Metro

Neighborhood Watch: Scaling up

06/28/2012 10:56 By JOHN BENZAQUEN

Once a transit camp, Or Akiva is now holding its own with other middle-class Haifa-area towns.

Photo by: Courtesy of Or Akiva municipality

Or Akiva is a small town south of Haifa and east of the ancient city of Caesarea. It started life in the early ’50s as a ma’abara, or a transit camp for the new immigrants who were flooding the country, and most of its inhabitants were immigrants from North Africa.

Like many such transit camps, it was supposed to be transitory. The Construction and Housing Ministry decided that the best way to solve the housing problem on a more permanent basis was to convert the transit camps into permanent urban entities. As such, it started building low-cost housing, ranging from semidetached dwellings to single-family homes to apartment blocks. The dwellings were between 40 square meters and 60 sq.m., and those who opted for single-family or semidetached dwellings got relatively large plots of land measuring 800 sq.m. and 900 sq.m.

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Neighborhood Watch: Scaling up

Once a transit camp, Or Akiva is now holding its own with other middle-class Haifa-area towns.

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