Welcome to My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. So Daniel sent us this one — he's been watching Jerusalem sprout luxury high-rises all around him, and it's messing with a literary education that told him city centres are where the poor live. He grew up on Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, on Angela's Ashes — books where downtown means squalor. But the Jerusalem he actually lives in is building thirty-seven-storey towers with penthouses marketed at over a million dollars. And he's asking: was the "inner city equals poverty" thing ever actually true, or did he just absorb a very specific Anglo-American literary trope?
It's a good question. The same patch of geography, two completely opposite realities depending on which century's novel you're reading. And he's not just asking it academically — he's looking at it.
He's in it. And it's not just Jerusalem. This is happening globally — London's Nine Elms, New York's Hudson Yards, downtown Dubai. The cultural shorthand says "inner city means poor," but the cranes on the skyline are building for millionaires. The literature hasn't caught up.
Where does this association even come from? And what do you actually see when you look at who's living in city centres now versus who the novels told you would be there?
That's the arc. We trace the historical mechanism that created the image, then look at the reversal — with Jerusalem as the case study. Because if you grew up reading certain books, the view out Daniel's window doesn't make sense. Let's fix that.
The thing that makes Daniel's question interesting is that he's not wrong about the literature. If you did an English literature curriculum in Ireland — or Britain, or the US for that matter — the city centre is basically a synonym for deprivation. Dickens gives you the London slums, Zola gives you the Parisian underclass, Orwell is literally washing dishes in a Paris hotel basement and sleeping in a dosshouse. And then you get the twentieth-century Irish canon — Angela's Ashes is set in Limerick, and the city is just this relentless backdrop of damp, hunger, and dead infants. That's what the word "urban" means in those books.
The thing is, those books don't feel like they're describing one possible version of the city. They feel like they're describing the city, full stop. The definitive account. You finish Angela's Ashes and you don't think "Limerick in a particular decade under particular economic conditions" — you think "cities are wet and hungry and babies die." The specificity gets erased.
That's exactly the mechanism. The literary power of those works is so strong that the local and the temporal gets read as universal and permanent. And then you move to Jerusalem, look out the window, and it's a thirty-seven-storey glass tower called the Knesset Tower with units starting at one point two million dollars.
The question splits into two parts. One: how did that literary association form — was it ever accurate, or was it always a selective gaze? And two: what's actually happening now, and is Jerusalem's building boom just a local anomaly or part of something bigger?
I think the second question is where it gets interesting, because you can answer the first one fairly cleanly — the association formed for real historical reasons, we'll get to those. But the second question is messier. Are we watching the literary trope become obsolete in real time, or is it just that the trope was never as universal as the canon made it seem?
That's the right frame. The canon was written in English and French, mostly, and it reflected the cities those authors lived in — London, Paris, Dublin, New York. Those cities really did hollow out their cores in the twentieth century. But if you'd grown up reading Japanese literature, or Italian, or Singaporean, you might not have the same association at all. Tokyo never abandoned its centre. Neither did Paris, not really — the wealthy arrondissements stayed wealthy. So part of what Daniel absorbed is specifically an Anglo-American story that got exported through the dominance of English-language literature.
That's worth pausing on, because the export mechanism matters. It's not just that English departments taught these books — it's that the Anglophone publishing industry became the global default for what counted as "serious literature." So a student in Dublin, a student in Mumbai, a student in Nairobi all end up reading the same syllabus: Dickens, Orwell, the Anglo-American canon. The tenement and the slum become the global literary image of city life, even in places where the actual urban pattern was completely different.
A cultural artefact disguised as a universal truth.
And now the artefact is colliding with a different reality — one where the centre is being rebuilt for people with money. The question is whether that's a reversal of the old pattern or just the unmasking of a pattern that was never truly global to begin with.
We've got three things to trace. The mechanism that created the poor inner city in the first place, the evidence that it was never a universal condition, and then the current reversal — with Jerusalem as the test case, because it's happening right in front of us.
The Jerusalem case is particularly stark because you've got this luxury building boom happening in a city where nearly half of families live below the poverty line. So it's not a simple story of "the city got rich." It's a bifurcation — towers for investors and professionals going up next to neighbourhoods that have been poor for generations.
That's the tension Daniel's living in. He's not just reading about it — he can see the cranes. And I think that's what makes the prompt feel urgent in a way a purely theoretical question wouldn't. He's watching the contradiction get built, floor by floor.
Let's go back to the mechanism. Because if you want to understand why the literary image and the current reality don't match, you have to understand what actually happened. Pre-industrial cities — we're talking before about 1820 — didn't separate rich and poor by neighbourhood. You'd have a merchant living on the second floor, a tradesman on the third, a servant in the attic, and maybe a shop on the ground floor. Vertical stacking by class, not horizontal segregation. The city centre was where everyone lived because walking was the only transport.
The poor weren't "downtown" — everyone was downtown. The rich were just higher up in the same building, which is its own kind of metaphor.
It really is. And this pattern held for centuries. If you walked through central Paris or London in 1780, you'd find wealth and poverty on the same street, often in the same structure. What changed everything was the Industrial Revolution. Factories went up in city cores, and they needed workers — enormous numbers of them. Rural populations flooded in. Landlords threw up cheap tenement housing as close to the factory gates as possible, and the result was overcrowded, unsanitary, and genuinely miserable. That's the world Dickens is describing in the 1840s and 50s — not a timeless urban condition, but a specific product of industrialization.
The numbers on that overcrowding are staggering when you look at them. Parts of London's East End in the 1880s had densities of over three hundred people per acre. Families of eight in single rooms. It wasn't just poverty — it was a complete collapse of the physical capacity of the city to house the workforce the factories demanded.
Then the people with money started looking for the exit.
Which makes sense, right? If your city centre now smells like coal smoke and industrial effluent and the streets are packed with people living six to a room, you're going to want distance.
That's the second piece. The streetcar, and later the automobile, made it possible to live miles from where you worked. So the wealthy decamped to the suburbs, leaving the polluted core to the factory workers. This accelerated massively after the Second World War. In the United States, you get the GI Bill in 1944 — federally guaranteed mortgages that overwhelmingly went to white veterans buying suburban homes. Then the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act builds the interstates straight out of city centres. It was a subsidized escape route.
Redlining made sure not everyone could follow. Can you explain how that actually worked on the ground?
The Federal Housing Administration literally drew red lines on maps around Black neighbourhoods and refused to insure mortgages there. So if you were a Black family trying to buy a home in a redlined area, no bank would give you a federally backed loan. Meanwhile, white families were getting those same loans to buy in the suburbs. Between 1934 and 1968, ninety-eight percent of FHA-backed mortgages went to white borrowers. That's not a natural market shift — that's the government picking winners and losers by race and geography. Between 1950 and 2000, the white share of US central city populations dropped from about seventy percent to forty-four percent.
The American inner city becomes poor and Black, the suburb becomes affluent and white, and the whole thing gets locked in by federal housing and highway policy. That's a very specific story. It's not gravity — it's legislation.
Then literature takes that specific story and makes it feel universal. Orwell's Down and Out in 1933, Zola's Germinal, Dickens's Bleak House — these weren't just novels, they were the books that English and French departments built curricula around. The literary gaze focused relentlessly on the most visible suffering in the most influential cities. Mayfair in London was always wealthy, the Upper East Side in New York never stopped being rich — but those neighbourhoods didn't produce the same kind of canonical literature because comfort doesn't make for compelling narrative.
Suffering writes better sentences.
And so you get generations of students — Daniel in Ireland, me in Connecticut — absorbing the idea that "city centre" and "poverty" are basically synonyms. It's a durable cultural shorthand even though it was never the full picture.
The counter-evidence is right there if you look. Paris kept its wealthy central arrondissements — the seventh and sixteenth have been affluent since the nineteenth century. Tokyo never hollowed out its core at all. Even London, for all its East End poverty, had Belgravia and Kensington sitting right there.
The "poor inner city" was strongest in the US and the UK, and even there it was geographically patchy. The literary canon flattened a complex reality into a single image — the tenement, the slum, the dosshouse. And that image travelled, because English literature travelled.
Daniel's education gave him a map that was accurate for a very narrow slice of urban history in a very narrow set of countries, and presented it as the map.
And the problem is, that map is now failing him. Because the historical pattern is reversing in a lot of cities — and Jerusalem is a perfect case study. Since roughly the two-thousands, you've seen luxury residential towers going up in city centres globally. London's Canary Wharf, New York's Hudson Yards, Dubai's Downtown, Singapore's Marina Bay. The demographic choosing city-centre living now is affluent — professionals, empty-nesters, international investors.
Jerusalem is doing the same thing, except more jarringly because the poverty baseline is so much higher.
Forty-eight percent of Jerusalem families below the poverty line as of twenty twenty-two, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research. And yet the skyline transformation that kicked off around twenty fifteen is almost entirely luxury. The Knesset Towers — thirty-seven storeys, units starting around one point two million dollars. The Holyland Tower complex. All marketed as premium living with Old City views, walking distance to the Western Wall. You've got these glass towers rising right next to Nachlaot, which has been a working-class neighbourhood for generations.
Who's buying these units? Because the math doesn't work — if half the city is below the poverty line, those people aren't buying million-dollar apartments.
Three forces at work. One, urban revitalisation policies — the municipality rezoned old industrial parcels and low-rise commercial strips for residential high-rises. Two, foreign investment — buyers from the US, France, and the UK buying second homes or pure investment properties, often sitting empty most of the year. And three, a cultural shift among younger Israelis who want walkable urban living over suburban sprawl.
It's not gentrification in the classic sense — it's not pushing out one group to make room for another in the same housing stock. It's building entirely new stock for an entirely different demographic.
That's the structural shift. And this is what makes it different from the gentrification stories people are used to. Classic gentrification is the artist moving into the working-class neighbourhood, then the coffee shop opens, then the property values rise, and the original residents get priced out of the buildings they already lived in. What's happening in Jerusalem — and in Hudson Yards, and in Nine Elms — is different. They're not renovating the old tenement. They're demolishing a warehouse or a parking lot and putting up a glass tower that was never available to the existing community in the first place. The displacement is less direct but the class re-sorting is just as real. The literary image of the poor inner-city dweller is becoming a historical artefact. What's replacing it is a bifurcated reality — luxury towers for the wealthy, while the poor get pushed to peripheral neighbourhoods or satellite towns. The city centre is no longer synonymous with poverty. It's increasingly synonymous with premium real estate.
Jerusalem makes the bifurcation more visible than almost anywhere else, because the luxury towers and the poverty are literally on the same block. You can stand on a street corner and see a glass penthouse and a family in a two-room apartment that hasn't been renovated since the British Mandate.
Hudson Yards in New York — twenty-five billion dollars, sixteen towers, median one-bedroom rent around five thousand a month. London's Nine Elms — twenty thousand new homes on former industrial land, overwhelmingly luxury. These aren't marginal projects. They're the dominant mode of new city-centre construction in global cities.
The question Daniel's really asking — is the inner city poor? — the answer is no, not anymore, and it was never as universally true as the books made it seem. What he's watching from his window is the literary trope being demolished in real time.
What do we actually do with this? If the literary canon gave us a mental map of the city that's now decades out of date, how do you update it?
First thing is just recognizing the trope when you see it. Next time you're watching a film or reading a novel and the city centre is coded as the dangerous poor neighbourhood — ask yourself whether that's a story set in nineteen-seventies New York or whether it's just a lazy cultural reflex. The "inner city equals poverty" shorthand is strongest in American and British media because it was real there — but it was real because of specific policies, not because of some law of urban physics.
Redlining, highway construction, federally subsidized mortgages that went to white suburbs. Those are choices, not inevitabilities.
They're choices that didn't happen everywhere. If you're consuming media from Tokyo or Singapore or Milan, the city centre reads completely differently. So part of what Daniel's doing — questioning the association rather than just absorbing it — is actually a useful habit. When the trope shows up, ask: which city, which decade, which policies produced this image?
It's like realizing you've been reading a very specific genre and mistaking it for documentary.
The tenement novel was a genre — a powerful one, an important one — but it was never the whole story. And now it's increasingly not even the current story.
That's the first lens — historical contingency. The second one is more practical. If you want to know what's actually happening in your own city, watch the cranes.
This is something anyone can do. Who's building new residential towers in your city centre, and who are they marketing to? Look at the sales materials. Are the renderings showing young professionals with laptops on balconies? Empty-nesters walking to the opera? Is the copy using phrases like "curated living" and "concierge services" and "panoramic views"? That's the luxury core phenomenon. The demographic that can afford those units is not the demographic the literary canon prepared you for.
If the marketing is in English and the price per square metre is higher than the city's median income — which it almost always is — you're looking at a product built for investors and global professionals, not for the people who already live in the neighbourhood.
Jerusalem's a textbook case. The Knesset Towers marketing is in English, French, and Hebrew. The website shows a couple on a balcony with a glass of wine, the Dome of the Rock glowing in the background. That's not aimed at a working-class family from Kiryat Yovel. It's aimed at a buyer in Brooklyn or Paris who wants a Jerusalem pied-à-terre.
That's a very specific kind of urban resident — the person who's buying a view of the city, not a life in it.
The pied-à-terre buyer isn't sending kids to the local school or shopping at the neighbourhood market. They're flying in for Passover and the High Holidays, and the unit sits empty the rest of the year. So the tower is technically "occupied" on the property rolls, but it's not contributing to street life or local commerce in the way a full-time resident would.
The luxury tower becomes a leading indicator. If you see them going up in your city centre, the class geography of your city is being re-sorted — and not in the direction the old novels would predict.
Here's the third thing, which is even simpler. Next time you're walking through your city centre, do a quick observational audit. Look at the new buildings and look at the old ones. Who's coming out the front door? What languages are they speaking? Are the lights on in the evening, or are half the units dark because they're investment properties nobody actually lives in?
The dark-window test. It's surprisingly informative.
It really is. In some of these Jerusalem towers, you walk past at nine p.and maybe a third of the units have lights on. The rest are owned by people who visit twice a year. That tells you something about who the city centre is being built for — and it's not the working-class tenants Daniel remembers from his earlier buildings.
The dark-window test works in any city. You can do it tonight. Walk through your downtown, count the lit windows in the new towers versus the old buildings. If the new towers are dark and the old walk-ups are lit, you're looking at an investment-driven market, not a resident-driven one.
You've got three practical lenses. One, when the poverty trope appears in media, ask which policies built it. Two, watch who the new towers are marketing to — that tells you where the city's class geography is heading. Three, walk around and actually look at who's living where. The literary image might be forty years out of date, and your own eyes will tell you that faster than any urban planning report.
None of this requires being an expert. It's just paying attention to the built environment you're already moving through. Daniel's prompt came from exactly that — he looked out his window, saw something that contradicted what his education told him, and asked the question.
The best prompts usually start that way.
Which leaves us with one final question. If the luxury tower is replacing the tenement as the defining image of the city centre, what happens to the literature? The tenement novel gave us a century of canonical work — Dickens, Zola, Orwell, all the way through to Angela's Ashes. Does the luxury tower produce its own genre?
I think it already is, just not in the form we'd recognise. The luxury tower novel, if it exists, is probably being written in Mandarin or Arabic or Russian — languages attached to the new money flowing into global city centres. The English-language canon might simply miss it for a while, the way it missed the wealthy arrondissements of Paris because suffering was more narratively compelling.
Or the luxury tower story doesn't become a novel at all. It becomes the Instagram grid, the real estate walkthrough video, the architectural rendering that never quite matches the finished building. Maybe the genre isn't literary — it's visual, and it's marketing.
That's a bleak thought. The tenement produced art. The luxury tower produces a brochure.
I'm not sure it's that simple. Someone will write the great luxury tower novel eventually — it'll just be about isolation and glass and money, rather than community and grime and hunger. Different kind of suffering.
Maybe that's already happening in pieces. You get novels now where the central relationship isn't between neighbours but between a person and the building management app on their phone. The concierge as the only human interaction. The view as the main character. It's a different kind of claustrophobia.
That's the thing — the tenement novel was about too many people in too little space. The luxury tower novel would be about too much space and no people at all. The suffering in Angela's Ashes is damp and crowded. The suffering in a Hudson Yards novel is dry and silent.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to. None of this — the luxury boom, the bifurcation, the re-sorting of who lives where — is inevitable. It runs on policy. Zoning decisions, affordable housing mandates, rent control, tax treatment of foreign investment. Jerusalem's luxury tower boom could stall tomorrow if the investment market shifts or if the political situation changes.
Or if someone in the municipality decides that maybe building exclusively for absentee owners while nearly half the city's families live in poverty isn't a sustainable urban model.
The trend looks like a structural inevitability when you're watching the cranes go up, but it's really a set of choices. And choices can be reversed. The "poor inner city" of the nineteen-seventies was also a set of choices — redlining, highway construction, suburban mortgage subsidies — and we reversed some of those, for better and for worse. Inclusionary zoning ordinances, for example, started requiring developers to include affordable units in new projects. That's a policy reversal, not a market inevitability. The luxury core is not the end of history.
The city centre has never been just one thing. It's always been a contested space — contested by class, by policy, by literature, by who gets to tell the story. The tenement novel was never the whole truth, and the luxury tower is not the whole truth either. The interesting question is who gets to write the next chapter.
Whether the people living in the shadows of those towers — in Nachlaot, in the Old City, in the neighbourhoods the marketing brochures crop out of the frame — get a voice in that chapter.
That's the question worth sitting with. If this episode changed how you see your own city centre, rate us five stars and tell a friend. It helps more than you'd think.
Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts.
I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back next week with whatever Daniel sends us.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: During the high medieval period, the granitic seamounts of the Seychelles microcontinent contained feldspar crystals with anomalously high barium concentrations — up to seven percent by weight — making them chemically distinct from any continental granite known at the time.
...right.
