I listened to the latest live stream of the SGU[1]. One of the things they do there is debunk non-sense videos people post but in an interesting and informative way. I'd like to use this to further discuss economics of cemeteries, and specifically those in #Israel .

Someone posted a such a nonsense "theory" about how come there are no new cemeteries in the US (spoiler: this is wrong). So in the short discussion they raised some points:

Land used by cemeteries needs to be close to cities, and therefore is expensive, as it replaces buildings. Therefore, cemeteries have been using the same land more efficiently: use parts that were previously unused, bury more people in the same space, and such. And of course: cremation greatly reduces the space requirements.

And this is why there are way fewer new cemeteries built in the US.

The points above are the ones raised in the show, that I'm just repeating. I'm not as familiar with what's happening in the US. I do know what's happening in Israel. Because it gives an interesting perspective.

In Israel cemeteries are run by non-profits, almost all of them are run by religious institutions. The Jewish ones are called חברא קדישא (Hevra Kadish, literally, "a holy soceity"). Each such non-profit maintains the cemetery. It is funded by payments people pay for new burials. But they have to keep maintaining the cemetery for eternity.

In practice cemeteries do fill up and new ones need to be built. This is a serious issue in the larger cities. Cremation is not socially acceptable by most people. It is also more expensive than other alternatives.

And the price matters here. Decent burial is considered a basic human right and therefore Social Security covers basic costs of burial. The cemetery non-profits still make money from selling pre-allocated plots (for those who want to buried next to their partner, or people who want to be buried near a holy guy).

Any form of more burial that has more graves per area, e.g.: a tower of graves, is way more expensive to maintain, and therefore costs more, even per single grave. Therefore those non-profits prefer to continue using the "good old" single-graves burial. And as it happens, some of them have quite some political power.

There is more to it, but suffice it to safe that land for graves is one of the long-term issues in Israel that will not be solved unless Someone does Something about it:
https://library.mevaker.gov.il/sites/DigitalLibrary/Documents/2024/2024.05/EN/2024-05-205-Burial-Taktzir-EN.pdf

[1] Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ . Besides the regular weekly podcast they also have a more casual weekly chat that they stream live on Youtube and also release to their RSS feed.