Israel’s property commissioner, Erez Steinberg, recently ordered a Jerusalem apartment owner to sign a TAMA 38 redevelopment agreement after rejecting all of his objections as unreasonable. The case concerns a four-story building on Lincoln Street in Talbiya, where 95% of the owners of 20 apartments had already signed a demolition-and-rebuild deal with the developer A.Greenbaum TAMA 38.
The building is more than 65 years old and does not meet Israeli earthquake-resistance standards. Under the plan, it will be replaced by an eight-story building with 40 apartments, an elevator, reinforced safe rooms, and an underground parking garage. Each existing owner is set to receive an additional 25 square meters, including a protected room, a balcony of at least 12 square meters, a regular parking space and a storage room, while the developer will cover rent during construction until handover.
The holdout owner, whose apartment is 53 square meters, argued that he would lose value, suffer from poor design and less functional air flow, and that the developer was acting in bad faith by taking excessive profits. The commissioner dismissed the claims, saying that reducing exposure to air is common in demolition-and-rebuild projects and that the loss here was minor. He wrote that the difference between 2.5 air directions and three was not a substantial harm that could justify blocking the project.
Steinberg also rejected the claim that the interior layout was personally unsuitable, noting that it was similar to the other compensation apartments and did not discriminate against the objector. He said the rise in the apartments’ economic value far outweighed the owner’s subjective dissatisfaction. A separate complaint about the view from the apartment was also rejected after an appeal committee found no material harm, a conclusion the commissioner adopted. He further said the disputed area measurements did not matter because all original apartments had been measured under the same agreed method. In his ruling, he emphasized that earthquake reinforcement protects both lives and public funds, and noted that the project also includes protected rooms, whose importance in Israel is “critical” in the current reality.
