Chair of the Noam party, Avi Ma'oz, told the Knesset Channel that a decrease in the price of housing is not in the interest of anyone - ultimately not even those who currently don't own a house.
"There is not interest to anyone in the state in the price of housing decreasing. There is really no true interest to anyone," he said.
Ma'oz elaborated, "If I have an apartment, I don't want it's price to decrease. If the price goes down, I'll also receive less rent from whoever lives in the apartment. If I have an apartment I live in, I don't want the price of the apartment to go down, because I will want to sell it at some point. Even if I leave it as an inheritance for my children, I don't want the price to go down - I only want it to go up."
"Banks have no interest in the price of housing going down. Neither do contractors, entrepreneurs."
The only people who do have such an interest are those who do not currently own housing, he explained. But "even those who don't own an apartment, where will they get the money? From their parents. But what is the parents' interest? That the price of the apartment doesn't go down, because they are holding assets."
"They should stop deceiving the public, stop engineering the public consciousness," Ma'oz concluded. "Nobody - including the Finance Ministry and the State of Israel and the government of Israel - has a true interest in a decrease in the price of housing."