Jerusalem court sides with residents over city planners in precedent-setting case
District court blocks proposed construction project for the Rasco neighborhood, saying it failed to comply with an existing master plan
Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.
In a move seen as a victory for Jerusalem residents, a construction project proposed by the municipality for the Rasco neighborhood has been blocked by the district court for failing to comply with a master plan for the neighborhood.
The case sets a precedent that may make it more difficult for builders to submit plans that violate the city’s master plans for neighborhoods, which have not been seen as legally binding until now.
It is also a story of how one determined resident was able to fight back against the municipality and win.
Israel’s capital is the country’s leader in urban renewal projects, with more than 70,000 housing units currently under “pinui-binui” (evacuate-and-rebuild) projects in various stages of development, according to the city’s urban renewal directorate. Such developments allow apartment owners to upgrade their homes at no cost, while the developer funds the project in exchange for the right to build additional housing units for sale.
While these types of urban renewal projects benefit the parties involved and allow the municipality to add new housing units in existing neighborhoods, they often come at the expense of neighborhood residents, who suffer from noise, increased congestion, and greater competition for community resources. As many as 500 skyscrapers planned for the city in the coming years threaten to irreversibly alter the city’s character.
Like most neighborhoods, Rasco, located between the Katamon, Givat Mordechai and Pat neighborhoods in central Jerusalem, has a master plan that sets guidelines for urban renewal construction projects, including how many new housing units can be built, how tall buildings can be, and what traffic changes are needed to accommodate additional housing.
A master plan for the city published in 2000 also defines a vision for the city’s future development.
However, unlike Jerusalem’s Master Plan 62, created in 1959, these master plans are considered by the municipality to be policy statements, not legally binding documents.
“In practice, the municipality and district committees don’t care about the master plan at all,” said Dorit Perry, the neighborhood resident who spearheaded the legal campaign. “They build whatever they want.”
In most urban renewal construction cases, the municipality receives plans from an investor who has already obtained the agreement of a majority of tenants for the project. But in the case of a plot of land spanning the properties on 68 Tchernichovsky Street and 39 Shimoni Street, the city developed its own plan for urban renewal, which it would have later pitched to investors.
First approved by Jerusalem’s local planning and building committee in October 2020, the plan seeks to knock down a pair of long 4-story housing buildings and replace them with four new buildings, including one 23-story tower and three 10-story buildings. This would nearly triple the number of housing units on the plot from 108 to 298, and add about a thousand people to the neighborhood.
One of the proposal’s benefits was that access to the project’s underground parking lot would be from Herzog Street, a large thoroughfare, instead of from Shimoni, a small one-way side street that already suffers from congestion. The plan would have also made the roads on Tchernichovsky and Shimoni wider and added a center for storefronts and public services, including a daycare center.
But there were problems. Firstly, Perry said, the neighborhood master plan only allows buildings of up to eight stories on those streets, due to the neighborhood’s classification as a “historic” area. (More specifically, six floors for a single building and eight stories for a complex with multiple buildings.)
“We’re not talking about a small deviation,” Perry said. “A building of 23 stories is three times what the master plan allows.”
In addition, Perry said, an independent consultant found that the municipality’s plan to divert traffic off Shimoni had “a very low chance of working.” More likely, she said, it would make congestion within the neighborhood much worse.
“This project would have destroyed the entire neighborhood,” Perry said.
Neighbors were up in arms over the proposal and led by Perry, 400 objections were filed against the plan.
“You have to understand that Dorit Perry led this all herself,” said a community council member familiar with the case. “She took the municipality to court and brought hundreds of people to file documents. She got a hundred people to physically come to court with her and raised thousands of shekels from neighbors to hire a lawyer. Winning a case like this requires someone who is extremely driven, and she made it happen.”
A petition against the plan was initially rejected, and the plan was approved again by the district planning and building committee in August 2024. After the committee rejected a request to appeal the decision, Perry and her partners took the case to the district court, where they argued that the proposal did not comply with the neighborhood’s master plan.
An alternative plan, with shorter buildings and more small apartments appropriate for renters and young couples, was also presented.
In a hearing last week, Jerusalem District Court Judge Ilan Sela ruled that the city’s plan was invalid, and called on city engineers to design a new proposal that would comply with the master plan. The municipality said in a statement that it accepted the decision and would develop a new plan based on the court’s ruling.
“This is a unique case of the court ruling against the municipality that has never happened before,” the community council member said. “No neighborhood has ever won a case against a building project because it deviated from the master plan. It sets a precedent that will require investors to be more careful with future projects.”
