Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis
by Patrick Condon (UBC Press $32.95)

(BCBW 2024)

With 40 years of experience in sustainable urban design, UBC architecture and planning professor Patrick Condon has watched housing prices skyrocket out of affordability for an increasing number of people.

In Broken City, due out in May, Condon says the economic link between local wages and housing is broken. In Canada, many immigrants, racialized minorities, young people and service workers are prevented from joining the middle classes as they cannot build wealth through home ownership because they can’t afford it. Wages for workers, adjusted for inflation, have stayed flat, while housing costs multiplied—a trend seen across the English-speaking world. Condon argues that the 1% who today own 20% of national income (up from 10% in the 1980s) are the small minority who can most afford to buy property and, therefore, are the biggest beneficiaries of the housing crisis.

In the following excerpt, Condon writes of a period when Vancouver found a way to remain a truly livable place as the City bargained with developers to take back a healthy portion of the increase in land values when land was rezoned for much higher density (which added vast new amounts of value to the land that buildings are erected upon—in the business, called “land lift”). This money was then used for amenities such as community centres, daycare, parks and, most importantly, affordable housing. It worked … at least for a while. 9780774869553

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Edited by Patrick M. Condon and Jackie Teed for the Design Centre for Sustainability at UBC, Sustainability by Design: A Vision for a Region of 4 Million (New Society, 2007) examines the implications of demographic changes as Vancouver doubles its population in the next fifty years, resulting in a 250% increase in the number of citizens older than 65.

[BCBW 2007] "Sociology"