Environmental group seeks to stop building projects

The Adam, Teva V'Din organization says the projects would cause severe overcrowding in the Florentine area.

By MIRIAM BULWAR DAVID-HAY (TRANSLATED)
The Adam, Teva V'Din organization (Israel Union for Environmental Defense) has appealed to the courts to cancel two residential building projects planned for the Florentine neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, reports www.local.co.il. The organization says the projects would cause severe overcrowding in an area that already suffers from a serious lack of open spaces, and that the district planning and construction committee should never have approved the plans in the first place. According to the report, the committee allowed the Abarvanel and Harash ve'Oman areas on the border with Jaffa to be re-classified from commercial and industrial zones to residential zones, and approved the building of a number of residential towers in the two areas. But the environmental organization filed an appeal against the projects with the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Matters, saying that while it generally favors plans that aim to renew rundown neighborhoods and create much-needed extra housing, these two projects would do so at the expense of the open spaces in the area, which are already suffering from a "grave and extreme" shortage. In its lawsuit, the organization says cities are required to leave at least five meters of open public space for every person in an existing neighborhood (seven meters in a new neighborhood), but in Florentine there already are only two meters of open public space per resident and the plans would reduce the amount of space even further. "The plans undercut the basic right of Florentine residents to a reasonable quality of life … they (the plans) do not stand up to any reasonable criterion or principle that measures the density of the population in relation to the amount of public space in a residential neighborhood," the organization said. It added that in an old and settled area such as Florentine there was no way of solving the existing shortage of public space, but when it came to deciding the future of the last lands remaining in the area, it was "unacceptable to ignore the existing problem and even to make it worse." No response to the lawsuit or date for a court hearing was reported.