Ten years renting in Jerusalem

I moved to Israel in 2015 and I have lived in Jerusalem the whole time. For all ten of those years I have been renting.

What renting here has actually cost us

I have lived through several traumatic rental experiences. In the last place, the landlord refused to fix a leak, and we ended up having to move. In the one before that, the landlord — who lives abroad — decided to give the apartment to their daughter. Ten thousand shekels, just to move our things.

Every time, I have had to pay illegal fees to realtors: one month’s rent plus VAT.

These experiences have been financially obliterative. Between this and the war, I cannot even quantify how much time and money has been wasted and diverted simply on maintaining a roof over our heads as a family. The irony is that this is exactly what makes property ownership a far harder thing to achieve. The money that goes into surviving as a renter is the money that would have become a deposit.

The arnona problem

There is something about renting in Jerusalem specifically. The municipality is almost uniquely, among Israeli municipalities, unequipped to deal with the realities of renting.

Renters end up paying the arnona (ארנונה, the municipal property tax) on behalf of landlords — and it is still, I think, the highest in the country. We are the ones who have to deal with the bureaucracy. And they do not let you pay by the month.

So you end up taking on a financial risk for a property you do not even own, and an obligation to the municipality for a property you do not even own. It feels like a totally perverse way for municipal services to work.

How can you have a municipality that seems unaware that owning property has become almost unreachable, and that at the same time makes it virtually impossible for renters to simply pay their municipal tax on time?

What I think should be different

I do not have a drafted policy here. What I have is the observation that the municipality behaves as though every household it bills is an owner-occupier, when a large part of the city is not, and that the small administrative facts — whose name the bill is in, whether it can be paid monthly, who carries the risk when a tenancy ends mid-cycle — are where that assumption does its damage.