The ‘Price for the Occupant’ plan is a government residential construction program in which the contractors bid for a project, and the lowest bid in terms of the final price for a purchase of an apartment (the price of the occupant – hence the name), wins the project. One of the main goals of this plan is to lower housing prices.
To participate, the resident must meet certain conditions (such as being without an apartment of his own), and after receiving the eligibility certificate, he is registered for the lottery. The lottery is for a specific project, and it is interesting to examine which projects are registered by the Jerusalemites. The Ministry of Housing regularly publishes data on the winners, and since this is a lottery, it can be assumed that the distribution of the winners is similar to the distribution of the registrants.
As of the end of 2017, out of the 41,600 winners in the ‘Price for the Occupant’ lottery, 3,543 of the winners were Jerusalemites. The localities with the highest number of Jerusalemites were Beit Shemesh (944 Jerusalemites), Modi’in (480), and Jerusalem itself (319). Some of the other localities around the city are also of interest to the Jerusalemites, but apparently there were not many housing units offered in them.
If we examine the percentage of Jerusalemites out of all the winners, it appears that the main localities (where Jerusalem comprised more than 10% of the winners) are Jerusalem, where Jerusalemites constituted 44% of the winners; Ma’aleh Adumim (41%); Beit Shemesh (33%); Mevaseret Zion (26%); Modi’in (15%); Nazareth Illit (12%); And Safed (12%).
Who were the rest of the people interested in projects in Jerusalem? Apparently they came from a very wide variety of communities. The main localities from which came the winners of projects in Jerusalem, except for Jerusalem, were Tel Aviv (34 winners); Bnei Brak (24); Mevaseret Zion (24); Petah Tikva (22); And Beit Shemesh (20). The list of localities is long and varied, and includes (excluding Jerusalem) 119 localities.
