Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / Do People Actually Like Living in Jerusalem's Towers?
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: Skyscrapers are going up all over Jerusalem like mushrooms after the rain. I'd be interested to know | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Daniel sent us this one — and honestly, it's the question I've been muttering to myself every time I walk past another construction site. Jerusalem's skyline is changing faster than any other city in Israel right now. You've got cranes everywhere, thirty-plus-story towers shooting up in neighborhoods like Kiryat HaYovel and Talpiot that were all low-rise walk-ups a decade ago. Daniel wants to know if anyone has surveyed quality of life and living satisfaction among high-rise residents here — and whether the picture changes once you separate out owners, renters, and the investment-property crowd. Given how much money and political energy is being poured into vertical construction, this feels overdue. Herman: It's not just overdue — it's almost perverse how little attention this question has gotten. We're talking about the single biggest transformation of Jerusalem's urban fabric since 1967, and the conversation has been almost entirely about height limits, zoning, and developer incentives. Not about whether the people in these buildings actually like living there. Corn: Which is the only metric that should matter. You can build a city that looks impressive from a drone shot and is miserable to live in. Herman: Jerusalem is a uniquely interesting case study, because the tower boom here isn't driven by the same pressures you see in Tel Aviv or New York. We don't have a land shortage in the same acute way — Jerusalem is surrounded by open space. The push toward vertical construction is partly about density targets, partly about developer profit margins on luxury units, and partly about a certain vision of what a modern city should look like. But the people moving into these towers fall into three very distinct groups, and that stratification is going to be the backbone of everything we talk about today. Corn: Walk me through the three groups. Herman: First, full-time owner-residents — people who bought an apartment in a tower and actually live there. Second, buy-to-let investors, and a significant chunk of those are foreign — diaspora buyers who purchase a Jerusalem apartment as an investment or a pied-à-terre and may occupy it a few weeks a year at most. Third, renters — people who lease from either the developer or an investor-owner. Each group has completely different incentives, different stakes in the building's quality of life, and different satisfaction drivers. Corn: If you're an investor who visits for two weeks a year, you don't care whether the elevator takes five minutes during the morning rush, because you're never in it during the morning rush. Herman: You don't care whether the building's WhatsApp group is toxic or whether anyone knows anyone else's name. You're not there. But the full-time residents absorb all of those costs, and the renters absorb them with even less control over their situation. So the core question isn't just "does high-rise living make people happier or unhappier" — it's whether the answer changes depending on which of those three groups you're in, and what that means for how we should be building. Corn: Where do we even start with the data? Herman: The headline number, from a 2024 Hebrew University study that surveyed twelve hundred Jerusalem households across fourteen high-rise buildings and twelve low-rise buildings in the same neighborhoods — controlling for income and apartment size — is that high-rise residents report twelve percent lower overall life satisfaction than their low-rise neighbors. That's the kind of number that should make city planners stop and ask hard questions. Corn: That's the aggregate. That's before you even start slicing by owner versus renter. Herman: The mechanisms driving that gap are surprisingly concrete. The researchers identified three specific things. First, elevator wait times. Building management logs from the Menachem Begin Towers complex — the thirty-eight-story development near the central bus station — show an average wait of four point two minutes during peak hours. That's not total commute time. That's standing in the lobby waiting for an elevator to arrive. Corn: Which is an eternity if you're doing it twice a day, every day, with groceries or kids or both. Herman: Four point two minutes down, four point two minutes up — nearly nine minutes a day just waiting. Over a year, you're talking about fifty-plus hours. Two full days of your life per year, standing in a lobby. Corn: The sloth in me wants to say that sounds leisurely, but I suspect most humans don't share that view. Herman: They do not. The second mechanism is noise transmission through concrete slabs, which is a structural issue in Israeli high-rise construction specifically. The concrete frame construction creates direct pathways for impact noise. Someone drops a pot on the fifteenth floor, you hear it on the twelfth. And unlike low-rise buildings where you might have two or three neighbors sharing walls, in a tower you've got units above, below, and on both sides. You're surrounded by noise sources in three dimensions. Corn: You're surrounded by noise sources in three dimensions. Herman: The third mechanism is the one I find most striking: reduced sense of community. The Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research found that only eighteen percent of high-rise residents know their neighbors' names, versus forty-seven percent in low-rise buildings. That's a collapse of the basic social fabric that makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood. Corn: So if you live in a thirty-story tower with maybe two hundred units, you're anonymous in a building full of people. That's a dormitory, not a community. Herman: That has downstream effects on everything from informal childcare to emergency preparedness to just the baseline feeling of belonging somewhere. Corn: I want to push back on something before we go further. There's a counter-narrative here. High-rises aren't all downside. Views, for one. Herman: And the data bears that out. High-rise residents report significantly better views — eighty-two percent satisfaction. And there's a real maintenance burden that disappears. No garden to maintain, no roof repairs, no exterior painting. For a certain demographic — childless professionals over forty — the tradeoffs actually net out positive. The view, the low maintenance, the concierge services some of the newer luxury towers offer — those are real quality-of-life gains. Corn: It's not that high-rises are inherently worse. It's that they're worse for certain people under certain conditions, and better for others. Which means the question isn't "should we build towers" — it's "who are we building them for, and how are we building them. Herman: That's exactly the right framing. And this is where the ownership stratification gets really interesting. The Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research has preliminary data suggesting that owner-residents in high-rises report about eight percent higher satisfaction than renters in the same buildings. But both groups are still below the low-rise benchmarks. So owning helps, but it doesn't close the gap. Corn: Which makes intuitive sense. If you own, you've got more control over your unit, you're more invested in the building's management, you're more likely to join the va'ad bayit. But you're still stuck with the same slow elevators and the same noise transmission and the same anonymous hallway culture. Herman: Ownership mitigates but doesn't solve. And that brings us to the most damning part of this whole picture: the investor-owner mismatch. The Jerusalem Institute put out a working paper in 2025 looking specifically at buildings where more than forty percent of units are investment properties. In those buildings, satisfaction among the remaining actual residents drops an additional fifteen percent. Corn: Fifteen percent on top of the twelve percent baseline gap. So you're now looking at a nearly thirty percent satisfaction deficit compared to low-rise living. That's not a nuance — that's a structural failure. Herman: The mechanism here is what some researchers are calling the ghost floor phenomenon. When a significant chunk of units sit empty most of the year, the building feels underpopulated in a way that's actively unsettling. Hallway lights on timers that nobody's around to trigger, so you're walking through semi-darkness. Elevators that stop at floors where nobody gets on or off. Package deliveries piling up outside doors for weeks. Corn: It also means the security dynamic shifts. In a low-rise building where everyone knows everyone, you notice a stranger. In a tower where half the units are dark and the other half are strangers anyway, a stranger is just another face in the elevator. Herman: There's a financial dimension. Maintenance costs don't scale down just because units are empty. The va'ad bayit still has to pay for elevator servicing, lobby cleaning, security, building insurance. But the investor-owners often resist fee increases because they're not living with the consequences of deferred maintenance. So the full-time residents end up in a constant battle over building upkeep with owners who are six time zones away and have no skin in the game beyond asset appreciation. Corn: Which brings us to the policy question lurking under all of this. Jerusalem's 2025 Vertical Density Incentive program — the city's flagship push to get developers building above twenty stories — offers substantial tax breaks for hitting height thresholds. But it includes zero requirements for owner-occupancy minimums. Herman: And that's not an oversight — that's a choice. The program was designed to maximize units built, not to maximize quality of life for the people who'd inhabit them. The metric of success was construction starts, not resident satisfaction. So you get a perverse incentive: build as tall as possible, sell as many units as possible to investors wherever they happen to live, and walk away. The social costs — the ghost floors, the eroded community, the fifty-plus hours a year standing in elevator lobbies — those are externalities the developer never pays for. Corn: The city is effectively subsidizing the degradation of its own neighborhoods. Herman: I think the data supports that. And this is where the comparison to other cities becomes instructive. The Housing Development Board there requires eighty-five percent owner-occupancy in new high-rise developments. They also mandate communal spaces on every third floor — not as a suggestion, but as a requirement. The result is that high-rise residents in Singapore report satisfaction levels within three percent of low-rise residents. Three percent, versus Jerusalem's twelve. Corn: The problem isn't height. It's policy design. Herman: That's the single most important takeaway. Height is just a multiplier — it amplifies whatever social dynamics are already built into the structure. If you build tall with good policy, you can get density without misery. If you build tall with no policy, you get what Jerusalem is getting: vertical suburbs where nobody knows anyone and half the lights are off. Corn: That's before we even get into the noise problem in detail. Herman: The concrete slab transmission issue — it's not just an annoyance, it's a design failure baked into Israeli construction standards. Most of these towers use a flat-plate concrete system, which is efficient and cheap, but acoustically it's basically a drum. Impact noise travels through the slab with almost no damping. You hear your upstairs neighbor's dishwasher, their washing machine spin cycle, their kids running. The study found that noise complaints in high-rise buildings were three times higher than in low-rise buildings, even after controlling for unit size and number of occupants. Corn: Which means it's not that high-rise residents are more sensitive. It's that the buildings are genuinely louder. Herman: Retrofitting acoustic insulation into an existing concrete frame building is astronomically expensive. So these buildings are locking in decades of noise complaints from day one. Corn: That's a long-term liability that nobody's pricing into the construction cost. Herman: It connects back to the community erosion point. If your building is noisy and your neighbors are strangers, you don't form the informal relationships that make noise tolerable. In a low-rise building where you know the family upstairs, you might text them — "hey, any chance of wrapping it up by ten?" In a tower, you call building management or you just suffer. The noise and the anonymity compound each other. Corn: The noise and the anonymity compound each other. Herman: This is where the ghost floor data really drives home how much worse it gets. In buildings where investment units cross that forty percent threshold, the remaining full-time residents report satisfaction levels fifteen percent lower than residents in predominantly owner-occupied towers. You're stacking that on top of the twelve percent baseline gap. In the worst-case scenario — a tower dominated by investor-owned units — you're looking at a satisfaction deficit approaching thirty percent. Corn: That's the difference between a functioning building and one where people are actively looking for a way out. Herman: The mechanism isn't mysterious. Empty units mean fewer eyes on common areas, less informal monitoring. Maintenance requests from absent owners get deprioritized. The building's WhatsApp group — which in Israeli residential culture is basically the nervous system of the building — becomes a ghost town. You end up with what one researcher called vertical isolation: you're surrounded by hundreds of units and still feel alone. Corn: The city's 2025 Vertical Density Incentive program is actively incentivizing this outcome. Herman: Without meaning to, probably, but yes. The program measures success by construction starts and height thresholds hit. There's no occupancy requirement, no owner-occupancy minimum, no mechanism tying the tax benefit to whether the building actually functions as a community. You could build a forty-story tower, sell eighty percent of the units to investors in Miami and Paris, collect your tax break, and walk away. The city gets a taller skyline and a worse neighborhood. Corn: Which makes it a subsidy for bad outcomes dressed up as urban progress. Herman: We know it doesn't have to work this way. Singapore's Housing Development Board mandates eighty-five percent owner-occupancy as a condition of approval. They also require communal spaces on every third floor: shared kitchens, gardens, laundry areas — spaces where neighbors actually encounter each other by design rather than by accident. Herman: High-rise residents in Singapore report satisfaction levels within three percent of low-rise residents. That gap — nine percentage points — is essentially the cost of bad policy. It's not that Singaporeans are culturally more predisposed to vertical living. It's that the HDB understood from the start that density without community infrastructure is just stacking loneliness. Corn: The entire Jerusalem satisfaction gap is potentially closable. It's not gravity, it's governance. Herman: The Singapore example is instructive on specifics. The communal spaces aren't decorative — they're programmed. There are scheduled events, maintenance is funded through the building's operating budget, and the spaces are positioned so that residents pass through them in the normal course of their day. You don't have to make a special trip to the community floor — it's between you and the elevator on the way home. Corn: Versus the Jerusalem model where the lobby is a pass-through and the only common space is the parking garage. Herman: If you're lucky. And here's the forward-looking piece that should worry anyone paying attention. Jerusalem's city planning department projects that by 2030, roughly twenty-five percent of the city's population will live in buildings over fifteen stories. If current policy doesn't change — if we keep building without occupancy minimums, without communal infrastructure requirements, without elevator redundancy standards — the satisfaction gap doesn't stay at twelve percent. Corn: Because you're scaling a broken model. Herman: Because the demographic mix shifts. Right now, the people self-selecting into high-rises are disproportionately childless professionals who value views and low maintenance. But as towers become a larger share of the housing stock, you'll get more families with children, more elderly residents, more people who didn't choose vertical living so much as get assigned to it by the market. Those demographics are exactly the ones the data shows are least satisfied in towers. Corn: The policy vacuum isn't neutral — it's a ratchet toward worse outcomes. Herman: The frustrating thing is, the policy levers aren't mysterious. Singapore figured them out decades ago. Owner-occupancy minimums. Mandated communal infrastructure. Elevator redundancy standards — Singapore requires a minimum of one elevator per eighty units in buildings over twenty stories, which keeps peak wait times under ninety seconds. Jerusalem's Menachem Begin Towers, with four point two minute waits, has roughly one elevator per one hundred twenty units. Corn: It's not even that we need to invent solutions. We need to decide we care enough to implement the ones that already exist. Corn: If the problem is policy and ownership structure, not height, what can someone actually do about it? Let's get concrete, because Daniel's question is ultimately practical — he's watching these towers go up and wants to know what the data says about living in them. I think there are three audiences here: policymakers, potential residents, and developers. Herman: Start with policymakers, because they set the rules everyone else plays by. The single highest-impact move would be mandating a minimum owner-occupancy ratio in new high-rise developments — say sixty percent — and tying tax incentives to actual occupancy rates, not just construction completion. Right now, a developer gets the tax break the moment the building tops out. Whether the units fill up with families or sit empty as investment vessels is irrelevant to the incentive structure. Corn: You'd tie the subsidy to verified occupancy. The developer only gets the full benefit once sixty percent of units are owner-occupied for, what, two consecutive years? Herman: That's the model Singapore uses, and it flips the developer's calculus entirely. Suddenly you care about whether your building is attractive to people who actually want to live there, not just to investors shopping for a safe place to park capital. You start thinking about elevator ratios and acoustic insulation and communal spaces because those are the things that get real buyers to commit. Corn: The city gets a mechanism that's self-policing. If the building is miserable to live in, it won't hit the occupancy threshold, and the developer pays full freight. Herman: The second policy lever is even simpler: require the Jerusalem municipality to publish a building-level community score. Something that aggregates occupancy rates, neighbor familiarity survey data, noise complaint frequency, elevator reliability. Make it public, make it searchable, and suddenly developers are competing on quality of life rather than just square-meter price. Corn: Which brings us to the second audience — the person actually considering moving into one of these towers. What should they look for? Herman: First, find out the investor-ownership percentage. If it's above thirty percent, the data says you're signing up for a materially worse experience — ghost floors, absentee management fights, eroded community. This number isn't always easy to get, but a good real estate agent can pull it from the building's registration records. If they can't or won't, that's information too. Herman: The Menachem Begin Towers ratio — one elevator per one hundred twenty units — produces those four point two minute peak waits. Singapore's standard is one per eighty units, which keeps waits under ninety seconds. As a rule of thumb, you want at least three elevators per hundred units in anything over twenty stories. Fewer than that, and you're going to spend a lot of your life staring at closed doors. Corn: The third thing would be that community score you mentioned — which doesn't exist yet, but should. Herman: Until the municipality publishes something official, you can do your own rough version. Talk to people in the elevator. Ask how long they've lived there, whether they know their neighbors, how responsive the va'ad bayit is. If you ride the elevator five times and nobody makes eye contact, that's a data point. If the building has a WhatsApp group and it's active, that's another. Corn: The elevator interview. I like it. But this is where it gets awkward — the people who most need this information are the ones least likely to have the time or social capital to gather it. New immigrants, young families, people moving from outside the city. Herman: Which is exactly why the municipality should be doing it. This isn't luxury intel — it's basic consumer protection for the biggest financial decision most people will ever make. Corn: The third audience — developers. You mentioned earlier that buildings with dedicated communal floors see twenty-two percent higher resident retention. Herman: From the Hebrew University follow-up study in 2025. Twenty-two percent is the difference between a building where people stay for five years and one where they're gone in three. High turnover means higher vacancy costs, more wear on common areas, more strain on the va'ad bayit. Investing in a co-working space, a shared garden, a laundry room that's pleasant to be in — these aren't charity. They're retention tools that pay for themselves. Corn: Yet most Jerusalem developers treat communal space as square footage they could have sold. Herman: Because the incentive structure rewards that thinking. If your profit is determined entirely by sale price per square meter, every common area looks like a loss. But if your profit is also tied to occupancy rates and resident retention — which is what the policy shift we're describing would create — suddenly that co-working space on the fourth floor is an asset, not a cost. Corn: The three audiences actually converge on the same insight. Policymakers need to change the incentives. Residents need to shop with the right criteria. Developers need to recognize that community infrastructure is good business once the incentives align. The data's there. The question is whether anyone acts on it. Herman: That's where I keep coming back to the image Daniel opened with — cranes everywhere, towers going up like mushrooms after rain. The city is adding fifty-plus more towers by 2030, and right now, not a single one of them is being built with an owner-occupancy minimum or a communal space mandate or an elevator redundancy standard. We're scaling the broken model. Corn: The question isn't really whether high-rise living can work. Singapore proved it can. The question is whether Jerusalem's policymakers will start measuring what actually matters — resident satisfaction, not just units built and tax breaks claimed. Herman: The early signals aren't encouraging. The 2025 Vertical Density Incentive program didn't even include a mechanism for collecting satisfaction data. We have the numbers we've cited today because of academic researchers and independent policy institutes, not because the city is tracking outcomes. You can't fix what you don't measure. Corn: Which means the twelve percent gap could easily become fifteen or twenty percent as the tower stock grows and the demographic mix shifts. And that brings us to the frontier that I think is the real test. Herman: Families with children. Corn: They're currently the least satisfied demographic in towers, and they're also the group that will determine whether Jerusalem's vertical neighborhoods become actual communities or just dormitories for childless professionals and investment portfolios. If families with kids won't live above the fifteenth floor — or can't, because the buildings weren't designed for them — you create a demographic stratification that hardens over time. Herman: No playgrounds, no soundproofing between units, no informal supervision networks because nobody knows their neighbors. A parent in a low-rise building can send the kids down to the courtyard and trust that someone's watching. A parent on the twenty-second floor is operating in a completely different calculus. The data from the Hebrew University study shows that high-rise residents with children under twelve report satisfaction levels twenty-two percent below the low-rise baseline — nearly double the overall gap. Corn: If the city doesn't solve for families, the tower boom doesn't just produce unhappy residents. It produces a city where the vertical dimension maps onto a demographic divide. Young and old. Families and singles. Owners and absent investors. Stacked on top of each other but living in different worlds. Herman: Once that divide is built into the physical structure of the city, it's extraordinarily hard to undo. You can't retrofit a sense of community into a forty-story building that was designed as a stack of investment units. You can't add communal floors after the fact without tearing out residential square footage and fighting every owner in the building. Corn: The window for getting this right is the window we're in right now — before those fifty-plus towers are locked into their final form. Every building that goes up under the current incentive structure is a fifty-year commitment to the outcomes we've been describing. Herman: That's what I hope Daniel and anyone listening takes from this. The data is clear. The mechanisms are understood. The policy solutions exist and have been demonstrated at scale in Singapore. What's missing isn't knowledge — it's the political will to tie incentives to outcomes that actually matter for the people who will live in these buildings for decades. Corn: The next time you walk past one of those construction sites and see the crane swinging, the question to ask isn't "how tall will it be." It's "who's going to live there, and will they be happier than the people in the low-rise building next door that's about to spend the rest of its life in the shadow. Herman: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: In the 1860s, Tibetan weavers producing the deep crimson dye for monastic robes required approximately twenty-five thousand female lac insects to produce a single kilogram of colorant — roughly the same weight as a standard bag of flour, but extracted entirely from insect resin collected on Himalayan mountain slopes. Corn:...right. Herman: This has been My Weird Prompts. Thank you to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to send us a question like Daniel did, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. Corn: We'll be back next week.