22.07.2011                      20.Tammus, 5771

Wohnungsnot:

The bizarre Tel Aviv apartment stories behind the tent city

Tel Aviv residents reveal it is not only high prices that make finding an apartment in the coastal city an ordeal.

The public protest against high housing costs, which began last week with 10 tents pitched at one end of Rothschild Blvd. in Tel Aviv, has ballooned into a headline story highlighting Israel's housing shortage. What began as an action by a handful of enthusiastic young people has turned into a nationwide, middle-class movement.
It's not just the high prices that make apartment-hunting in Tel Aviv an ordeal. High demand, it seems, has turned every basement storage room into a potential rental apartment. A 30-square-meter apartment suddenly sounds downright spacious. Every potential roommate has a list of nonnegotiable demands that must be met before a lease can be signed, and that doesn't include the guarantees the landlords require, which in some ways makes them the country's real tycoons….