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

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 as best it can the high cost of living and the advance of gentrification.

Loose cables, dead rats, people sleeping on the street and garbage, a lot of garbage, which you can see, smell and even eat. The other face 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 Shaanán, a microcosm of languages, religions and survival stories in which former Israeli residents mix with African migrant workers and asylum seekers, all with the same goal: to live in Tel Aviv and not die trying.

“Israelis from the rest of the city do not set foot in this area, and when they do they are stunned, they have no idea what is happening here,” says Ami Giz, a tour guide who lives in the neighborhood and who survived the pandemic on walks Israelis through the backyard of Tel Aviv.

“There is a Rothschild Tel Aviv to the north, where everything is nice, organized and top-notch, and there is a Rothschild Tel Aviv to the south,” says Kobi Aharami, a Shapira resident since birth, in front of the store where he sells from plants to used kitchen utensils.

Rotschild Boulevard, one of the typical arteries of the city packed with electric skateboards and co-working spaces, is nothing like Mesilat Yesharim Street, which houses Aharami’s store, multiple dilapidated houses that during the day function as shops and the only bike lane in the neighborhood, hampered by potholes in the dirt with the remains of dry plants.

Idris Adam, one of nearly 30,000 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan residing in Israel, most of them crammed into small apartments in south Tel Aviv, has a laundromat on that same street.

According to figures released by the daily Haaretz, this group, together with a large and diverse group of migrant workers, represents two thirds of the population of Nevé Shaanán and a considerable percentage of that of Shapira, neighborhoods that offer them affordable rents and proximity to their Job positions.

“Life here is good, I feel like I am part of a community and a family, but it is getting more and more difficult for me to maintain my business due to the increase in prices and rent, which goes up every year,” explains Adam, originally from Sudan.

That price increase, a unanimous complaint among the dozens of residents with whom Efe spoke, is due in part to growing gentrification: in Shapira through the migration of young artists and students from more expensive neighborhoods, and in Nevé Shaanán with the purchase of real estate by huge real estate 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 areas poorer in the suburbs or even other cities.

“This is a pity, because Tel Aviv will thus 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, who 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 rise of high technology ends up turning Tel Aviv into a city for the rich only.