A Holy City Housing Crunch

Elisheva Aron, a single mother with her 4-month old son Benzion. She is paying $1,000 a month for a nondescript walkup. She recently took a roommate to defer the rent. Michele Chabin

Elisheva Aron, a single mother with her 4-month old son Benzion. She is paying $1,000 a month for a nondescript walkup. She recently took a roommate to defer the rent. Michele Chabin

by Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent

Jerusalem — Jerusalem is in critical condition, and unless an affordable housing solution is implemented soon, the city will lose the majority of its young people. If this happens, most of its remaining residents will be poor haredi families and wealthy absentee landlords.

That’s the dire prediction of Shlomo Hasson, a Hebrew University geographer and head of a brand-new municipal committee created to explore ways to make Jerusalem affordable.

“Jerusalem is dying. The city center is dying, and if we fail to do something to save them, we’ll find ourselves unable to reverse the negative migration,” Hasson told The Jewish Week in a frank, foreboding interview.

The scramble for affordable rentals — a must for any city that wants to attract college

students and young wage-earners — is at its fiercest right now, the end of summer vacation, as many of Jerusalem’s 40,000 university students search for apartments in the tightest, most expensive market anyone can remember. They’re competing with the city’s other long-term renters as well as thousands of tourists and foreigners here on overseas learning programs.

The unprecedented demand comes at a time when the number of rentals is at an all-time low.

By all accounts, much of the shortage can be traced to the foreign demand for Jerusalem properties. According to a late-2007 municipal report, at least 10,000 Jerusalem apartments, the vast majority of them in the most central, desirable neighborhoods, are owned by diaspora Jews. (Although no one knows exactly how many apartments exist in Jewish neighborhoods, Hasson believes the number is a bit over 100,000.)

“Today, between 25 and 50 percent of houses sold in Rehavia, Talbiya, Katamon, the German Colony, Baka — traditionally places where students reside — are sold to affluent people living abroad, and the vast majority don’t live here but don’t rent out their properties, either,” Hasson noted.

Another survey said that one out of three new apartments in central Jerusalem are being sold to foreign investors, and that 20 percent of all apartments downtown remain empty much of the year. The apartment shortage has emboldened the remaining landlords to jack up their prices, “making it unaffordable for young people.”
For a vibrant city center to exist “you need young people and a middle-class, but they’re disappearing,” Hasson said.

Amit Poni, housing coordinator of New Spirit, a student advocacy organization, noted that since the early 1990s, about 17,000 Jewish Jerusalemites have left the city every year, while only 9,000 to 10,000 have arrived.

“During the past 15 years, 100,000 Jews have left, half of them young people. Many have left for more affordable housing.” Poni calls it “ironic” that “Jerusalem is the second most-expensive city housing-wise in Israel after Tel Aviv, yet it’s the poorest city. How can that be?”

Even a casual look at local apartment rental Web sites, list-serves and newspaper ads confirms the shocking prices. A simple unfurnished two-bedroom in a central location can easily fetch $1,200 to $1,500 per month, and a comparably sized “luxury” flat can top $2,500. Though more affordable in places like Pisgat Ze’ev, Neveh Ya’akov and East Talpiot, rents are still higher than many students can afford.

David Uziel, co-founder of the organization Meluna, which means “kennel” in Hebrew (“that pretty much sums up student housing,” he says), calls the current situation “horrendous.”

“Many landlords are doubling the rent and you wouldn’t believe the terms they put into the contract,” Uziel said, his voice rising. “A lot of landlords now expect their tenants to pay for the first NIS 2,000 worth (about $575) of apartment repairs, even if it’s to fix the infrastructure.”

Despite these terms “students are signing because the pressure to find an apartment is huge.”
While experts agree that the housing crisis, which also extends to Tel Aviv, has been largely precipitated by foreign investors “that’s far from the whole story,” insisted Elan Ezrachi, director of Yad Ben Zvi’s International School for Jerusalem Studies and a community activist. “The problem is one of policy, both on the local and national levels.”

“We don’t blame the foreigners, although we don’t think they realize how much they’re contributing to the problem,” Uziel said. “The problem is the government, the Israel Land’s Authority, which sells real estate to developers at unbelievably high prices. The developers, in turn, feel they have to charge exorbitant prices and the only people who can afford a million-dollar apartment is a foreigner or rich Israeli. The outcome is the same.”

Uziel also blames the municipality, “which is thrilled to receive city taxes but doesn’t insist on affordable housing for the people who should be the real tax base of the city: the ever-dwindling young and middle-class.”

Both Uziel and Hasson want the city to require contractors to set aside a certain percentage of housing units for middle-income Jerusalemites every time they build a complex.

“Instead of giving a developer permits to build 800 units, give him 1,500 on condition 300 of them are affordable,” Hasson said.

If Jerusalem activists agree on one thing, it’s the need to provide affordable housing in the heart of the city, not on its outskirts.

“We need to rejuvenate the old, historic areas,” Hasson said. “We know from the 1970s that when the government starting building Ramot and Gilo,” neighborhoods in the city’s periphery “mainly middle-class secular people moved to these new neighborhoods.”

If this happens again, “the inner city will be taken over by the ultra-Orthodox, who already comprise 30 percent of the population. Imagine a city with no Israeli flags on Independence Day, no driving whatsoever on Shabbat. A city where the Knesset, the government and courts are all controlled by the ultra-Orthodox. Jerusalem could lose its pluralistic character.”

Poni said his organization’s new “Housekeeping” campaign, launched three months ago to encourage diaspora home owners to rent out their apartments to young people, “has gotten absolutely nowhere.” New Spirit has put up posters in upscale neighborhoods and met with realtors and real estate lawyers, “both of whom have been receptive,” he said.

While landlords are giddily gearing up for the High Holy Days, when they charge thousands of dollars from American and French tourists, many ordinary Israelis wonder where they will be a year from now.

Faced with a steep hike in rent this summer, 35-year-old Elisheva Aron, a recently divorced grant writer, recently felt compelled to sign a new lease for her unrenovated walk-up next to the Mahane Yehuda market, and then get a roommate to help pay the additional $200 her new lease demands.

Cradling her 4-month-old son, Benzion, in the living-room-turned-roommate’s room, Aron said she has resisted suggestions to move to the less-expensive West Bank.
“I didn’t want to worry about bulletproof buses,” she says. “Jerusalem is where I feel safest, most at home. But I honestly don’t know how I’ll afford to stay here if the prices keep rising.”

Things are looking even grimmer for Esther Binyamin, a single mother of two who can’t afford to move out of her 350-square-foot Tel Aviv studio apartment.
“I’ve been trying to get public housing, with no success. There is public housing outside of Tel Aviv but all the people we know in Israel are here,” Binyamin, who immigrated from Canada eight years ago,” said. “Besides, where would I find a job? I can’t afford a car.”

Binyamin just signed a lease for NIS 2,300 (about $657) a month, very affordable by Tel Aviv standards. (A new survey published in Globes revealed that the average rent for a three-room apartment in central Tel Aviv reached 56.1 percent of the average national monthly salary.)

“The problem is, we live on only NIS 3,600 [about $1,000] a month in government subsidies and that has to cover rent, food, everything.”
Binyamin, who is currently unemployed, says she isn’t considering a return to Canada.
“We’re Zionists. Jews who buy apartments in Israel and then leave them empty, that’s not Zionism,” Binyamin says, unable to suppress her anger.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization

Jerusalem Hotel

Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem