Sick City

Sick City is a thoughtful reflection on the crisis that has been eating away our cities, the pandemic, but that has also brought the issues of race, inequality and unaffordability to the forefront. Patrick Condon has done a terrific job of walking the reader through history and proving that most of these problems are rooted in the inflation of urban land value, no longer priced for its value for housing but as a class in the global market hungry for assets of all kinds. The common man who is most affected by COVID is also the worst hit by the surging price of urban land which has made the essential commodity of housing inaccessible. Since the 1960’s, expanding North American metropolitan regions and rising urban land prices have resulted in a segregation of mid to lower income classes by forcing them to move away from the jobs-rich districts. This has put immense pressure on the governments, leading to expensive tax payer investments into highways and public transit systems to help ...