Ariel Sharon - Biography Chapters

1990 – 1992 Minister of Housing and Construction

Ariel Sharon served for two years as the Minister of Housing and Construction in Yitzhak Shamir's government. During those years he launched a housing campaign, unprecedented in scale and speed.

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The big wave of Aliya brought to Israel at that time approximately half a million new Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. The state of Israel had to provide housing for them and at the same time to solve the young couples' housing crisis. Within a short period of time, Ariel Sharon solved the critical housing problems by leading an enormous building effort.
Sharon: “The problems we had to deal with then were, first of all, to provide immediate housing solutions for hundreds of poor people who were left with no houses, because the arrival of new immigrants forced them to leave their apartments since the Olim had the means to pay rent for a whole year in advance. The day I stepped into my office, there were 2,208 Israeli families living in the streets, and the numbers grew by the day. Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants arrived. There were times I had to provide 300 apartments a day. Never in the history of Israel had we built so fast. We built 144,000 apartments and thoroughly renovated another 22,000.
"Since correct allocation of the population is fundamental to the existence of the nation, in order to form communities along the borders of the state and keep land reserves to Jews who'll make Aliya in the future, I have definitely tried to change this allocation as much as possible. I have decided, and this was authorized by the government, that 35 percent of the construction effort would be in the Negev, and indeed, the Negev settlements, that were falling apart, began to develop and flourish. Thousands of families that had left now returned to the Negev. I wanted 35 percent of the new immigrants to be housed from the line of Ashkelon-Kiriat Gat and to the south; 25 percent in the north of Israel, from the line of Akko or the Krayot – Nazareth up to the Lebanese border; small numbers in Judea and Samaria, and massive effort in the Jerusalem area and Ma'ale Edomim, also known as Greater Jerusalem."

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