Overview

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In just one city, Vancouver, land prices increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In this engaging, readable, and clearly reasoned treatise, Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good – and proposes bold strategies that cities in North America could use to shift it back.

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9780774869553

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Reviews

"""….readable, provocative, and satisfying…"" -- Setha Low, The Planning Report ""Prof. Condon sees high urban land value as the underlying culprit, a fact that has increased the equity of homeowners, who represent around 65 per cent of Canadians. The point he is making is evident to anyone who has reviewed their home assessment – that the land is much more valuable than the home that sits on it."" -- Kerry Gold * Globe and Mail *"

"""This is an excellent book on an essential topic - the hyper-financialization of urban land - that is well-written and straightforward. The work is provocative but well-reasoned, and follows with practical policies.""-- ""Emily Talen, author of Neighborhood and City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form"" ""In most major cities, the value of land now far exceeds the value of the buildings on it. The price of dirt has inflated so drastically that buying or renting homes has jumped out of reach of ordinary wage earners, creating severe inequality and more. The myriad repercussions of inflated land prices are spelled out in clear, painful detail in a new book by University of B.C. architectural school professor Patrick Condon, titled Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis.""-- ""Vancouver Sun"" ""The old neo-liberal economic theory that deregulation will solve the problem of unaffordable housing is being contradicted by reality, with ugly consequences for social cohesion, mental health, urban vitality, and politics. New thinking and experiments with effective solutions addressing the problem - like those presented in Broken City - are urgently needed.""-- ""Robert Liberty, planning consultant"" ""There couldn't be a more urgent problem for cities than housing affordability, and there couldn't be a more welcome or well-targeted book than Patrick Condon's Broken City. With calm and thorough logic, he walks us through the thicket of misinformation and misconceptions, to show where the overlooked truths still lie: obscured by distorted land tax policy, and the stubborn persistence of obsolete supply-side dogma. Critics might miss his point that, yes, supply is a factor, but housing cost is the result of multiple factors, and there is no silver bullet. What we might need is something more like 'silver buckshot' - which he describes here in refreshing detail, from zoning reforms, to innovative funding approaches, to land use and the economics of sprawl. You needn't think his argument is gospel to find this a very welcome new take on one of the central urban issues of our time."" -- ""Michael W. Mehaffy, Ph.D., executive director, International Making Cities Livable"""

"""….readable, provocative, and satisfying…"" -- Setha Low, The Planning Report"

Author Information

Patrick M. Condon is a professional city planner, teacher, and researcher with over forty years of experience in sustainable urban design. Patrick has taught in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia since 1992. He is the author of three previous books, including Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities and Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities. A pioneer of public engagement, Patrick understands collaboration as a fundamental part of designing sustainable communities. He has successfully focused attention on strategies for inspiring systemic change in city-building and operations, notably in the East Clayton project in Surrey, British Columbia. More recently, he and his research partners collaborated with the City of North Vancouver to produce a 100-year plan to make the city carbon-neutral by 2107. Patrick and his partners’ work received the Canadian Institute of Planners Award for Planning Excellence and the BC Union of Municipalities Award of Excellence. Patrick Condon lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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