Daniel sent us this one — and I'll admit, reading it felt a bit like someone handed me a mirror. He writes that he's a huge fan of skyscrapers and high-rises, finds something oddly comforting about the idea that a building of such enormity can house so many people in one space. When he looks up at a skyscraper, he feels part of a whole but also comfortably anonymous — a kind of being soaked up in something large, the antithesis of village mentality. But here's the tension. His wife, Hannah, who's an architect, argues against them on resource usage grounds. And Daniel himself has been critical of how Israel's rental market over-invests in high-rise construction intended primarily as investment vehicles. So he's asking whether there's a defensible vision of urbanism that accommodates skyscrapers — or whether loving them is just an aesthetic indulgence that doesn't survive the numbers.
This is exactly the kind of tension that makes urbanism worth talking about, because it's not academic for Daniel. He's in Jerusalem. He's photographing these towers. He's got an emotional relationship to the skyline — and at the same time he's watching buildings go up that he knows aren't being built for people like him, or for anyone who actually needs a home.
And I think that's the thing I want to sit with before we even get into the data. Because I feel this too. I look at the new towers going up near the entrance to the city — this massive Gateway project, multi-billion shekels, glass and steel catching the light — and there's a part of me that thinks, good, Jerusalem should look like a real city, a capital that belongs in this century. And then I remember that nearly half the families in this city live below the poverty line, and a lot of those towers sit mostly empty.
The ghost tower phenomenon. We've dug into this before, but the numbers haven't gotten better. Luxury residential towers in neighborhoods like Talbiya, fully built out, sold — and at night maybe twenty percent of the windows have lights on. These aren't homes. They're safety deposit boxes with floor-to-ceiling glass.
Which is why Daniel's question lands so hard. He's not asking whether skyscrapers are cool. He's asking whether there's a version of this that isn't extractive, that doesn't hollow out the city while giving it a pretty silhouette. And what makes it personal is that the feeling he's describing, that comfort in being part of something large, that's real. I know that feeling. The question is whether we can build cities that earn it.
That's where the architecture critique Hannah's bringing — the resource argument, the embodied carbon, the thermal insanity of glass curtain walls in a desert climate — that's not some killjoy objection. It's the real cost side of the ledger. So what we want to do here is take both things seriously. The emotional truth of loving tall buildings, and the physical truth of what they actually consume and who they actually serve.
The episode is going to move through three layers. First, we'll quantify the critique — what's actually happening with Jerusalem's ghost towers, what the carbon data says, what the social patterns show. Then we'll look at the counter-argument from density done right — Tokyo, Singapore, Vancouver. And finally, we'll synthesize something practical: a framework for what good high-rise urbanism would actually require, in policy and design terms.
I should say, this isn't going to be a debate where one of us plays the booster and the other plays the skeptic. We're both trying to figure out the same thing Daniel is — whether the thing he loves can be separated from the thing he's rightly angry about.
Because if it can't, that's genuinely sad. Not just for Daniel's photo collection. For what it says about the limits of what cities can be.
We're not just asking whether skyscrapers are efficient or sustainable. We're asking whether the thing Daniel feels when he looks up at them — that sense of being part of something larger, the comfortable anonymity — whether that's a legitimate human need that cities should serve, or a kind of aesthetic Stockholm syndrome we've developed toward the very things extracting value from our communities.
Hannah's critique, from what Daniel describes, isn't "tall buildings are ugly." It's that they're resource-intensive in ways that are hard to justify. The embodied carbon in concrete and steel, the thermal inefficiency of all that glass in a Middle Eastern summer — these are measurable, physical objections. And Daniel's not dismissing them. He's saying, I hear this, I respect this, and I still love these buildings. Is there a version of the argument where both things can be true?
Which is really a question about whether the problem is height, or whether the problem is the specific economic and design model that produces most of the height we see. If it's the latter — which is where I land — then the fight isn't over whether we build up or out. It's over who gets to build, for whom, and under what rules.
The episode, at its core, is about both aesthetics and policy — but not as separate conversations. The aesthetics are what make us care. The policy is what determines whether the things we care about actually serve us or just use us.
Let's start by taking the critique seriously — because Hannah, from what Daniel describes, is making the case that holds up under scrutiny. And the first place it holds up is right here in Jerusalem. The ghost tower thing isn't a metaphor. You can walk through Talbiya at night and count the lit windows.
I've done exactly that. It's eerie. These are completed buildings, sold units, and maybe one in five has anyone inside. The rest are — what? French investors who visit for Sukkot? American families who bought as a hedge and haven't set foot in the place in three years?
That's the pattern. And it's not accidental. Developers in Jerusalem have been marketing luxury towers explicitly to foreign buyers as wealth storage. The pitch isn't "here's a wonderful home in a vibrant neighborhood." The pitch is "park your capital in a stable asset in a city that will always have demand." The fact that the units sit empty isn't a bug — it's the business model. An empty apartment requires no maintenance, no tenant disputes, and appreciates just fine.
Meanwhile, nearly half the families in Jerusalem live below the poverty line. So you've got this surreal mismatch — towers rising, capital flowing in, and the people who actually live and work here can't afford any of it. It's not just inequality. It's inequality made visible in steel and glass.
That's the first thing the critique gets right. These towers aren't solving a housing shortage. They're creating a parallel real estate market that has nothing to do with shelter. The Gateway project — multi-billion shekels, office and residential towers — it's being built for high-tech firms and wealthy tenants. Which, fine, Jerusalem wants a tech sector. But when you rezone for height and the primary beneficiaries are developers and existing landowners, the public gets a skyline and not much else.
The zoning point is worth underlining. When a city upzones, the land value spikes immediately. The owner of a three-story building who suddenly gets rights to build forty stories just received a windfall. And unless the city captures some of that value through taxes or inclusionary requirements, it's a pure transfer of public wealth to private hands.
The height itself isn't the problem. It's that the economic model assumes height exists to maximize returns for capital, not to house people. And that's where Hannah's resource critique connects. Because if you're building towers as investment vehicles, you're going to build them cheap for the developer — which means concrete and steel and glass curtain walls, regardless of whether those materials make any sense in a desert climate.
Let's put numbers on that. The embodied carbon in a concrete and steel high-rise is typically two to three times higher per square meter than a mid-rise built with timber or masonry. You're front-loading a massive carbon debt before anyone even moves in.
Then the operational side. Glass curtain walls in Jerusalem, where summer temperatures hit thirty-five Celsius regularly — you're building a greenhouse and then running air conditioning nonstop to make it habitable. A well-insulated masonry building with smaller window openings would use dramatically less energy, but it wouldn't photograph like a Dubai skyline, and it wouldn't command luxury pricing from overseas buyers.
The resource argument isn't just "tall buildings use more materials." It's that the specific kind of tall building we're getting — the glass tower on a concrete frame — is about the worst possible choice for this climate, chosen almost entirely for aesthetic and marketing reasons.
Then there's the social critique, which is maybe the one that stings most given what Daniel said about loving the idea of so many people in one space. Because the towers going up in Jerusalem don't actually create that. They create vertical segregation. You've got luxury penthouses on the upper floors with private amenities, and residents who never need to interact with anyone outside their economic bracket. The ground floor, if you're lucky, has a lobby and maybe a cafe. If you're not lucky, it's parking and a security desk.
Which kills street life. The thing that makes urbanism vibrant — people walking, shops at eye level, accidental encounters — gets replaced by a vertical fortress. You enter through a guarded gate, take an elevator to your floor, and never touch the street except to get in your car.
That's the cruelest irony in Daniel's prompt. He looks up at these towers and feels part of a whole, comfortably anonymous, soaked up in something large. But the towers themselves, the way they're actually built, are designed to prevent exactly that kind of collective experience. They're stacking capital on top of capital, with each unit sealed off from the next.
If we're being honest, the critique lands. The ghost towers are real. The carbon cost is higher than alternatives. The social fabric gets shredded at street level. And the economic model ensures that the people who need housing most get a view of buildings they'll never enter. If that were the whole story, Hannah would be right and Daniel's love of skyscrapers would be — what, nostalgia for a promise that was never kept?
Here's where it gets interesting. Because if you look at cities that actually do high-rises well, the critique starts to look less like an argument against height and more like an argument against bad policy and bad design.
People hear "Tokyo" and picture the Shinjuku skyline — massive towers, neon, density that feels almost overwhelming. But the actual residential fabric of Tokyo isn't monolithic superblocks. It's narrow buildings on narrow lots, seven, ten, twelve stories, built by small-scale developers under permissive zoning that lets you build by right rather than begging for variances. The result is an organic vertical neighborhood. Not a tower in a park. Not a gated compound. Just a continuous urban fabric that happens to be tall.
The distinction is between a city that's vertical because a few big developers built a few big things, and a city that's vertical because thousands of small players built thousands of small things.
That distinction changes everything about who benefits. In Tokyo, the land value uplift from height gets distributed across many owners rather than concentrated in a few. You get mixed uses by default — the corner shop on the ground floor, offices on two and three, apartments above — because small developers need to maximize every square meter. The street stays active because there's no giant lobby swallowing the block.
Which is basically the opposite of what we're getting in Jerusalem, where the height is concentrated in a handful of mega-projects and the street level is a blank wall and a parking ramp.
Here's where the emissions argument flips in an interesting way. When you look at per capita carbon, not per building, dense vertical cities consistently outperform sprawl. Tokyo's per capita emissions are roughly half of Houston's. The reason isn't that their buildings are magically efficient — it's that density enables transit, walking, shared infrastructure. You don't need a car. Your apartment shares walls, which means shared heating and cooling loads. The city's footprint is compact, so you're not paving over farmland for subdivisions.
The carbon ledger has two columns. Column A is the building itself — more embodied carbon per square meter in a high-rise, absolutely. Column B is everything else — transportation, land use, infrastructure. And in a well-designed dense city, Column B savings can more than offset Column A.
The problem in Jerusalem isn't that we're building up instead of out. It's that we're building the wrong kind of up — luxury towers with large floorplates and four units per floor, instead of slender towers with twenty small units, ground-floor retail, and no parking podium eating the streetscape.
This is what people call the missing middle, right? The gap between single-family homes and forty-story towers.
Yes — though I'd say the concept extends vertically too. It's not just about building six-story courtyard apartments instead of detached houses. It's also about the difference between a forty-story tower with twelve units total and a forty-story tower with two hundred units. Same height, completely different urbanism. The first is a wealth vault. The second is a neighborhood turned on its side.
That gets at something Daniel said that I keep coming back to. The feeling of being soaked up in something large. The comfortable anonymity. That's not a fantasy about glass and steel — it's a fantasy about density that actually works. About being one person among many, neither exposed nor isolated.
It's the psychological opposite of the village, where everyone knows your business. And I think that's a legitimate thing to want from a city. The question is whether we can design for it without the negative externalities. And I think the answer is yes — but only if the building actually contains a community, not just a collection of assets.
Let's talk about what that looks like in practice. You mentioned Vancouver.
Vancouver's interesting because they stumbled into a model that works almost by accident. In the nineteen nineties, they were facing a hollowing-out of the downtown core. So they started approving residential towers downtown, but with very specific design guidelines. Slender towers — narrow floorplates, so every unit gets light and air. Set on a podium that meets the street with retail and townhouses, so the pedestrian experience is human-scale even though the building is thirty stories. No parking podiums facing the sidewalk. Active uses at ground level, mandatory.
The result is what they call Vancouverism — this weird hybrid where you've got Hong Kong-level density but the street feels like a neighborhood, not a canyon.
Downtown Vancouver's population tripled. The streets stayed walkable. The towers are thin enough that they don't cast permanent shadow on entire blocks. It's not perfect — the units are still expensive, the model hasn't solved affordability on its own — but as a proof of concept that you can do high-rise without killing the street, it's important.
Singapore takes it further on the affordability side.
Singapore is the counter-argument to almost everything we've said about ghost towers and speculation. Eighty percent of the population lives in HDB flats — public housing towers built by the government. These aren't grim Soviet blocks. They're well-maintained, mixed-income, with communal spaces and green corridors and hawker centers at ground level. The towers are tall — forty, fifty stories in some cases — but they're integrated into neighborhoods that actually function.
The key difference is that the state captured the land value and directed it toward public benefit. The height wasn't a windfall for developers. It was a tool for housing policy.
Singapore's model is statist in a way that probably wouldn't transplant directly to Jerusalem — different political culture, different scale — but the principle is transferable. If you're going to allow height, you need to capture some of the value that height creates and put it toward public goods. Otherwise you're just subsidizing penthouses.
Tokyo shows you can do it without heavy state intervention — just by making the zoning permissive enough that height becomes boring. It's not a special privilege granted to connected developers. It's just what you're allowed to build if you own the lot.
Which brings us back to Daniel's question about whether there are passionate advocates for better high-rise architecture. And the answer is absolutely yes — but they tend not to be the people building luxury ghost towers. They're urbanists and architects arguing for slender towers, mixed uses, active ground floors, and public benefit requirements. The advocacy isn't for more height. It's for height that actually delivers what Daniel feels when he looks up at a skyline — the sense of being part of something large, not locked out of it.
That's the synthesis that's forming for me. The feeling isn't wrong. The feeling is actually a pretty good guide to what urbanism should be. The problem is that the towers we're building in Jerusalem are designed to extract that feeling — to give you the silhouette and the skyline photo — without delivering the substance. It's the aesthetic of density without the reality of it.
The musical equivalent of a band t-shirt worn by someone who's never heard the album.
There it is.
Where does that leave us? If we accept that skyscrapers can work under the right conditions, what do we actually do about it? Because I think a lot of listeners are in Daniel's position — they feel the pull of these buildings, they also feel the unease, and they want a way to think about it that isn't just "tall good" or "tall bad.
The simplest heuristic I've come to is this: when a new tower goes up, ask who benefits. Not who the marketing materials say benefits — who actually benefits. Is it primarily a store of value for foreign capital, or does it add housing units, public space, and street-level vitality? If the answer is the former, your unease is well-founded. If it's the latter, height might actually be serving the city.
That's where the policy piece gets concrete. Because right now, Jerusalem's towers don't have to pass that test. There's no inclusionary zoning requirement — nothing that says if you're building forty stories, some percentage of those units need to be affordable to people who actually live and work here. There's no vacancy tax to discourage the buy-and-leave-empty model. There's no design guideline requiring active ground floors or slender tower profiles.
All three of those are off-the-shelf tools. Inclusionary zoning is standard in hundreds of cities — Vancouver requires twenty percent affordable units in new developments. Vacancy taxes exist in Vancouver too, and in Melbourne, and they demonstrably push units back onto the rental market. Design guidelines for ground-floor activation are basically urbanism one-oh-one at this point.
Thermal performance standards — in a desert climate, with summers getting hotter — that's not a niche architectural preference. That's a public health and energy security question. If you're going to build a glass tower in Jerusalem, you should have to demonstrate that it won't require a small power plant to keep habitable in August.
The frustrating thing is that none of this is experimental. The policy menu exists. What's missing is the political will to apply it, because the current arrangement is very profitable for a small number of people, and they're well-organized. The diffuse public — the people who look up at the towers and feel that mix of admiration and sadness — they're not lobbying the planning committee.
Which brings me back to that feeling Daniel described. Being soaked up in something large. I don't think that feeling is naive or misguided. I think it's an intuition about what cities are supposed to be — places where you can be one person among many, neither exposed nor isolated, part of something bigger than your own household. The tragedy is that the towers going up in Jerusalem promise that experience and then withhold it. They're the silhouette of community without the substance.
That's the real task, right? To build cities that deserve that feeling. Not to stop building up — but to build up in a way that the thing Daniel photographs is actually there. Lights on at night. Ground floors with shops and cafes. Elevators with neighbors who aren't just asset managers checking on an empty unit.
The love of skyscrapers isn't the problem. It's a demand for something good — density, anonymity, collective scale — that the current economic model supplies in counterfeit form. The job isn't to stop loving the skyline. It's to demand the real thing.
Here's the question I can't shake. We've laid out what good high-rise urbanism looks like — slender towers, mixed uses, public benefit, active streets. We've pointed to Vancouver, Tokyo, Singapore. But can Jerusalem actually do any of this?
That's the part that keeps me up, honestly. Jerusalem isn't just any city. You've got the political overlay — municipal boundaries that shift with every coalition negotiation, planning committees that are half urbanism and half religious politics. You've got an economy that's unusually dependent on diaspora philanthropy and foreign investment. And you've got a housing market where the speculative model isn't a bug that snuck in — it's been the operating system for decades.
The Gateway project alone — multi-billion shekels, right at the city's entrance — that's not a small pilot you can tweak with design guidelines after the fact. That's a baked-in commitment to a particular vision of what Jerusalem's growth looks like. The zoning was approved, the financing is in place, the cranes are up.
The political economy around it is entrenched. The developers who benefit from the current model are connected. The foreign buyers who park capital in empty units have no incentive to demand ground-floor retail or affordable housing set-asides — they're not there. The people who would benefit from a different model — young families, renters, the nearly half of Jerusalem below the poverty line — they're diffuse and politically weak.
The pessimistic read is that Jerusalem is locked in. The speculative model is too profitable, too embedded, and the city's unique dynamics — the religious significance that makes land a spiritual asset as much as a financial one, the diaspora relationship that treats Jerusalem real estate as a kind of patrimony — make it uniquely resistant to the policy tools that worked elsewhere.
I think that's a fair description of the forces at play. But I don't think it's a reason to give up. Because Vancouver in the nineteen eighties was also locked into a bad model — hollowed-out downtown, car-dependent sprawl, nobody living in the core. Singapore in the nineteen sixties had slums and a housing crisis that made Jerusalem's look manageable. Tokyo after the war was rubble. The question is whether the change is directed or just happens to people.
That's where Daniel's photographs actually matter. I mean this. When he posts images of Jerusalem's towers, when he talks about what they make him feel, he's doing something that the speculative model doesn't account for. He's treating the skyline as a public thing — something that belongs to the people who look at it, not just the people who own it.
That's not sentimental. That's a category claim. The skyline is a commons. It shapes how people experience their city, whether they ever set foot in the penthouse or not. And if enough people start treating it that way, start asking who benefits from the next tower, start demanding that the feeling Daniel described actually be available to the people who live here, that's how the politics shifts.
The open question isn't really "can Jerusalem do this." It's "will the people who love this city's skyline organize around a version of it that loves them back." And I don't know the answer. But I know the love itself isn't the problem. The love is the thing that makes the question worth asking.
Daniel's intuition — that there's something real in what he feels when he looks up — that's not naive. It's a demand that cities haven't met yet, or have only met in fragments. The challenge is to build cities that deserve that love. Cities where the towers actually contain what the silhouette promises.
That's where I land. The feeling isn't wrong. The feeling is an aspiration. The job is to make the buildings earn it.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The English word "salary" traces back to the Latin "salarium," originally an allowance paid to Roman soldiers for purchasing salt — a practice that persisted in modified form across the Sahel, where Tuareg traders in the late sixteen hundreds transported salt slabs from Taoudenni south to Timbuktu, where it was traded weight-for-weight with gold. The Bioko Islanders of Equatorial Guinea, meanwhile, obtained salt not through trade but by evaporating seawater in hollowed-out palm trunks.
...right.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own tangled question about cities, or anything else, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. Until next time.
