Changes around us

Tel Aviv is a young city.  It celebrated it's 100 birthday last year.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to the largest concentration of Bauhaus buildings in the world, among other things. 

It has become the 17th most expensive city in the world.  We discovered this when we began our adventure with our apartment hunting visit last May.  The place we chose was built just last year, so our neighbors also recently went through move-in balagan. Our building is only about 35% Israeli, the other 65% are foreigners like ourselves, or mixed marriages, like the southwest unit on our level (6/5) which is occupied by a British man and Israeli woman, and their kids.   

We continue to see city lots all around us in varying stages of destruction and reconstruction.  The weekday morning orchestra of city noises often includes jack-hammers with the car horns.  So Saturdays are a real treat, as it is nearly silent for this "day of rest."  This week we passed the above pictured lot around the corner from our place on the walk up to Ulpan.  Tel Aviv is continuously changing, and rapidly.  What I don't yet know is whether the city is taking this opportunity to enforce greener building standards.  In general though, most Israeli's I've met say that Israel is "waking up" to sustainable planning, not just as an economic opportunity, but as a social and environmental responsibility and necessity as well.