Kfar Saba: Ra’anana’s Ugly Stepsister

I’m going to lose some friends in Ra’anana for this one.

When an Anglo family tells me they’re making Aliyah to the Sharon, the conversation almost always goes one way. Ra’anana. It’s the default — “Little America, soft landing,” the place your cousin moved to in 2009, where you can sit at Cafe-Cafe on Ahuza and complain about the heat in English with your friends. And look, I get it. Ra’anana earned that reputation honestly. It’s a wonderful city.

But I’ve sold homes in both Ra’anana and Kfar Saba, and the obvious choice and the right choice aren’t always the same. More and more, the families who do their homework instead of just following the herd are landing one neighborhood to the west. In Kfar Saba.

So let me make the case for the stepsister.

“But everyone says Ra’anana is where the community is…” They’re not wrong. Roughly 30% of Ra’anana speaks English, it’s got close to a hundred shuls, and the soft-landing infrastructure — AACI, Telfed, the English minyanim. If your single hard requirement is to live inside an English bubble where you never have to stumble through Hebrew at the makolet, Ra’anana wins.

But most of the families I sit with don’t actually want a bubble. They want a warm community that feels familiar, with enough people like them that they have where to go and who to host for Shabbat lunch, and they want their kids to actually become Israeli, not to grow up in a transplanted Teaneck with better weather.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: they’re the same place.

Kfar Saba and Ra’anana don’t compete. They touch. The two city centers are about three kilometers apart — five to eleven minutes in the car, a bus every fifteen. They literally share a train station on the border.

So when you choose Kfar Saba, you are not giving up Ra’anana’s Anglo infrastructure.  You’re choosing to live a five-minute drive from it. The English shul, the AACI event, the kosher butcher are all still right there. You just walk a few more minutes, and buy, on the smarter side of the line.

What do you get on the smarter side?

A bigger, greener city. Kfar Saba is home to just under 100,000 people, built around a 250-dunam city park — an ecological pool, a bird sanctuary, a skate park, a bike pump-track, playgrounds for days. For a family that rates “parks and green space” near the top of the list, this isn’t a tie with Ra’anana. Kfar Saba wins it.  The train. Kfar Saba has had its own railway stations since 2003, with a direct run to Tel Aviv in about 34 minutes. Ra’anana didn’t get a station until 2018 and is still, by everyone’s admission, a car town. If anyone in your family is going to commute to Tel Aviv, this really makes a difference.

And — quietly — a better price. I went into the last 24 months of recorded sales from the Tax Authority for Kfar Saba’s Green Neighborhood (Hayeruka) and laid them against the comparable newer-build pocket in Ra’anana. Same Sharon, same quality of product, same young-family profile. The median in the Green Neighborhood came in about 6% below the Ra’anana comp. On a typical 120-square-meter apartment, that’s roughly a quarter of a million shekels — and on larger homes that percentage goes up substantially! There’s definitely an “Anglo tax” baked into Ra’anana. Why pay it?

I have friends in their thirties living in Kfar Saba Hayeruka right now. He’s an international lawyer; she’s in HR. He’s from the tri-state area, she’s from California — so, about as Anglo as it gets. And they are genuinely happy there. They walk to the green Kfar Saba mall. Their youngest is in a kindergarten they love. And they’re right off Route 4 (not Teaneck ) and into Ra’anana’s booming industrial zone in minutes.  They got the established, walkable, green community they wanted  -and the access-without overpaying for a zip code. They didn’t settle for the stepsister. They figured out she was the better match all along.

So who is Kfar Saba actually for?

It’s for the family that wants warmth over a bubble, value over a brand name, and a genuinely Israeli community that still has enough Anglo neighbors to feel like home — withRa’anana’s full English infrastructure sitting one short drive away.

If you’re considering Ra’anana, Kfar Saba, or anywhere in the Sharon / Merkaz area, drop me a line and let’s set up a call.

— Stephen Epstein, Gabai Real Estate