Housing supply: built for whom

Opened by A poor city building luxury towers, 10 August 2026.

The thesis, provisionally. The stock being added to Jerusalem is not addressed to the income profile of the people living in it. If that is true, the question this area exists to answer is how much of it the municipality could have done differently — unit mix, affordable-housing requirements, and the treatment of dwellings held as investments rather than lived in — and how much sits with the district committee or with national policy.

Nothing below stage 1 has been done. Note also that this testimony is observation rather than direct experience, which the evidence rules treat as weaker; it will need the data annex to carry it much earlier than a typical area would.

Pipeline status

Stage	Artifact	State
1. Testimony	testimonies/2026-08-10-housing-supply.md	✅
2a. Jurisdiction — the gate	research/02-jurisdiction.md	⬜
2. Evidence base	research/01, 03–06	⬜
3. Paper	papers/housing-supply.pdf	⬜
4. Manifesto	platform/program-for-the-city.md	⬜

Next action: /map-powers housing-supply.

Scope notes

Facts to establish

#	Claim or question	Status
1	Jerusalem is “consistently ranked the poorest city in Israel” — establish on which measure (CBS socio-economic index מדד חברתי-כלכלי, poverty incidence, or median income), for which years, and against which comparator set. Note that ranking outcomes differ sharply by measure	[UNVERIFIED]
2	Housing starts and completions in Jerusalem over the last decade, by unit size and price band	[UNVERIFIED]
3	The share of new stock that is high-rise, and how that share has moved	[UNVERIFIED]
4	The share of Jerusalem dwellings held by non-resident owners, and the share standing empty	[UNVERIFIED]
5	Whether the municipality has any adopted policy on unit mix or affordable housing (דיור בר השגה) in plans it approves, and whether it has used it	[UNVERIFIED]
6	The city’s tall-building policy: the governing plan, when it was adopted, and by which committee	[UNVERIFIED]
7	Whether an arnona surcharge on empty dwellings (דירות רפאים) exists in Israeli law, who may impose it, and whether Jerusalem has	[UNVERIFIED]
8	All of 2–4 disaggregated by neighbourhood, including East Jerusalem and the Haredi neighbourhoods — a city-wide figure will be wrong about this question	[UNVERIFIED]

Attributions to test

#	The account assumes	To test
1	“The municipality is fixated on building” this stock — i.e. that the city chooses what goes up	The split between the local planning committee (ועדה מקומית), the district committee (ועדה מחוזית) and national outline plans. Expect a mixed A/B/C answer, and expect the mix itself to be the finding
2	The city could require smaller or affordable units in what it approves	Turns on whether an affordable-housing quota instrument exists and is available at municipal level. If it exists and is unused, that is a class-A finding of the kind the doctrine hunts for
3	Marketing to diaspora buyers is something the city could restrain	Almost certainly not a municipal power over marketing as such. Expect D — but test whether it can be reached indirectly, e.g. through taxation of unoccupied dwellings
4	Investment ownership and empty flats are a municipal matter	Depends entirely on fact 7. A, B or D — one of the sharper open questions in this area
5	That building luxury high-rise and having a housing crisis are causally linked	Not a jurisdiction question but a substantive one, and the strongest objection to the whole area: added supply at any price band may still relieve pressure. It gets steelmanned in the paper, not waved away