Luxe Jerusalem
The Waldorf Jerusalem under construction
I’m apt to think that we should be making Jerusalem more palatable and affordable for younger folk, rather than butler-hiring, $17,000 per square meter buyers…and we should refrain from encouraging developers to create projects in politically questionable neighborhoods that end up being bought by foreigners.
In my mind, $6 million residences are fine, as long as there’s plenty of other options for the rest of us.
Nostalgia Sunday – On the street where you lived…
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel, design
Today I visited all the houses where I’ve ever lived in Israel. Almost — I’ll get to that in a minute. Thanks to Zoomap.co.il, which has been photographing the city streets and each and every building in Israel, you too can take a look at your old digs and check up on how badly the place has continued to deteriorate since you yourself lived under its leaky roof.
For example, the apartment building near trendy Sheinkin Streeet in Tel Aviv where I don’t live anymore. Don’t be put off by the disgusting facade. Location is everything.
And then the place in glorious north Tel Aviv, off HaYarkon Park, where I moved to escape trendiness and find parking.
And the place after that — not a great apartment — but still right on the park.
I started to get hooked on finding a picture of every place I’d ever lived here. That’s when I found out that Zoomap also has its flaws: this is a picture of the building in front of the Jerusalem building where my family lived in 1973-4. You can see our building peeking out on the left-hand side. Apparently the Zoomap folk were too tuckered out to walk up the hill to take pictures of the cul-de-sac.
But I got back on track with this picture of my grandmother’s old apartment which was Party Central for several years in the early 80s.
I could not find an address for the Hadassah Youth Center on Mt. Scopus and so could not do a search for a picture — another failing of Zoomap is that, like GPS, it doesn’t recognize institutions, only addresses — but I’m pretty sure this is the immigrant absorption center in Dimona where Young Judaea parked us for a few months om 1979. Again, the dowdy appearance is deceiving; the Black Hebrews were also living there at the time, which made it kind of cool.
And this is where I live now! Back to Jerusalem, just up the street from grandma’s old apartment. Life is funny.
Google Earth doesn’t get down to building resolution for Israel so use Zoomap to take a trip down memory lane. Or purchase some real estate. It’s part of Bezeq’s 144 directory assistance site which is now translated into English. Happy trails!
Foto Friday
Harry’s already written about his annoyance with the recent New York Times article on Tel Aviv — with its fairly dismissive mention of Jerusalem — but it did get me to go back and look at the article again, with its simply fabulous photos of Tel Aviv, taken by veteran New York Times photographer Rina Castelnuovo.
Rina is Israeli-born, and has been working for the Times for some 25 years, while her husband, Jim Hollander, is another great photographer who works for Reuters. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rina off and on throughout the years, although our work together tends to focus on real estate and great homes in Israel, which isn’t quite as creative or stimulating as most of her regular work.
Here are a few more pieces taken from her shoot in Tel Aviv, some shots that didn’t make it into the NYT slide show, but showing just how perfectly she has her finger on the pulse that is the Israeli beach experience in the summer.
Disgruntled homeowners
It’s said that buying or renovating a home is one of the most stressful times in life, right up there with the death of a loved one, moving houses and switching jobs. For the estimated 4,700 families in Israel affected by the bankrupt Heftsiba construction company, one can only imagine how they must be feeling, particularly those who lost their money and future apartments.
One disgruntled Heftsiba customer commented that while former Heftsiba CEO Boaz Yona has offered to give back NIS 4 million, that only comes to NIS 854 per family. Not a whole lot of cash-flow when your mortgage money is gone or you’re looking at unfinished walls and floors.
Clearly, homeowner and construction disasters happen in the States and Europe; look at the current foreclosure crisis in the U.S.; different in nature, similar in effect. But given the number of home renovations in Israel — a country with one of the highest homeownership rates, at 75% and higher — it’s unsettling to hear about the odd construction company that defrauds new homeowners, or the independent contractors who can make life extraordinarily difficult for the homeowner looking to gut their home, or carry out a partial renovation.
I’m thinking of friends who have been out of their home since last August and are suing their former contractor, while waiting for their house to be finished. Or my mother-in-law, who decided to renovate the apartment she’s owned since 1971, and which desperately needed some updating. Six months and two contractors later, we’ve got a missing kablan (Hebrew for contractor), lost funds, and a woman who’s really tired of living out of her kids’ homes.
Clearly, none of this is the end of the world, and the end of the renovation brings happy homeowners back to fab-o, like-new apartments. I’m also hoping that the former Heftsiba customers find a way out of their mess. As for my mother-in-law, and all the other post-renovation homeowners, they have to make nice to their neighbors and find a way to make them forget that they’ve been living in a construction zone for months on end…
Airless Jerusalem apartment? Sold for $1.05m.
Mmm. What would I do if I had $1 million to spend?
Buy an airless apartment in Jerusalem of course…
Things are getting so ludicrous in the real estate market here that a small 75-square meter apartment in Kfar David, which overlooks the Old City, sold for $1.05 million recently, even though the windows only face in one direction. What a bargain!
The purchaser was a Jewish European businessman who paid about $14,000 per square meter. Other apartments in the complex (those with more than one set of windows) sell for up to $25,000 per square meter.
Real estate agents were complaining that the drop in the dollar rate against the shekel was impacting sales.
Not too badly it seems.
Ah, to be a millionaire. The treasures it buys.
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