demolitions were carried out. Moreover 2018, the Tira local committee failed to submit its legally required annual enforcement report to the National Enforcement Unit. “Reports from the committee’s prosecutor to the Prosecution Guidance Department in 2018 paint a grim picture of a lack of oversight and enforcement,” the State Comptroller stated. That year, no supervision files were transferred to prosecutors, no administrative stop-work orders were issued, and no indictments were filed. The prosecutor reported that five administrative demolition orders had been issued—but none were executed.
The result? The entrance road to Tira is lined on both sides with auto repair shops, building supply stores, gas stations, plant nurseries, restaurants, and more—all built without permits and in violation of the law. The land in question is designated for agricultural use. The State Comptroller found no evidence of any enforcement action in the area. In other cases, Tira’s authorities ignore regional planning committees and openly defy court rulings—including those of the Supreme Court.
For example, in May 2016, inspectors discovered an illegal event hall in Tira, built on agricultural land. The local planning committee delayed its demolition, and a district court ruling criticized the committee for failing to fulfill its legal duties and for not taking enforcement action despite a blatant violation of the law. When the Supreme Court reviewed an appeal by the hall’s owner in June 2018, it also noted that the Tira local committee had ignored orders from the regional planning committee regarding the issuance of a demolition order. While the Supreme Court ultimately rejected the appeal, it delayed enforcement until September 2018 to allow the property owner to comply voluntarily. The illegal structure was not demolished until July 2020—two years later.
Even more troubling are reports of improper interference in enforcement actions in Tira. In its annual report, the committee’s prosecutor stated, “Local enforcement officials receive directives from the municipality’s management regarding the monitoring and implementation of enforcement orders.” Such interference violates the law, which explicitly prohibits meddling in the professional judgment of a local authority’s chief engineer responsible for enforcement.
Instead of eradicating these violations, Israel’s increasing reliance on spot zoning plans—now a dominant feature of its planning system—effectively legitimizes illegal construction. This trend is pushing Israel’s planning framework into a dangerous downward spiral. The system is inefficient and incapable of producing high-quality, comprehensive master plans. As a result, it relies on an ad hoc, fragmented approach that fails to account for broader urban needs and, in many cases, facilitates severe and potentially irreversible damage to the country’s urban fabric.