Daniel's been thinking about Jerusalem as a tourism city — and he's worried. He sees the city positioning itself as a global magnet for Jewish and Bible-focused visitors, and he's asking whether that path inevitably leads to low-wage service jobs, hollowed-out local culture, and a kind of Disneyland where locals prop up the show from behind the curtain. His real question is whether there's a better version of this — cities that found symbiosis, where tourism made the place better for everyone, not just visitors. Can tourism be a rising tide that lifts all boats, and can it sustain careers, not just minimum wage shifts? So today we're going to look at Jerusalem through that lens, then go hunting for counterexamples — cities that got tourism right.
Jerusalem's numbers make the stakes clear. Pre-pandemic, 2019, the city pulled in roughly four and a half million visitors. Israel's national target is ten million tourists annually by 2030, and Jerusalem is the anchor of that strategy. But here's what sits underneath those numbers: nearly half of Jerusalem's families live below the poverty line. That's not a tourism statistic — that's a structural fact that predates the current tourism push — but the kind of economy that's growing fastest is hospitality, retail, guiding. Sectors where median wages run well below the city average.
So the thing Daniel's pointing at isn't just "tourism creates low-wage jobs." It's that tourism, when it becomes the dominant economic logic, starts reorganizing the city around people who don't live there. And I want to sit with that phrase for a second — "reorganizing the city." Because it's not just an economic shift. It's physical. It's social. It changes what a street is for.
Right. And the mechanism is surprisingly concrete. A street that served residents — corner grocery, hardware shop, community bakery — gets replaced by souvenir stores, chain hotels, tour-group restaurants. The Old City's Christian Quarter Road is basically the case study. It was a mixed-use market street. Now it's overwhelmingly tourist-oriented retail. The residents who stayed now shop elsewhere, often outside the Old City walls entirely. You want to buy a screwdriver or a pound of flour in the Christian Quarter today? Good luck. You want a olive-wood camel figurine made in a workshop three towns over? You've got forty options.
That's the thing — it's not even that the tourist stuff is fake, necessarily. Some of it is. Some of it is perfectly nice. But it's not for the people who live there. And once a street tips past a certain threshold, there's no going back. The hardware store that closes doesn't reopen. The bakery that served the neighborhood for eighty years becomes a frozen yogurt chain, and that's it. The street has changed species.
And that's not Jerusalem being uniquely bad at this. That's Venice. That's Dubrovnik. That's Bruges. Venice went from a hundred seventy-five thousand residents in 1950 to about fifty thousand today. The city didn't shrink — the residents left, and tourists replaced them. The same apartments, the same buildings, but the people sleeping in them are on vacation.
I was in Venice about five years ago, and I remember walking through a residential area — or what the map said was a residential area — and realizing that every single doorbell had a keybox next to it. You know, the little lockboxes for Airbnb keys. There wasn't a single name on any buzzer that was a permanent resident. It was just a grid of keyboxes. That's the endpoint. The city becomes a hotel with really good architecture.
The dual-track system. That's what Daniel's describing even if he didn't use the term. A parallel economy that serves visitors while the local economy atrophies. In Jerusalem you see it in the luxury hotels and the empty high-rise towers — the ghost towers we've talked about — sitting alongside neighborhoods where forty percent of children live in poverty. Two cities occupying the same geography, barely touching.
The ghost towers are the same story in vertical form. Absentee investors buying real estate as assets, not homes. Tourism and luxury housing feeding the same dynamic — build for the person who's passing through, not the person who stays. And here's the thing — those towers are full, technically. Someone owns every unit. But the lights are off. The lobbies are quiet. They're not empty buildings, they're empty of life. It's a different kind of vacancy.
And the labor market reinforces it. Tourism is structurally reliant on seasonal, part-time, and — in many markets — migrant labor. Hotels, restaurants, tour operators compete on thin margins and pass labor costs downward. In Jerusalem specifically, the Palestinian labor force from the West Bank provides a flexible, lower-cost workforce. I'm not making a political point here, I'm describing a wage dynamic. When you have a pool of workers who cross a checkpoint to get to work and have limited alternative employment options, wages stay low because the bargaining power is asymmetrical.
And can we talk about what "flexible" means in practice? Because it sounds like a scheduling word, but in this context it means something else. It means a workforce that can't easily organize, that can't easily change jobs, that has a constrained set of alternatives. That's not flexible in the way a freelancer with three clients is flexible. That's flexible in the way a captive market is flexible. The employer has options. The worker doesn't.
And it's not unique to Jerusalem — you see versions of this in resort towns everywhere, where the labor pool is constrained by geography, housing costs, or immigration status. But Jerusalem adds a layer that most resort towns don't have, which is a political boundary that literally controls movement. The checkpoint isn't a metaphor. It's infrastructure.
So you've got low wages, you've got real estate priced for people who don't live there, and you've got the physical city reorganizing around visitor experience. What does that do to the culture?
It commodifies it. When a city's identity becomes a product, authenticity becomes a performance. Jerusalem's Bible tourism packages the city as a theme park of prophecy fulfillment. Locals become extras in a biblical reenactment. The Western Wall plaza, the Via Dolorosa, even the Mahane Yehuda market — you see more Instagram photographers than actual shoppers now. The market still functions, but the balance has shifted.
Mahane Yehuda at night is basically a bar district for tourists and students. During the day it's still a market, but the night economy is a different thing entirely. That's not inherently bad — markets evolve — but it's not evolving for the people who buy their vegetables there. The vegetable sellers are still there in the morning, hosing down the pavement where someone spilled a cocktail the night before. That's the dual-track system in microcosm. Same space, two completely different worlds, and they just take shifts.
The Disneyland comparison Daniel made isn't hyperbolic. Bruges and Dubrovnik have seen resident populations shrink as tourism real estate pricing pushes locals to suburbs. Jerusalem's population is growing, so it's not depopulating the way Venice is. But the economic disconnect between tourist zones and residential neighborhoods is widening. You can live in Kiryat Yovel or Pisgat Ze'ev and never encounter a tourist. You can spend a week in the Old City and never meet a Jerusalem resident who isn't selling you something.
And that's a strange kind of segregation, right? It's not enforced by law, but it's enforced by economics and urban planning. The tourist Jerusalem and the residential Jerusalem are practically different cities that happen to share a municipal boundary. The tourist never needs to go to Kiryat Yovel. The resident of Kiryat Yovel has no reason to go to the Old City except maybe once a year when a relative visits from abroad and wants to see the sights. They're not sharing space. They're not sharing an economy. They're sharing a zip code and not much else.
So that's the problem. Tourism monoculture creating a two-tier city. But not every tourism city ends up this way. Let's look at three that didn't.
Model one: Barcelona. And I want to be careful here because Barcelona has its own overtourism crisis — residents protesting, rents skyrocketing, the whole thing. But underneath that, Barcelona's tourism economy is structurally more diverse than most. The city markets to niche professional communities — design conferences, tech events, architecture tourism, culinary innovation. The result is that tourism supports architects, event planners, food scientists, not just hotel cleaners and waitstaff.
So they're not just selling "come look at our old buildings." They're selling "come to our city because interesting professional things happen here, and also there are old buildings." The buildings are almost the bonus. The main product is "this is where the conversation is happening."
And that changes the labor market. A conference organizer in Barcelona earns a middle-class wage. A chef in the high-end culinary tourism sector is building a career, not working a seasonal gig. The city's tourism board actively cultivates this — they don't just count visitor numbers, they track visitor spend and professional engagement.
Yield per visitor rather than visitor count.
That's the phrase, yes. And it's the thread that connects all three models we're going to look at. Barcelona's problem is that they didn't control volume, so the success of the strategy created its own backlash. But the underlying economic structure is healthier than a pure leisure-tourism city. A city that attracts people for professional reasons has a built-in ceiling on how shallow the economy can get. You can't run a design conference with minimum-wage labor. You need people who know things.
What's model two?
Kyoto. And Kyoto is fascinating because they went the opposite direction from Barcelona on volume. Kyoto explicitly caps tour bus access to geisha districts, bans photography on certain streets, requires reservations at popular temples. The city prioritizes resident quality of life over visitor volume, and they enforce it.
Wait — they ban photography? On public streets?
Specific streets in the Gion district, yes. The geisha and maiko were being harassed by tourists treating them as photo opportunities. The city said, essentially, this is a living neighborhood, not a set. No photos. And they fine people.
That's... I mean, that's a city deciding who it belongs to. That's the municipal government looking at a situation and saying, "These are our neighbors. These are people who live here and have a profession and a daily life. And your desire for a photograph does not override their right to walk down the street unharassed." That's a values statement, not a tourism policy.
And it works. Tourism revenue in Kyoto is high, but the zoning and regulation prevent the hollowing-out effect. Local craftspeople — kimono makers, tea ceremony practitioners — are protected by certification systems that keep the industry skilled and well-paid. You can't just open a "traditional tea ceremony experience" in Kyoto without credentials. The city protects the authenticity by protecting the practitioners.
So they're making it harder to fake the culture for a quick profit. If you want to sell a tea ceremony, you have to actually know what you're doing, and the city verifies that you know what you're doing. That's such a simple idea, but it's the opposite of how most tourism cities operate. Most cities let anyone hang a shingle that says "authentic local experience" and let the market sort it out. Kyoto's saying the market can't sort it out because tourists can't tell the difference, so the city has to be the referee.
Right. And that means the people performing the culture are the people who actually own it. The economic benefits stay local because the skills are local and can't be undercut by cheaper, inauthentic alternatives. You can't outsource a tea ceremony to a cheaper provider who watched a YouTube video. The certification system is a barrier to entry that protects quality and wages simultaneously.
Model three?
Medellín, Colombia. And this one is the most radical departure. Medellín's transformation from murder capital to tourism destination wasn't driven by tourism investment. It was driven by public investment in libraries, cable cars, and parks that served residents first. Tourism followed as a byproduct.
Explain the cable cars.
Medellín built a cable car system connecting the hillside favelas to the city center. This wasn't a tourist attraction — it was public transit for residents who previously spent hours commuting on foot. But it became a tourist attraction because it's impressive infrastructure with spectacular views. The difference is, the cable cars were built for the people who live there.
So the tourists are riding the residents' transit system, not the other way around. The city didn't build a tourist attraction that residents happen to use. It built a transit system that tourists happen to find interesting. That's an inversion of the usual logic, and it matters because it means the thing exists whether or not the tourists show up. It's not dependent on visitor volume for its justification. It's justified by the commute it shortens, not the ticket sales it generates.
And the city's "tourism for peace" model created jobs in guiding, interpretation, and cultural management that pay above minimum wage because they require specialized knowledge — history, language, conflict mediation. Former gang members now lead tours of neighborhoods they once controlled. That's not a minimum-wage job. That's a career built on expertise that only a local can provide. You can't import a tour guide who knows what it was like to live through the violence in Comuna 13. That knowledge is local, it's embodied, and it commands a wage premium.
What do these three share? Barcelona diversified the visitor economy, Kyoto protected residents and authentic practitioners, Medellín built for residents and let tourism follow.
They all decouple tourism success from tourism volume. They focus on yield per visitor rather than visitor count. And — this is the part that matters for Jerusalem — they embed tourism within a broader economic strategy rather than letting it become the strategy.
Can Jerusalem do any of this?
It has the assets. World-class archaeology, religious significance that's unique, a diverse population with deep historical knowledge. But the governance is fragmented among municipal, national, and religious authorities. The Western Wall is run by the rabbinate. The Old City is under the national parks authority. Hotels are private developers. No single entity can implement a Kyoto-style cap or a Medellín-style public investment strategy.
There's no one with the authority to say "no photos on this street" and actually enforce it, because three different jurisdictions overlap on that street. The municipality might want to, but does the national parks authority agree? Does the religious authority that controls that particular corner recognize the municipality's right to regulate behavior there? Probably not. So you get a stalemate, and in the absence of regulation, the default is always "anything goes."
Even if there were, the ownership structure works against the rising-tide idea. Tourism can lift all boats, but only when the boats are already in the water. If locals don't own the hotels, the tour companies, or the real estate, the tide lifts outside investors. Jerusalem's hotel ownership is heavily concentrated among international chains and absentee investors. Same pattern as the ghost towers.
The profits from tourism leave the city, but the costs — crowded streets, rising prices, cultural commodification — stay. That's the worst of both worlds. The city absorbs all the negative externalities of tourism and captures very little of the upside. The money flows out. The problems pile up.
That's the dual-track system in its most extractive form. The visitors spend money. The money goes to a holding company in another country. The local worker gets a wage. The local resident gets the noise.
There's a version of this where Jerusalem could do something like Kyoto's craft certification. The city has genuine artisans — Armenian ceramicists in the Old City, Jewish scribes, Palestinian glassblowers in Hebron who sell in Jerusalem. Protect those, certify them, make the authentic stuff the premium product and drive out the knockoffs.
That's theoretically possible. The problem is that certification requires a governing authority with legitimacy across communities, and Jerusalem's communities don't share a governing authority or, in many cases, even recognize the same one. An Israeli certification for "authentic Jerusalem craft" would be rejected by Palestinian artisans. A joint certification body would be a political negotiation, not a tourism policy.
The political situation doesn't just make tourism policy harder — it makes certain kinds of tourism policy structurally impossible. You can't certify authenticity when you can't agree on who gets to define it. You can't protect craftspeople when the craftspeople don't recognize the authority of the certifying body. The tool that worked in Kyoto requires a level of civic consensus that Jerusalem simply doesn't have.
Right. And that's where I think we need to bring in Hilbert, because he's been sitting there with a look on his face that says he's seen this movie before.
Hilbert: 2003. Night auditor at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. Six months. I'd just folded a meditation retreat startup — don't ask — and I needed something that paid in cash and didn't ask questions about work permits.
The American Colony is one of the most beautiful hotels in the world..
Hilbert: It is. The courtyard alone is worth the room rate. But the economics were feudal. I worked eleven at night till seven in the morning. The cleaning staff — mostly Palestinian, mostly from neighborhoods the other side of the checkpoint — they'd start arriving around five. Some of them walked two hours each way because the checkpoint was closed to pedestrian traffic at that hour and the taxis wouldn't take them. They walked. The guests came in air-conditioned buses.
You could see the dual-track system from the front desk.
Hilbert: You could see it from the payroll. I processed the night ledger. The guests were on vacation from history. The staff were living inside it. There was a man named Samir at the front desk — he'd been a professor of Arabic literature at Bethlehem University before the second intifada closed it. Now he worked the desk because it paid more than any academic job available to him. He was overqualified for my job, and I was his supervisor.
That's not a tourism problem.
Hilbert: No. That's a city that broke its own middle class, and tourism just moved into the ruins. Everyone talks about tourism lifting all boats, but in Jerusalem the boats are made of different materials. The American Colony was a lovely place to work — lovely — but the economics weren't about tourism policy. They were about who could move freely and who couldn't, who had a passport that let them leave and who didn't. You can't regulate your way out of occupation economics.
Kyoto-style certification or Medellín-style public investment — those assume a functioning city with a unified population and a government that represents everyone. They assume the boats are all in the same harbor, subject to the same weather. But what you're describing is a situation where some boats are anchored and some are adrift, and the tide doesn't affect them the same way because they're not in the same water to begin with.
Hilbert: They assume the boats are all in the same water. Samir had a PhD. He was working a front desk at night because the university that employed him was on the wrong side of a wall. That's not something Barcelona solved with a conference strategy. Barcelona didn't have a wall.
The case studies abstract away the political reality. Kyoto can ban photography because the city government has legitimate authority over the streets. Medellín could invest in cable cars because the municipal government controlled the budget and the territory. Jerusalem's tourism economy sits on top of a conflict that distorts every market — labor, real estate, even the definition of who counts as a local.
Hilbert: The American Colony still runs. Samir — I don't know what happened to him. I left after six months. The hotel probably still has night auditors, probably still has cleaning staff walking to work. The guests still arrive in buses. It's a good hotel.
The thing Hilbert's describing — it changes the frame. We've been asking whether tourism can lift all boats. But if the boats are already sunk, tourism doesn't lift them. It just floats on top.
That's the deeper question Daniel's prompt raises, whether he meant to or not. Maybe the problem isn't tourism itself. Maybe it's monoculture. Jerusalem's economy is tourism-heavy because other sectors — tech, manufacturing, academia — have been hollowed out by conflict, occupation, and brain drain. Tourism is the symptom, not the cause.
The cities that got tourism right didn't start with tourism. Barcelona had an existing design and architecture sector. Kyoto had living craft traditions. Medellín had a municipal government that decided to invest in its poorest neighborhoods. Tourism followed. It was the tail, not the dog. Jerusalem's trying to make tourism the dog and hoping a tail grows later.
Jerusalem's trying to do it backwards. Build the hotels, market the Bible tours, and hope the economy diversifies later. But the evidence from every city we've looked at says that doesn't work. If you build for visitors first, you get a visitor economy. If you build for residents first, tourism becomes one layer of a diversified city.
Building for residents first in Jerusalem means addressing the political fragmentation that makes everything else impossible. You can't have Medellín-style public investment when three different authorities control different parts of the same neighborhood. You can't have Kyoto-style craft protection when the craftspeople don't share a civic identity. The preconditions for the success stories we looked at are precisely the things Jerusalem lacks.
Hilbert: The American Colony had a piano in the lobby. Steinway. Beautiful instrument. Nobody played it — it was just there, part of the atmosphere. One night around three in the morning, Samir sat down and played for about twenty minutes. Classical, I don't know what. He was good. The night manager told him to stop because it might wake the guests. I think about that a lot.
He had the skill. The hotel had the piano. But the structure of the place said no. The structure said the piano is decoration, not an instrument. It's there to be looked at, not played. And the person who could play it beautifully was behind the front desk, not at the keyboard.
Hilbert: That's the city. The skill is there. The piano is there. But the structure says no.
If you take one thing from this, it's that the cities that got tourism right didn't start with tourism. They started with making the city work for residents, and tourism followed. That's the lesson Jerusalem can't easily apply — but it's the only one that matters.
The reason it can't easily apply it isn't bad policy or lack of imagination. It's that the city is a living political flashpoint that happens to have hotels. You can't regulate your way out of that. You have to fix the city first, and then ask what kind of tourism it wants. But "fix the city first" is a generational political project, not a tourism policy. And in the meantime, the hotels keep going up, the souvenir shops keep spreading, and the dual-track system keeps hardening.
Which leaves us with an open question that's uncomfortable. Can a city like Jerusalem ever implement the Kyoto or Medellín models when its governance is split among competing authorities and its political situation makes long-term planning nearly impossible? I'm not sure the answer is yes. And if the answer is no, then the tourism monoculture Daniel's worried about isn't a policy failure — it's the only equilibrium available.
That's a grim note, but it's where the evidence points. The rising tide is real — we saw it in Barcelona, Kyoto, Medellín — but it only rises for cities that are already seaworthy. Jerusalem's taking on water, and building more hotels doesn't patch the hull.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the American Colony story that I'm going to be thinking about for a while.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you have a weird prompt about cities, economies, or the places where they intersect, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
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