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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-1...

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 ...

Preface describing this book and why it is being freely distributed.

When, in the winter of 2020, the pandemic struck, I had just released a book named Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities. In that book none of the following words can be found: disease, plague, pandemic, communicability or virus. So much for my skills with a crystal ball. Then all my classes went on line. Then the lockdown. Faced with nothing but time to sit on my couch, and as frustrated and despondent as the rest of the world, I decided to write another book right away. And even though my academic career was largely focused in Canada, this book would be entirely focused on the USA, where I am from. Prior to this time I was sure that at the age of 70 I was done with writing books. That Five Rules was my last kick at the can, so to speak. Well, the pandemic intervened. Very soon it became clear to me that the pandemic was making the inequalities of the American political economy all the more glaring, and that my 40 years of exploring how urban design intersected with ecological, social, and...

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