A poor city building luxury towers

My wife is an architect, so I see this from closer than most renters do.

Jerusalem is, by and large, a poor city. It is consistently ranked the poorest city in Israel. And yet the municipality is fixated on building a vast stock of high-rise construction, built explicitly as luxury and marketed to the Jewish community broadly.

Often these are investment properties outright. Even where they are not marketed as investment properties, they play — rather ironically — into the idea of the diaspora as an unending pool of wealth, where everyone can simply afford a huge luxury condominium in Jerusalem.

So you have a housing crisis, and the answer being built is not addressed to the people living through it. The stock going up is not stock for the city’s own income profile.

I am aware that this is an observation about what I watch being built and marketed, rather than an account of something that happened to my household. The thing that happened to my household is the renting, and the two are the same problem seen from two ends: what is available to rent, and at what price, is downstream of what gets built and who it is built for.