Bøker av Patrick Condon

Broken City argues that skyrocketing urban land prices drive our global housing market failure - so, how did we get here, and what can be done about it?

The challenge for the fall 2019 UBC SALA Masters of Urban Design cohort was to envision a City of Vancouver with two of its biggest problems solved. The first: absorbing the increase in population projected by the year 2070. The second: insuring that people who worked in Vancouver and wanted to live in Vancouver could afford to do so.To start this effort, students provided an in depth analysis into the land economics, ecology, morphology and history of the city. The students were split up in 3 teams of 5 members each where they took on this research to inform their further work.The next stage involved the collaborative creation of a framework plan for the city. The city was divided into 6 quadrants. Teams of 3 or 4 students provided a conceptual land use and transportation plan for each of these six quadrants. A major aim was to patch up the city-wide frequent transit network and create an interconnected green-blue network (linking the open green and civic spaces).In the third exercise each of the 15 students focused on a 6-8 block area to explore in great detail how to solve, at thesite scale, the project goals. Each student took up aspects of the bigger plan and implemented them in their work.The outcome was a set of practical and affordable solutions that could easily be adapted and deployed in any part of the city and would eventually lead to an affordable and sustainable city.

The challenge for the fall 2021 UBC SALA Masters of Urban Design cohort was to envision a City of Vancouver with two of its biggest problems solved. The first: absorbing the increase in population projected by the year 2070. The second: ensuring that people who worked in Vancouver and wanted to live in Vancouver could afford to do so...

Sick City is a call to action prompted by the crisis that crippled our cities, the pandemic. But the pandemic has brought the issues of race, inequality and unaffordability to the forefront as well, illustrating how all of these ills can be traced to unequal access to urban land. Patrick Condon walks the reader through that history, proving that most of these problems are rooted in the inflation of urban land value - land that is no longer priced for its value for housing but as an asset class in a global market hungry for assets of all kinds. The American wage earner 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 increasingly inaccessible.Not only does Condon dive deep into myriad and credible references to prove these points, but he also wraps up the conversation with some eminently practical and widely 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.