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 people commute to work.

The author shows through various well-researched sources that it would be much cheaper for governments to intervene in the housing markets, a resolution that was made unpopular in the Reagan-Thatcher era.

The capital value of urban land has shot up so much in the past few decades that it is the determining factor of what developers can build on it and what politicians and planners can allow for. And so, Professor Condon suggests, if we can organize our taxing, policy and governmental strategies to extract a big chunk of the capital away from the pockets of land speculators and use it to support non-market housing, we’d not only be reducing the demand for transportation, but also helping solve the ongoing housing crisis.

Not only does this book dive deep into the statistics around America to prove these points, but it also wraps up the conversation with some practical and precedented policy actions that municipalities can enact - policy tools to establish housing justice at the same time slow the flow of land value increases into the pockets of land speculators.

Review by Kaenat Seth.