Broken City - by Patrick Condon (Paperback)

About the Book

"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."--

Book Synopsis

Analyzes the skyrocketing urban land prices driving our global housing market.

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon in Broken City, 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. For example, in Vancouver, land prices increased by six hundred percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In this engaging, readable, and insightful treatise, Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good and proposes bold strategies for how cities in North America can shift it back.

Review Quotes

One of The Hill Times' Top 100 Best Books in 2024-- "The Hill Times"

"Condon offers what a modern tax on land value could do instead and how city-wide zoning approaches used in Portland or implementing an affordable housing overlay district in Cambridge, Massachusetts are models for moving forward. Armed with these case studies and a critical analysis of the problem, we are ready to address the role that land value plays--and undo it--to create a better future for our cities today."-- "City Watch"

"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"

"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"

About the Author

Patrick M. Condon teaches in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia and has forty years of experience in the art and science of sustainable urban design. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.