'Their transit camp became real estate' - Haaretz

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Last update - 11:01 11/02/2008

'Their transit camp became real estate'

By Tahel Frosh

Tags: Bitzaron, Israel, Tel Aviv

Dana Olmert, Tzahi Bukshester, Gil Hovav, Keren Neubach, Dana Spector and Einat Fishbein, all of whom live in east Tel Aviv's Bitzaron and Ramat Israel neighborhoods, are better known for their activities in the media, cooking and literature and less for their other activity - gentrification. However, perhaps unwittingly, they are part of a broad movement of the middle and upper-middle class currently moving into housing projects and neighborhoods that were built on the outskirts of Israel's cities in the 1930s and the 1950s and are thereby fomenting a bourgeois revolution.

Gentrification is a process in which a well-to-do population discovers an urban neighborhood that is weak in socio-economic terms and characterized by backwardwardness, moves there, buys real estate and gradually pushes out the old-timers. A well-known example of a gentrified neighborhood is Tel Aviv's Neveh Tzedek. The process is still underway in Bitzaron and Ramat Israel, resulting in an ethnic and cultural drama whose winners and losers are already known in advance.

"This is an aggressive process - they're buying us with their money," says Yaffa Shinizki-Kachlon, who came to the area as a child with her Holocaust-survivor parents and has lived there to this day.

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"They are expelling us the same way they do with the Arabs from Jaffa - that, too, ostensibly of their own free will." She says this from the heights of the 11th story of Tel Aviv's municipality: Shinizki-Kachlon is a member of the city council, formerly on behalf of Meretz and currently on behalf of the Labor Party. According to her, "There is no attempt at integration on the part of the newcomers - only arrogance."

M., 55, who was born in the neighborhood and lives there with his family, claims the ongoing gentrification process is part of a struggle between Mizrahim - Jews with origins in the Muslim countries - and Ashkenazim - Jews with origins in Eastern and Central Europe, "but the Ashkenazim as a metaphor that is not necessarily about who comes from where," he says. "It turns out that the newcomers are upgrading the neighborhood; if the original residents moved here because they didn't have a penny to their name, now 'the contributors to the community' have come along, who, in a manner resembling the missionaries in Africa, are certain that they are doing something good. This is a bourgeoisie of involved parenthood, enrichment classes and leisure time spent with ceramics and tai chi. The locals are attracted to this because they harbor feelings of inferiority." According to him, "The main contribution of the new population has been a rise in real estate prices."

Ariella Bartonov, 48, a sound technician who moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago (but is still considered a newcomer by many), believes there is a difference between the gentrifiers who arrived in the past seven years and those of her generation. "I call them 'yuplets' - a combination of the words yuppies and spoiled brats. Nowadays it costs a lot of money and is considered very 'celeb' to live here. The people who have come want a house with land. But they aren't neighborly. The have built fortresses with roofs and fences, and you know exactly who lives where - where the residents are yuplets and where there are those who aren't."

'A social gamble'

Bitzaron and Ramat Israel were built hastily in the early 1950s to provide housing for Holocaust survivors, mostly from Hungary and Romania, and for families from Yemen. The neighborhood currently has some 5,000 inhabitants. Over the years the area was considered a distressed neighborhood and was not afforded adequate urban development. But about eight years ago the infrastructures were improved and the gentrifiers began to arrive.

Prof. Amiram Gonen of Tel Aviv University's geography department says the gentrifiers "are young middle-class and they have the energy to shape their surroundings. Those who live in Tel Aviv are connected to the city's pace of life, their workplaces are in Tel Aviv and they have internalized the American and Western ideal to live in the city but also have a home with personal style. They have less money than the people who moved into Neveh Tzedek; if they had more money they would go to better places. That is, the dream is the same but the budget is different. This is a social and real estate gamble."

G., 38, the mother of two, moved to the neighborhood with her partner about nine years ago. "This was a neighborhood of crime, drugs and distress," she says, "and the old-timers made us feel as though we were taking the place away from them. This is a different culture. The difference isn't between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim but it is cultural and educational in nature. There are people who grew up here and developed, but some of them have territorial feelings like Indian natives."

She says the tension between the newcomers and the old-timers is understandable: "It's not pleasant to live in a dilapidated house of a room and a half for five people when others come along and build a three-story home next door; the neighbors feel envy and discontent, but they also understand the advantage - suddenly their little transit camp has become a piece of real estate. Nothing violent has been done here; rather, it's a matter of supply and demand. The neighborhood's life has taken a new direction. If the atmosphere used to resemble that of a moshav or a kibbutz, now life is more bourgeois."

Separate parks

Some of the veteran inhabitants think the newcomers' bourgeois lifestyle is good. "I like the change," says H., 45, the mother of two daughters, who was born in the neighborhood and still lives there. "It represents movement, momentum and renewal. In my view, they have come here as guests. Our children are successful and our homes are expensive and that is why they have come here, and if anyone gets confused - I'll have what to answer him. The process of renewal can't be stopped. It will happen everywhere. Where does this put me? It puts me with people who have money."

Nevertheless, the distinctions created by gentrification are plenty. G. describes the separation between the two groups in the public parks. "The park nearby our house is close to the area where the old-timers live," she says, "and it isn't so pleasant for me to go there. We go to a different park. The old-timers are in one park and the newcomers, who are afraid that the veterans are contagious, go to the new park."

D., says that ties are formed among parents at the neighborhood kindergartens. At the private kindergarten her daughter attends, "nearly all the parents are newcomers; the old-timers usually go to the public kindergarten. I assume that this has to do with economic means."

And indeed, money is one of the major segregating factors. Tomer Dovrat, the new director of the recently renovated neighborhood community center, says quite a few families are suffering as a result of the gentrification process. "A lot of people in distress are asking for discounts. There's a discounts committee - but it's not that simple. The prices of the enrichment classes aren't suited to a distressed neighborhood."

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1.	transit campt becme real estate	08:17	\|	evason	12/02/08

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