Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis - Paperback

by Patrick Condon (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.