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on September 23, 2020

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‘Sick City’: What the Pandemic Tells Us about Our Housing Crisis by David Beers, The Tyee

Patrick Condon looks at those hit hardest by the pandemic and concludes, as have many others, that COVID-19 has starkly exposed and exploited inequalities in our society. Essential workers, many of them immigrants, risking their health often for minimum wage, are bearing the brunt. And their exposure to the virus puts others at risk, most dramatically the elderly in long-term care. But Condon takes his analysis a level deeper . Underlying this map of inequity is one key factor -- the cost of land. Where land spirals upwards in value, housing, no matter how efficiently constructed, can’t be made affordable if left to market forces. And so, as the title of his book signals, there’s a recipe for sickness in how we zone, tax and otherwise regulate our city-building. Interconnected are “disease, race, inequality and urban land.” Condon, a professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia, dived into writing his latest book a few months into the arrival of COVID-19 to his

Urban Design, Social Equity and Urban Land Value. Draft book chapter.

Urban Design, Social Equity and Urban Land Value. By Professor Patrick M. Condon. (those who prefer pdf click here ) INTRODUCTION Housing affordability has reached the crisis stage and urbanists can no longer escape responsibility for understanding how their actions may impede or enhance access to secure affordable housing. This chapter introduces readers to what is unique about this historical moment, why former strategies for mixed income urban design strategies may no longer be adequate, and what practices have been taken up recently to address this problem. What is happening. During the past two decades the asset value of urban land has skyrocketed. In the USA the urban land price collapse of 2008 has been reversed with urban land prices far above what they were in the pre-collapse “bubble” year of 2006. The jobs rich coastal cities (e.g. Boston, Washington DC., San Francisco, and Los Angles) have seen urban land price increases of over 400 percent [1] in many district

Book Review of SICK CITY : Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land

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

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