I would say the precedent is more to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land - nothing about the Tower of Babel was meant to house anyone or be self-contained, it was merely a ladder to the heavens.
It's not canon, but in Ted Chiang's short story about the tower of Babel. The tower was perpetually in construction, so a whole society eventually flourished in the tower.
Some people never even left the tower because it took too long to get down from the place they were born.