"Empty House" project - there is no real housing crisis in Haifa

Usherit Raiz, Liran Ngauker and Livio Seidman locate abandoned buildings in the city of Haifa and perform musical performances in them. This is how they raise public awareness of the thousands of abandoned properties in the city.

The housing crisis seems unnecessary, when in Haifa there are thousands of empty and abandoned apartments, also called "ghost apartments". According to various estimates, there are between 3,000 and 10,000 empty apartments in Haifa (depending on who you ask). The apartments are empty for various reasons of economic viability. While common sense says that the burden of the property tax should be placed on the owners of the empty apartments, in order to force their owners to take action to occupy them and alleviate the housing crisis, Lahi Pa learned that these apartments, for the most part, actually entitle their owners to relief from the property tax.
About two years ago, Haifa's city council accepted the proposal of council member Yaron Hanan to double property tax on ghost apartments, however Lahi Pa learned that this proposal was never implemented.
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For comparison, in Ramat Hanasi, the largest housing project in Haifa in the last decade, about 1000 apartments were built. Imagine what would happen to the housing supply in Haifa, if the authorities acted with sanctions against the owners of the ghost apartments and obliged them to house them, by changing the property tax legislation and increasing the tax burden on their owners...
At a time when thousands of apartments are standing empty, the Haifa municipality continues to promote new construction projects on areas of natural woodland, since it is easier to destroy a piece of nature facing the sea than to roll up our sleeves and solve complex problems of ghost apartments within the neighborhoods themselves.
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The Empty House project deals with the phenomenon of empty buildings in Haifa that have been standing unused throughout the city of Haifa for years. Each building in itself is a story, and behind many of the buildings there is a rich history.
The ghost apartments are a burden on society, as they exacerbate the housing crisis and harm the tenants living in the neighborhood.

Many buildings are a physical hazard, others a social hazard - they affect the city's economy, lower the value of neighborhoods, the level of security on the street, and prevent the city from developing. The scope of the phenomenon is estimated at over 3000 housing units in Haifa, an amount that would have met the need for housing without establishing new neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city and emptying its center.
The project, with the help of music, an international language, tries to bring a little life to these buildings, to change the experience of walking on the street and to raise awareness of the phenomenon, in the hope that raising awareness will lead to a discussion on the issue and a change in the situation.

The group consists of three students from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion (Usherit Raiz, Liran Ngauker and Livio Seidman), locates abandoned buildings in the city and performs musical performances in them in the format of pop-up shows - a performance of about 30 minutes inside the empty buildings without prior warning, hanging a sign and appearing from the balcony/ Roof and just play, the people on the street stop and pay attention, enjoy a street performance and we also get feedback from them.

It should be noted that the interest in the project is great, people contact us with offers to help with film editing, photography, music and other requests.
The project itself began in an urban entrepreneurship course at the Technion and continued even after the course, as its importance to the city is great, since it gained publicity, we appeared in an article in Globes, on Raba radio for urbanism in GLAZ and presented the project at the Acre conference for national urbanism.

The problem is really difficult, the developers, who are in most cases private individuals, are not interested or cannot renovate or inhabit their buildings, they wait for the neighborhood to undergo restoration and renewal so that their renovation will be profitable, this is how it turns out that there are buildings that stand empty for decades without being touched.

The municipality does not collect property tax from the owners, they are actually exempt from property tax and therefore have no incentive to even start doing anything with their building (a loss of about NIS 5 million per year for the municipality), in various cities around the world municipalities collect property tax and even impose fines on entrepreneurs who leave their property empty (for example Barcelona ).

At the concerts themselves, all kinds of musicians appear, whether it's students from the Faculty of Architecture or whether it's musicians from local bands, as was the case at the last concert in Talfiot market (Oren Amitai performed).
It should be noted that the entire project is completely voluntary, without political motives, but only out of concern for the city, the neighborhoods and the residents.

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