Yesh Matsav

Gentrification has no national borders.  We arrived a few days ago to Tel Aviv where we will be living for the next year and are spending the first week with our good friends Yofi and Zohar and their cat Cato. The apartment where they live sits half a block from Shuk Ha’Carmel, the main market in Tel Aviv, and half a block from the sea, in the Kerem Hatemanim (Vineyard of the Yeminites) neighborhood, on of the oldest in the city. They live on the second floor of a two-floor building in a spacious three-bedroom apartment where if you stand on the southernmost point you can see the Mediterranean through the window. Anyone who knows anything about Tel Aviv knows that the sea is the center around which this city moves.

The Kerem Hatemanim neighborhood is a strange mix of new and old. It dates back to 1904 before Tel Aviv was a city, but the buildings that have survived have lost their original glory. Their once white facades have long been stained by the ocean air and city pollution. But today almost every other building on Daniel Street is new and shines in comparison to its rusty neighbors. Inside live wealthy Israelis, or foreigners, largely Americans and French who are quickly buying up real estate. These buildings have replaced their predecessors and offer a strange juxtaposition to the original landscape which surrounds them. It is unclear which stands out more, the old or the new and which is more beautiful. Across the street is an old shack like structure. In many ways it looks unlivable, but it is there that the bouganvilia drapes its pink fur, making the new buildings looks especially bare and lifeless.

Gentrification has spilt the building where we are staying down the middle. Though the structure is old, Yofi and Zohar are part of a group of newcomers that have begun to move into this traditionally Yeminite neighborhood over the last few years. But directly below them on the first floor live one of the old time Yeminite families who stand in stark contrast to us. When we arrived, we were warned about Leah, the “crazy old woman” who spends her days sitting outside at the entrance to the building. She is the matriarch of a large family. True to the warning, she holds court daily at a rickety table surrounded by a few chairs, where her sons and neighborhood friends while away the day over cigarettes and water. The door to their apartment is always open, and we pass it on our way in and out. The only part visible to us is the dilapidated kitchen where a light blue paint has all but peeled off  the cabinets and only hints at the apartment’s disrepair.

Here too, as in Brooklyn, the tensions between new and old, poor and less poor, uneducated and educated, are clearly felt. One notices it in the reticent greetings, sometimes suspicious and most probably envious looks we get as we go up and down the stairs.
It is unclear how long the downstairs family will remain given the recent trends. From what we understand the owner of Yofi and Zohar’s apartment is trying to buy the building and the neighboring plot of land. If he does, the building will most likely be torn down and in its place will rise a new, beautiful apartment complex that is fast becoming the new face of Tel Aviv. As in Brooklyn, here too it seems difficult to determine right and wrong, good and bad. What is good for some is bad for others and vice versa.