Author: Noy Drori
I met Tal at Kiryat Sefer Park in Tel Aviv, and it looked like our meeting place was the perfect setting. You just need to walk around the park searching for an empty stone bench to identify Tal’s urban living environment. It looks like the environment in which he lives is a source of his enthusiasm, curiosity, and inspiration, which became apparent during our conversation.
Tal Alster’s involvement in housing issues began in 2011 alongside his academic career as a student enrolled in Hebrew University's prestigious PEP - Philosophy, Economics, and Political Science or PAKAM in the Hebrew acronym. He was first exposed to housing issues when he started volunteering as a student for Knesset member Dov Khenin, the only Jewish Knesset member of the primarily Arab Hadash party. Through his volunteering, Tal became exposed to the politics of workers’ rights and housing. Towards the end of 2011, Israel’s social protests erupted. These protests would have a long-lasting impact on him. “I think the social protests’ effect on me and others raised awareness of our ability to change the political sphere. The reality we live in is less rigid than we think, and it is more malleable than it initially appears. We can move in the direction we choose. In hindsight, I think that the protests evoked this feeling in many people. We saw ourselves as agents of change in civil society and government, which gave us a positive feeling.”
Exposure to current events and issues and more profound academic pursuits jumpstarted Tal’s professional development.
Tal Alster (Credit: Tal Alster)
What happened after 2011? What were your next steps after you realized that this is the field that interests you?
"During my last year in my B.A. I registered for courses taught by Dr. Avner de-Shalit from the Political Sciences Department. One of my assignments in the Poverty and Social Exclusion course dealt with people who are unhoused. To gain a deeper understanding of the issues at hand, Avner recommended I speak with Dr. Emily Silverman. Toward the end of my degree, I signed up for Emily’s fascinating Housing Policy and Urban Renewal course, where I learned about urban revitalization projects that attracted new people without displacing the existing residents.
I enjoyed my B.A. PEP program and I felt that the urban policy and planning field provides a platform to implement transcendent ideas in political philosophy. I thought that this would be a great platform from which I could advance social policy and implement concepts of justice, equality, and fairness.”
Tal pursued an M.A. in Political Science with a concentration in urban planning and is now completing his Ph.D. He describes how his path intersected with the Urban Clinic, where he would go on to deal with housing issues for two and half years and receive a wealth of knowledge.
How did the work at the Clinic influence you?
“I started as a transcriber for a forum initiative led by the Ministry of Housing and Emily. The forum was established by the Urban Clinic as a platform for multi-sectoral discussion (private sector, municipalities, and government ministries) on affordable housing. This task included preparing legislation initiatives. Despite the legislation not being passed, the experiences still provided me with an invaluable opportunity to enter the field of urban planning. At the same time, Emily and I started working together, and little by little, I received a more prominent platform to advance my own initiatives in the Clinic. The most memorable moments from my work at the Clinic were working on the War on Poverty Housing Committee report (in Hebrew) and participating in the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia in 2014, representing the Urban Clinic.
About 30 Israelis attended the World Urban Forum (WUF) that year, in a delegation organized by the Urban Clinic. “Participating in the WUF was fantastic - it allowed me to meet new people, exposed me to new places, gave me excellent networking opportunities in Israel, and I went on to edit an Urban Clinic report titled Social Urbanism: What Israel can learn from Medellin”, with articles written by Israeli members of the delegation.
Following his MA, Tal began working in planning and pursuing a doctorate in housing policy and inequality in cities. He also continued his advocacy work as a founder of Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY), translating the ideas from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. One of YIMBY’s main goals in Tel Aviv was to organize political interests to advance just responses to the city’s need for additional stable and affordable rental housing. The hope was that this movement would influence decision-makers by presenting the political cost of voting against development plans.*
How did the YIMBY movement you founded in Tel Aviv start?
"The initiative began as a response to the literature I read and my interest in these issues. I found that YIMBY is relevant for housing policy in Israel because it advocates for renters’ rights and strengthens them in decision-making processes. My initiative stems from an understanding that tenants’ political weakness is bad for housing policy. However, unlike the movement founded in San Francisco, CA, where a middle school teacher claimed that “you can no longer live here” and “you cannot rent an apartment even near San Francisco,” our institution is not a grassroots movement. Everyone who has worked in our organization has done so in a professional capacity. One can say that that was our main weakness; our movement did not rise from ‘the bottom up,’ which was a central feature of the San Francisco movement.”
Tal at the Israeli Architecture Festival, June 2019 (Credit: Tal Alster)
What was this movement’s fate? Why did it stop?
"My activity at YIMBY ended when I joined the urban planning team tasked with writing Tel Aviv’s housing strategy. It didn’t make sense that I take part in the counterculture movement and work as an ‘insider-advisor.’ I felt that there was a limit to how many roles I could have and that these two were incompatible. Ultimately, for a movement like this to succeed and gain traction, it needs to influence housing policy, just like civil movements, where decision-makers are pushed, challenged, and shamed’.
Why is it important to take tenants’ voices into account? Is it accurate to say that the power has resided in the hands of homeowners up until now?
"Generally speaking, planning at its core, throughout the world, is a tool that benefits homeowners and secures their assets in various ways. Planning principles are comparable to the idea that municipalities look out for their residents, maximizing services while minimizing taxes and increasing local property values. For most municipalities, this is a straightforward task as most residents are homeowners, but in Tel Aviv, more than half the residents are renters. It’s important to understand that political power isn’t just a function of headcount. Political power is always also tied to the questions of who will fight? Who will vote? Who will protest? Who will call their city council people? Who will be taken into account? In general, tenants, both in their self-image and reality, have less seniority and less experience and tend to be less involved.
The analogy I think of relates to transportation and mobility. When the planning system attempts to widen sidewalks or add bike lanes at the expense of parking spots, it will always face powerful and centralized opposition. Even if the change will help thousands of pedestrians and cyclists, at the expense of perhaps twenty parking lots, it is still usually the interests of the car-owners that will be expressed more loudly. It’s possible to develop many mechanisms that help preserve the status quo, and one of them is interest groups. I think of homeowners in the same way, especially veteran homeowners. These people have a disproportionate influence on housing policy, and just like the car owners, they use their disproportionate allowances and unequal share of the pie.”
After pondering the essence and roots of planning and working to understand its relationship to the physical world, Tal shaped his YIMBY insights. His theoretical framework is based on William A. Fischel’s Economic Theory on Planning. The theory postulates that planning and local governance serve homeowners. “Fischel claims that the main driver behind the NIMBY movement in the United States and what characterizes local governance, in general, is risk management. Even when we are fairly certain that changes are going to result in positive outcomes for homeowners, there will still be opposition due to risk aversion.”
How do you make sense of all this in the Israeli context?
"What’s interesting about the Israeli context is that we see an opposite process to what is happening in the US. The government established a new institutional framework that changed the equation through its raze and rebuild (pinui binui in Hebrew) legislation (aimed at increasing the housing supply), primarily through the TAMA 38 plan. It’s not that homeowners don’t understand the disadvantages of adding residences, including stress on infrastructure and increasing density. They know why it’s problematic, but the economic benefit and increase in housing welfare are significant enough incentives to accept these projects. The state successfully created a mechanism where homeowners agree to increase density and housing supply in high-demand areas. Contrarily, in the US, the leading interest is to oppose building projects.
Today Tal is finishing his doctorate in Political Science under Prof. Avner de-Shalit and Prof. Michael Shalev’s guidance. Over the past few years, he has researched inequality in cities and written about urban renewal. He works as a planner and consultant on housing policy for the Tel Aviv Municipality and is a leading member of the team that wrote the municipal housing strategy for the city.
As a concluding note, Tal’s answer to “Where he sees himself in the future” embodies the same personal dialogue between theory and practice. Tal says that he would like to study and work in policy-making, both of which he already does (he teaches an MA course on housing policy and urban regeneration with Dr. Emily Silverman and works in the public sphere). On a grander scale, Tal strives to improve the field of planning in Israel in academia and improve the quality of urban policy.
"One thing that needs to change is the way we teach planning. Many talented people go on to study planning, and the curricula don’t reflect that well enough. I would like to take part in that; the changes in planning practice and how we understand urbanity need to be reflected better in the curricula for urban planners.”
*The Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) is rooted in the United States and a counter to the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) movement. NIMBY features residents opposing the establishment of public institutions and urban renewal processes near their homes out of fears that their property values and lifestyle could be affected.
Translation: Galya Globerman