 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosehill. I upload videos about Jerusalem and Israel. Thanks for coming back. Last night I decided to try educate myself a bit about the housing crisis. The one everyone is talking about. In Australia, in the US, and even New Zealand has its own housing problem. It didn't make I have to say for very upbeat viewing, although it did remind me that I wanted to share a bit about the problem here in Israel. The housing problem in Israel is a topic that I feel personally very passionate about and which I will definitely be talking more about in the future. We have in Israel some of the most expensive housing stock on the planet. And I mean that quite literally. A 2022 study by Compare the Market, which is a website ranked Israel as the second most expensive country in the world to buy real estate. According to the website, although Israel has a relatively low property price of $7,600 per square meter, it has an average disposable income of only $24,863, meaning the affordability ratio came out to 30.6%. Israel's housing market defied expectations by rising 20.3% year on year in 2022, despite the seemingly impending double recession and the potential slowdown in Israel's high-tech sector. Of course, the same reasons that make Israel a fantastic market for property investors also make it a sort of nightmare for those without trust funds attempting to get a foot on the housing ladder. In 2021, the Times of Israel carried an incredible piece by Ricky Ben-David assessing the dire state of the housing market. According to that article, people looking to buy an apartment nowadays must come up with roughly 840,000 shekels, which is $261,140 at the date of the article in personal equity. According to Ben Shacher, studying for the first quarter of 2021, that's more than a quarter of a million dollars to get on the property ladder. The outcome is that countless people, especially the young, and I'd have to include myself in that category, see no realistic way out of a lifetime of renting and dealing with escalating rental prices that often far outpace salaries. And a country which provides extremely minimal legal protection to tenants. What would that mean in 40 years' time when rents exceed pension savings? Like my peers in other countries, this question sometimes keeps me awake at night and the idea of a wave of homeless elderly people flooding the streets seems like something straight out of a horror movie. I've been renting property in Israel since I moved here in 2015, so I'm going on a decade of dealing with Israeli landlords of various striping color. The low point of my rental career was that time I came home from work to discover that my landlord had ripped out my toilet to attempt to fix the leak, yet that actually happened and no he never put the toilet back, and yes I actually had to move out. I currently live in the nicest place I've ever rented here, although he still might have to move out if my landlord decides that he'd like to give the apartment to his daughter, which could happen in a few months. I hate renting. If you needed more reasons to be depressed about the state of the rental market in Israel, then fortunately there's a page full of photos showing off the very worst rentals in the country. The photos are mostly scraped from Yad Shtaim, which is a sort of buy and found website in Israel that's full of property rentals. It's called in Hebrew, Dirod Be Israel Shameda Kototi, which translates to Apartments in Israel that Depress Me. They have a Facebook page with more than 75,000 followers as well as an Instagram. Disgruntled department hunters from all over Israel can send in their worst findings to their Gmail address and have them profiled on the page. Whoever runs the page has a biting sense of humor and shares incredible descriptions alongside the photos. Here are some of their delightful findings. We have the case of a rental near Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, whose bed is suspended from metal ropes hanging off the ceiling. It's going for 3800 shekels per month, which at today's dollar rate is a little over a thousand dollars. So yes, if you have a thousand dollars a month to cough up, then you too can sleep suspended from the ceiling in Tel Aviv. There's this apartment with the toilet that is so cramped that the cistern and the sink are literally touching, which sounds all kinds of unhygienic. The translation of the description in Hebrew reads, The shower that saves you precious time every morning. You can shower while sitting on the toilet, and you can shower while shaving and brushing your teeth. From today, you no longer do each action separately. Long-term apartment hunters know only too well that the photos shown on listing websites are often misleading and photoshopped, but sometimes they just show reality in all its moldy glory. Like this mold covered apartment in Tel Aviv with the heating element dangling precariously over the shower. Here's another absolute gem. We all know that getting up to go to the toilet after you've had a few too many beers is one of life's great annoyances. Well, this enterprising landlord decided to remove some of the hassle by simply positioning the bed in front of the toilet. This toilet is so cramped that the door can't actually swing open in it, so another forward-thinking landlord decided to simply chisel away a part of the door in order to take care of that geometric problem. Another difficult toilet placement issue here, this landlord took care of the same problem with the different approach, this time by chiseling away part of the toilet lid. Another of my all-time favorites, this bedroom doesn't actually have a window or any source of natural light, so instead this landlord decided to erect a wall-sized photo of a tropical island so that you can pretend that you're somewhere else other than a thousand-a-dollar month subterranean hellhole in Tel Aviv. And finally, we have an apartment that was listed as having a separate entrance from the street level. The catch is that you'll need to tap your inner powers of levitation in order to get in the door. For those who also relics the thought of making your own overpriced apartment seem better by comparing yourself to the misfortunate dwellings of others, this page is absolutely worth a follow, and I will of course leave a link to both the Facebook and Instagram in the description. Thanks for watching, until next time.