Last update - 00:00 07/05/2007
Battling purveyors of gentrification
By Danny Rabinowitz
There is a clear, ethno-national aspect to the commotion brewing in Jaffa over the 497 eviction notices sent out by the Amidar corporation to families living along the shoreline. Most of those affected are poor Arab families, who have been living in their homes for decades. The recent measure taken against them, carried out as part of a project to complete the promenade all the way to Bat Yam, has already become a dramatic milestone on the path toward banishment, and opposition to it has united all of Jaffa's Arab residents. The appetite for separating Arab citizens, individuals and communities alike, from the remnants of their physical assets and their cultural heritage, is insatiable.
But anyone who thought that what is going on in Jaffa is a problem of the Arabs, and of a few Jews who are still capable of recognizing such injustice, should think again. The crisis surrounding the evictions in Jaffa, which is still far from being solved, represents a phenomenon that should trouble every citizen in Israel. The urban landscape - that which is planned, human and socially conscious - has been expropriated from the hands of the democratic institutions supposed to supervise it. The ones who decide their fate, and ours, are a handful of real estate corporations, which, under the auspices of the religion of privatization and the cult of the market, are systematically taking control of our future.
For decades Jaffa had been undergoing a process of gentrification - a term that evolved from the word "gentry" (lower strata of aristocracy): In it, a population with means "discovers" a peripheral urban neighborhood that is old, socioeconomically weak and characterized by insufficient planning and underdevelopment, and it begins to buy up property. The value of real estate rises; the veteran residents agree to sell their property for a price that, to them, seems high; and they leave. Those veterans who rent apartments are unable to pay the rising rents, and they are also pushed out. Thus a new socioeconomic reality is created - one that is foreign and detached from its environment. At the end of the process it turns out that the return veteran residents received for their properties was relatively low, and most of the "added value" of this physical and image-related transformation remains in the hands of its instigators.
This process has been going on in Jaffa for some time. But the Zionist political reasoning that in the 1960s gave rise to the artists' community there, and the retail-oriented trend that brought Jews with means to the southern neighborhoods, starting in the 1980s, is now being replaced by a real estate offensive that is much more organized and serious. It began when Amidar became responsible for hundreds of properties in Jaffa and decided to make them available to real-estate development corporations, so that apartments with a sea view could be constructed there for the wealthy. There is only one small problem: There are hundreds of families living in these properties.
At Amidar they did not give in. They searched and found that in some of the cases the rights over the property are not clear, or are in dispute, that some of the residents are making unauthorized use of storage areas and attached rooms, etc. In its excitement to strike a good deal, Amidar collected all these different, legally ambiguous situations, bound them up into one package - and issued eviction notices to everyone. Thus, before our very eyes, a new phenomenon emerges: gentrification organized by real estate agencies.
As in the case of the Trans-Israel Highway, in this case, too, these bodies are working methodically. They identify the potential for profit, rally the support of a public body (in this case Amidar), wink knowingly at the planning authorities, and pull some strings in order to establish priorities and rush through eviction and construction.
Anyone who thought that this happens only to Arabs should think about Neveh Tzedek, for example, where the residents there were late in discovering a 10-story tower that would make their lives miserable; or the Shapira and Levinsky areas that are about to undergo a real estate transformation that will push the veteran population out.
One must admit: Our rights over the city have been expropriated by the speculators. Perhaps the Arabs of Jaffa, the weakest but also the most desperate and hopeless population, will manage to foment change. If those residents and Jews concerned about the fate of society and the environment in Israel rally and cooperate - they can tilt the odds away from the real estate fat cats, and help restore to the greater public some of its rights, which are increasingly being expropriated.