ISRAEL: Tel Aviv artists try to bring down the rent with prostitutes

At nightfall, skyscrapers light up the skies over the city that never sleeps...Tel Aviv. Street walkers in the booming coastal city are not a sight out of the ordinary. But cardboard placards of skimpy women in one of the city's most posh neighborhoods have raised some eyebrows. Like guerrilla fighters snooping around in the night, Danny Magerishvilli and Nati Ohayun posted placards of prostitutes on street poles lining Rothschild street. But this isn't a prostest against prostitution, a trick on a friend or an April Fool's joke. Design artists Magerishvilli and Ohayun are just fed up with the soaring rents that Tel Aviv landlords are charging. And in an attempt to bring them down, they are littering one popular neighbourhood with cardboard cut-out prostitutes. "We put whores in the streets of Tel Aviv, even though they are cardboard, we can make a point that we can say that whores are the most real estate contaminators of the world," said Magerishvilli. "We wanted to bring them to put the rent prices lower". Their website titled "Whores for (low) Rent" featured pictures of prostitutes hanging on street poles and read: "We are pushed to pimp ourselves to find a decent apartment at a decent price. We brought the world's best real estate polluters to Tel Aviv: the whores". Young Israelis, many in the hi-tech industry, and entrepreneurs from across the country, settle in the flourishing beach city of Tel Aviv, a trendy metropolis of bars and restaurants whose popularity has seen its population grow rapidly, pushing up demand for real estate. With a population density of 7,445 people per kilometer, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics as of June 2006, it's no wonder why dozens of people flock to a flat the second it's published for rent. A standard two-bedroom flat can cost more than one thousand dollars and the prices are continuing to climb. Equipped with a pile of placards of prostitutes, string and tape, Magerishvilli and Ohayun tip-toed through the streets into the night. By sunrise, Tel Aviv's flourishing Rothschild street featured prostitutes on street poles and tree trunks. Ohayun says he has no real plan for the future but hopes their personal protest will spread across the city and bring people to protest outside the Tel Aviv municipality, holding up placards of prostitutes. But if anything could come out of the protest, Ohayun hopes the government considers adopting a policy of rent control. For now, Rothschild street in Tel Aviv could serve as a role model for cities around the globe. So far, Ohayun says, the word is spreading at a rapid pace. "We see a lot of people around the world that sent us like emails and they want to make a protest in their own countries, like in Spain, in Argentina -- all over South America, people send us like emails and said we want to do something like this".

ITN Source | December 3, 2006

Tags:. .lower. .equipped. .published. .neighborhoods. .whose