The Jerusalem District Planning & Building Committee on Monday gave its stamp of approval for the construction of 700 units for Ramat Beit Shemesh, adding to the earlier approval of 350 units in the M-3 area, and an additional 800 units in RBS Gimmel-2. This brings the total number of approved housing units in RBS to 2,800. In all likelihood, the Ministry of Housing will begin moving ahead with the new units in the coming months. This is in addition to 2,200 units under construction in Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel-1.
The plans also include new roadways, a fire station, MDA station, and a new police station, larger than the current outdated facility. Also included in the plan is a storage facility for the municipality as well as a parking facility and garage for heavy equipment used by the municipality.
Office space intended for local residents is also part of the project as well as offices for high-tech, as well as additional commercial centers, strip malls. A gas station is also planned.
An 11-dunam (about 3 acres) plot has been approved for post-delivery convalescent facility (beit hachlama). Officials realize that today, local women are compelled to travel to Jerusalem, Bnei Brak or Telshe Stone for such a service. Officials report that annual birth rate in Beit Shemesh is 4,000 Baruch Hashem.
City officials report that Rabbi Moshe Muntag, who heads the local planning board and sits on the district board pushed for the project, realizing the need due to the growing number of annual births.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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5 Responses
BH! Kein Yirbuh!
If the Israelis didn’t require the approval of the national government to build housing, maybe more housing would be built, meaning housing prices would fall, and fewer people would have difficulty in getting adequate housing.
This is all fine and good, but I’ll believe that the infrastructure will be built only when I see it. Also, there is a significant deficit in the road to Beit Shemesh (Road 38) – it’s a two-lane highway that was intended to be the road to a town of a few thousnand, not a city of about 80,000. You can see how inadequate it is every day, morning and evening, when traffic is backed up for miles due to one slow vehicle or accident.
There is a plan in the works to widen the road to four lanes, but until this is done, building more housing is foolish.
an Israeli Yid
No mention of Parks, Community Centers, Bet Avot and proper allocation of land for schools, shuls and rec areas?
This whole news item seems to be based on “headlines” rather than on rational thinking. Ramat Beit Shemesh has grown from a Beit Shemesh “outpost” fifteen years ago to a town in its own right. Accordingly there has to be in place a town plan which would include every facility that a town requires, a fire station, an ambulance station, a police station, clinics, shopping area with adequate parking, recreation facilities (gyms, swimming pools, sports halls etc.), schools, sites for shuls, parks, playgrounds, and so on and above all a clinic or hospital. This plan should also include plans for expanding the facilities as the town grows. What seems to be happening is that every few weeks new dira building projects are announced without any reference to any logical town planning. This is nothing new. It appears that all new towns in Etetz Yisroel seem to grow in the same way. It is about time that someone should say “Hold on a minute. We are building housing units, fine, but where are all the facilities and where are they going to come from?” Just look at the school situation. For example, someone decided that the Beis Yaakov in Rechov Gilo in RBS Aleph needs to be expanded (which it does). They also imagined that the whole project can be completed in the summer vacation period! Now that school has started, and the project is no way complete, there is an inadequate back up arrangement, and pupils will be suffering staggered schooling for some time. Where is the planning? Of course, on top of everything must be a committment from the government to improve Route 38, and soon. Platitudes that “it will happen, sometime in the future” are not enough. There is so much road building going on in the country. How about Route 38 being put to the top of the priority list!
By the way, can someone explain to me why Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel-2 is not Ramat Beit Shemesh Daled, or are we to have Gimmel-3, Gimmel-4 and so on?