Urban Social Movements and the Struggle for Affordable Housing in the Globalizing City of Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Facing a severe housing crisis since 2008 and under pressure from an unprecedented social protest movement (particularly in 2011), the city of Tel Aviv has become an institutional laboratory for innovative experiments in housing regulation. Against this background, the author analyzes whether these recent shifts point towards a post-neoliberal transformation and a partial decommodification of housing in the interest of both middle-class and lower-class households. The empirical evidence used in this research stems mainly from a media analysis and thirty-three semistructured interviews conducted with political activists, housing experts, local politicians, and urban planners. This study shows that local political elites did indeed develop a number of affordable housing projects, while being less reluctant than their national counterparts to intervene in market pricing. However, these pioneering regulatory experiments hardly point towards a post-neoliberal direction. Despite small-scale market interventions, local decision makers define ‘affordable housing’ not in terms of social justice but, rather, by emphasizing the negative impact of rising housing prices on the global competitiveness of Tel Aviv. Accordingly, all innovative experiments in housing regulation focus exclusively on the needs and possibilities of middle-class households whose skilled labor power is seen as an essential economic asset for Tel Aviv's global city strategy. In addition to this, affordable housing projects are framed as tools to redevelop and gentrify the city's poorer southern and southeastern neighborhoods. As such, the author concludes that this clear class bias reflects a continuity of urban neoliberalism. Due to pressure from mass protests, the political elites may have changed their discourse but not their basic political agendas. These outcomes are explained by the lingering cohesion of local power relations and the strategic selectivity of the local state, since municipal public finances in Tel Aviv are heavily dependent on ground rent appropriation and, thus, entrepreneurial urban development strategies.