Planning and Zoning

Our Planning and Zoning team advises on some of Israel’s most complex matters, including several precedent-setting pieces of work, aiding Israeli and international entrepreneurs and companies in their planning and construction projects.

What we do

• Promotion and development of urban building plans: as the first phase of any building project, we work closely with architects, property appraisers, surveyors and legal advisors to present the building plans to planning bodies, local and district planning and building committees, appellate committees, the National Committee for Planning and Building and any other necessary planning bodies and authorities.
• Licensing of building projects: we handle the entire process of obtaining building permits, for projects of varying scales, from those including one building housing a handful of units through to multiple buildings housing thousands of units, for residential, commercial and office use.
• Planning and zoning-related disputes: litigation may be initiated by residents impacted by proposals, by project initiators or by the planning authorities themselves. We represent and advise clients on proceedings before local and district planning committees, appeals to appellate committees, compensation claims for property depreciation under Section 197 of the Planning and Zoning Law, and on claims arising from property expropriations.
• Legal opinions: clients turn to us for advice and due diligence on planning and zoning for various matters such as municipal expropriations, leasehold rights regarding the Israel Land Authority or property usage designations. After investigation, we provide clients with the comfort of legal opinions to provide clarity and transparency on projected developments.
• Betterment levies: We also advise on betterment levies and represent clients on appeals against the imposition of such levies by local authorities.

Recent work includes:

• Preparing the urban renewal plan of the city of Givatayim, according to Section 23 of NOP 38, working on a macro, city-wide level. This includes advising on four plans, one of which will add 3,013 residential units to the Givat Rambam neighborhood.
• Representing Safed Municipality in a precedent-setting and revolutionary legal solution, making creative use of a legal-planning loophole that required only one change of provision in the planning regulations to permit additions to existing buildings, solving urgent safety issues for the city’s residents.
• Acting for a developer to approve planning of a demolition-and-rebuild project in Ramat Gan and seeking to overturn a committee ruling by bring a precedential legal question over when a financial feasibility check of a project should be initiated.
• Representing a developer in a NIS 1 billion dispute with the Jerusalem Municipality and the Kiryat Yovel Neighborhood Community Management over plans to change the status of a large compound changed from sports use to residential.
• Representing a group of 120 residents of the city center of Raanana in a petition against allocating one half of a community green space area for the building of a synagogue cultural center and municipality offices. We succeeded in getting the court to annul the decision of the municipality of Ra’anana.
• Acting for the Blue Coast Association in promoting detailed plans for three complexes totaling 2,000 dunams (each dunam is 1,000sqm). The master plan included the construction of 12,500 housing units, as well as hundreds of thousands of square meters for employment, trade and hotels. We were able to resolve the dispute between the landowners and the municipality of Herzliya, and the decision was made to allow plans to be drawn up for the Blue Coast development.

Why choose us?

We provide an end-to-end service for clients: our lawyers will support your project from managing, presenting and registering urban building plans to obtaining permits while also handling any disputes or challenges to the project that may arise.

Our team is recognized as a leading firm by independent research: we are ranked among the top firms in Israel for planning and zoning by The Legal 500 after our merger with specialist planning practice Yuval Gal-On & Co.