Old Jaffa becoming the darling of real estate investors

In 1951, new and burgeoning Tel Aviv was unified with old and dilapidated Jaffa. For five decades, the 4,000-year-old port town struggled in the shadow of its robust municipal patron.

Behind the picturesque Jaffa that tourists see is a squalid working-class backwater rife with crime, poverty and racial tensions.

Yet, Jaffa is being touted as the place to live by 2010.

"I can see tremendous change since I moved in two and a half years ago," says computer programmer and budding novelist Shaul Volkov, who lives in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood..

"About 20 new buildings have gone up in this area, and many new people have moved in, including lots of young people that rent cheap apartments. The mood has changed in the streets. The police presence is felt much more nowadays — there used to be a couple of drug pushers on my street, but that seems to have stopped."

The area is also popular among upwardly mobile immigrants from the former Soviet Union, notes Volkov.

"Russian yuppies don't have a lot of money — especially the artistic types. They say that Jaffa reminds them of a European city. They love the architecture. It's a special place to live; I can see five churches and three mosques from my balcony and wake up to church bells and muezzins calling to prayer."

The real estate market in Jaffa is entering a surge, having collapsed after local Arab citizens rioted following the eruption of the second intifada in October 2001.

"The local market began to wake up three years ago with an increase in sales between Jaffa residents, both Jews and Arabs," explains Arie Sheffer of the Jaffa-based Mediterranean Real Estate Agency.

"Major developers started investing about a year and a half ago, and six months ago the buyers started coming. Most are coming from Tel Aviv, but overseas residents are also increasingly buying properties as an investment. Sheffer reports a recent surge in interest in both high and low-end properties for sale or rent.

"There are a lot of opportunities in the heart of Jaffa," says Sheffer. But he adds that competition for choice locations is heating up, so now may not be the time for prospective buyers or renters to procrastinate.

Like Neveh Tzedek before it, Jaffa is undergoing a process of gentrification as an established population encroaches into rundown, high potential urban areas, forcing longtime residents to relocate. In the most conspicuous instances, million-dollar homes stand alongside slums.

The exclusive Andromeda Residential Project near the old port and nearby villas housing hi-tech professionals are clear examples of this gentrification, which is creating a domino effect.

Sheffer says that the ongoing infrastructure upgrade throughout Jaffa and south Tel Aviv (ordained by Mayor Ron Huldai) is making a difference. Jaffa boasts a gleaming new academic college. The old Opera House now houses the successful Gesher theater group. Gesher's former home, an abandoned portside warehouse, now hosts Mayumana, a music and dance company specializing in percussion.

Rehov Yehuda Hamit, a neglected thoroughfare replete with half-deserted buildings and boarded-up stores, is destined to become a local version of Tel Aviv's trendy Rehov Sheinkin.

"The street still looks like downtown Beirut," says Volkov, "but that's what Nahalat Binyamin looked like 15 years ago. The lower part of Rehov Rabbi Hanina by the flea market still looks scary, but some of the buildings are being renovated. I hear that apartment prices there are starting at $300,000."

Some Jaffa neighborhoods where many of the city's Arab residents live still lack paved access roads and occasionally suffer from overflowing sewage. About one-third of Jaffa's 60,000 residents are Arabs, many of them living in the Ajami neighborhood, which hugs the coastline south of the Old City.

Affluent Jews are now moving into Ajami — but a generation ago, impoverished Jews were moving out. Some 50,000 low-income Jewish immigrants settled in Jaffa following the 1948 War of Independence. Many of these Jews left for Bat Yam, Rishon Lezion or Holon during the more affluent 1970s, leaving their financially weaker Arab neighbors behind.

Meanwhile, real estate developers began marketing valuable beachside properties near Jaffa port and higher income Jews began to move in, creating a relatively insular community as the surrounding areas were neglected.

Rising prices and the housing crunch in Jaffa have already pushed many Arab families to adjacent Bat Yam, where their children attend Jewish schools but rarely fully integrate socially.

Interracial tensions exist beneath the surface, observes Volkov.

"The Arabs are not happy, and their resentment is probably growing. They're not being squeezed out — they're being squeezed in. They have nowhere else to go. They feel they don't have much to lose. On the other hand, their property values are rising."

"I don't see any political tensions between Jews and Arabs, rather social tensions," says Sheffer, 43, who has lived in Jaffa for almost 20 years.

Sheffer, a gregarious man, has volunteered for many years at Magen David Adom in the Jaffa and south Tel Aviv region.

"Many of the Arab residents are from a weaker socio-economic group, and there have always been problems of crime and drugs. The social gaps in Jaffa are enormous, but we're good, respectful neighbors," says Sheffer, who lives with his wife and three daughters in a renovated house with a bougainvillea-adorned patio in picturesque Rehov Hashachaf in the Maronite neighborhood just south of the port.

"My girls dance with Muslim and Christian Arab girls at the local community center. This is true coexistence. We live alongside each other in harmony. Jews have to know how to treat Arabs with honor and respect, and not appear condescending."

To foreigners and out-of-towners, Jaffa is exotic, ancient and artsy. Beyond its long history, Jaffa is best known for its fish restaurants, the clock tower, the flea market, Abulafia's 24-hour bakery, art galleries and ethnic nightclubs. It is also romantic, with winding stone alleys overlooking the sea, hidden away from the hustle and bustle of Tel Aviv.

Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon, one of the most prolific and celebrated Hebrew authors of the 20th century, described Jaffa as "the darling of the waters, where the waves of the Great Sea kiss her shores, a blue sky is her daily cover, she brims with every kind of people, Jews and Ishmaelites and Christians, busy at trade and labor, at shipping and forwarding."