Finding an apartment

My first task when I arrived was to find an apartment. Prior to my arrival I had already contacted two friends to ask if they knew about any places. They in turn asked ‘estate agents’ to find a suitable place for me. An estate agent in Ramallah is not a full time job, or at least it wasn’t the main form of income for the two gentlemen who showed me apartments. One is a taxi driver, the other works as an accountant for the local office of a transnational corporation. The taxi driver suggested that driving a car was his secondary profession, while the accountant was adamant that being an estate agent was a way to earn additional income.

It seems that in order to be a good estate agent in Ramallah, one must know the city well. This means developing extensive social networks so that you can become attuned to any emerging opportunities. However, access to information is not enough. You must also know how and when to use it. And even this attunement is speculative. There will be times when the information you have cannot be used, or cannot be used well (i.e. profitably). Perhaps this is why being an estate agent is a part time job for the two gentlemen I met.

An estate agent only makes money if the person seeking to rent a flat actually agrees to rent the flat. The estate agent then gets something equivalent to a one-time finders fee – between US$ 150-200 – for his services. In my case, I saw two flats. The first was on the 5^th floor of a building without a lift; about 15 minutes walk from the city centre. The second was a little bit further away, but brand-new. The owner intended to move in when he got married, but when his marriage fell through, he was left with an almost fully furnished flat and no one to share it with. I took the second flat. The estate agent who found this owner (and in a sense found me, and paired us together) received his $150 fee. The other estate agent received nothing, although the services he provided were identical. And I received an additional benefit through the first estate agent's participation in the process, because the second estate agent encouraged (and secured) a cheaper rent on the apartment I ended up renting to match the price of the first apartment that I didn’t take.

While this practice is something I would like to investigate further, at first blush it provides a good illustration of how Ramallah itself is an opportunity; a place where things happen; a site for experiment and speculation. The outcomes cannot be known in advance, but there is always the promise of success/reward. Even my own performance in the above drama can be scripted as the ability to plug into certain, fleeting networks at an opportune moment to derive an outcome that benefits me.

While these stories could conceivably be told in any city, the geographical specificity of them should not be taken for granted. On Thursday night I was talking to another friend who now lives in Khalil (Hebron), but was visiting Ramallah for the weekend (as he does every weekend). He moved to Khalil for work, and one of the stories he told me was how hard it was to find a place to live there. Due to the ‘conservative’ nature of the local society (his words), people were unwilling to rent to a single man. A single man, so the story goes, plays cards, makes too much noise and is generally unpleasant. Even when my friend did eventually find a place, a neighbour subsequently accused him – falsely - of bringing women back to his apartment.

Perhaps the two stories are not strictly comparable. I am a foreigner, while my friend is from a different part of Palestine, although this doesn’t necessarily make him less of an outsider, just a different type of outsider. However, I think the difference experiences do illustrate a broader difference between the cities, and the ways in which urban life functions in each respective context. In Ramallah, the circulation of knowledge and people attends to external flows (knowledge and people coming from outside the city) in different ways from Khalil. While Ramallah welcomes such externalities (perhaps we might say the city embodies a enthusiastically hospitable ethos), Khalil displays a far more constrained ethos of hospitality. Although at the moment I would only say this about housing and house hunting.