Poverty and exclusion in Tel Aviv: the other side of the most expensive city in the world

Paul Duer Tel Aviv, 16 Mar Tel Aviv, the most expensive city in the world, home to imposing skyscrapers, Mediterranean beaches and an insatiable entrepreneurial ecosystem, is also home to an impoverished minority that resists the high cost of living and the advance of gentrification. Loose wires, dead rats, people sleeping on the street and garbage, a lot of garbage, which you see, smell and even eat. The other side of Tel Aviv, a few meters south of the financial heart of the frenetic city recently listed as the most expensive in the world by The Economist magazine. These are two neighborhoods, Shapira and Nevé Shaanan, a microcosm of languages, religions and stories of survival in which former Israeli residents mix with African migrant workers and asylum seekers, all for the same purpose: to live in Tel Aviv and not die trying. “The Israelis in the rest of the city don't step in this area, and when they do they are stunned, they have no idea what is going on here,” says Efe Ami Giz, a tourist guide who lives in the neighborhood and who during the pandemic survived on Israelis walking through the Tel Aviv backyard. “There is a Tel Aviv in Rotschild to the north, where everything is beautiful, organized and first class, and there is another one from Rotschild to the south,” says Efe Kobi Aharami, a resident of Shapira since his birth, in front of the shop where he sells everything from plants to used kitchen utensils. Rotschild Boulevard, one of the city's typical arteries crowded with electric skateboards and co-working spaces, is nothing like Mesilat Yesharim Street, which houses Aharami's shop, multiple ramshackle dwellings that function as shops during the day and the neighborhood's only bike path, hampered by potholes of land with remains of dry plants. On the same street there is a laundry room Idris Adam, one of the nearly 30,000 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan residing in Israel, most of them crammed into small apartments in southern Tel Aviv. According to figures released by the Haaretz newspaper, this group, together with a large and diverse group of migrant workers, represents two thirds of the population of Nevé Shaanan and a considerable percentage of that of Shapira, neighborhoods that offer affordable rents and proximity to their jobs. “Life here is good, I feel that I am part of a community and a family, but it is increasingly difficult for me to maintain my business because of the increase in prices and rent, which increases every year,” explains Adam, a Sudanese native. This price increase, a unanimous complaint among the dozens of residents with whom Efe spoke, is partly due to the growing gentrification: in Shapira through the migration of young artists and students from more expensive neighborhoods, and in Nevé Shaanan with the purchase of real estate by huge property developers determined to revalue it. According to Nathan Marom, a professor at Reichman University who has been studying the evolution of Tel Aviv's urban ecosystem for years, this process is due to the increasingly high cost of living in the city and will trigger the inevitable departure of those with fewer resources to poorer areas on the outskirts or even other cities. “This is a shame, because Tel Aviv will lose many of the characteristics that make it a cosmopolitan city,” he warns. “It will retain some such as the presence of multinational companies and tourism, but it will lose other important elements, such as being a home for migrant workers, which will still be required for more precarious jobs,” he explains. One of the newcomers is Yahel Idán, an Israeli artist who could no longer afford the 5,000 shekels (1,400 euros) a month he paid for a small apartment in another neighborhood of the city, and who says he is worried that the high-tech boom will end up turning Tel Aviv into a city only for the rich. CHIEF pd/lfp/alf (photo) (video)