When Joel and his family moved to Israel from New York in 2021, they decided to put down roots in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of Kiryat Gat, a working-class former development town on the northern edge of the Negev desert not known for having a large population of English-speaking immigrant.

The neighborhood was Carmei Gat, which was attracting growing attention among young families, including many from the Anglo community, but was still relatively off the radar. Joel, who asked that his last name not be used, and his family found a nice penthouse for just NIS 1.9 million (around $590,000 at the time), a bargain compared to similar homes on the market in popular immigrant strongholds like Modiin or Beit Shemesh.

Buying in a neighborhood few of their friends had even heard of involved some risk, Joel recalled. “It was met with a lot of skepticism,” he said. “But we quickly realized we had made the right decision and fell in love with the neighborhood.”

Established in 2017 on former farmland separated from Kiryat Gat’s urban core by Route 35, the neighborhood is now home to more than 30,000 residents, according to municipal data, and has become one of Israel’s fastest-growing destinations for national religious families seeking affordable housing.

The neighborhood has become particularly attractive for English-speakers, with an estimated 300 immigrant families now living there, real estate agents say. According to Nefesh B’Nefesh, more than 100 English-speaking families have moved there in the past year alone, and more are expected to join in the near future as additional residential projects near completion.

“We’re like the ‘Buchman’ of the Negev now,” said Deborah Michael, a real estate agent specializing in Carmei Gat, referring to a high-end Modiin neighborhood that has become a magnet for English-speaking immigrants.

“For less than the price of a place in Beit Shemesh or Modiin, you can buy a much larger apartment in a community that already has Anglo [immigrants], shuls, schools, shopping malls, and English-speaking professionals,” she said. “It feels like a yishuv — a close-knit community — with the amenities of a city.”

For early buyers like Joel and his family, it has also proven to be a wise investment. As the family grew, Joel decided last year to sell the apartment and move into a larger home nearby. Demand had grown so quickly that he was able to sell for nearly double the price he paid just four years earlier, he said.

“There is no beating the value one gets for the money in our neighborhood,” Joel said.

Things didn’t always look this way in Kiryat Gat. When it was founded in 1954, the city was a remote desert outpost that struggled with poverty and high unemployment as it absorbed large numbers of North African Jews. As new roads and factories — including a massive Intel chip plant that employs thousands — were built in the coming decades, and a wave of Russian immigrants arrived in the 1990s, it gradually evolved into a growing working-class city.

But the development of Carmei Gat as an expansion neighborhood north of the city represents a completely new chapter in Kiryat Gat’s story.

In 2013, the neighborhood was the first in the country to be designed using a comprehensive “umbrella agreement” model in which housing, shopping, schools, transportation and parks were all planned together. The model, which is designed to ensure that........

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