On January 16, 2025, Vancouver Urban Planner, Patrick Condon, published an essay titled "Why Is Vancouver So Insanely Expensive in the journal essay in Macleans HERE. He is the author of numerous books, including the important 2024 volume, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis.
Patrick Condon, is a local Massachusetts treasure. A graduate of U. Mass. Amherst, he was the former Director of Community Development of Westfield, Mass, before moving to Vancouver BC to become Director of the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Vancouver, focusing his attention on sustainable development principles. This blog post, which we have titled "Dirt, " reproduces segments of Condon's important January 16, 2025 article. We urge people to purchase and read Condon's important book, Broken Cities, among others. We urge people to support their local book stories, but also provide an Amazon link; HERE He subtitles his Jan. 16, 2025 essay: "The city has built homes faster than any other in North America, but it’s still the priciest place to live on the continent." Why? He asks, and provides important answers: "Politicians and pundits often blame Canada’s housing crisis on a simple problem of supply and demand: housing prices are high because not enough new housing is being built for the people who want to live there. But something weird is happening in the city of Vancouver [clip]. The city has built homes faster than any other in North America, but it’s still the priciest place to live on the continent….Why? Because the problem isn’t just about how much housing we build….The more density a city allows, the more lucrative its land becomes for those in the business of buying and selling urban property. And those speculative gains do not trickle down to renters or homebuyers. They fatten the pockets of landowners and developers. So what can we do? In the 1980s and ’90s, the city upzoned its neighbourhoods and added thousands of new units…. [They] claimed a significant portion—up to 80 per cent—of that new value through taxes and development fees, which lowered the profits of land owners….[who] still reaped substantial profits as their property values soared far beyond pre-rezoning levels. But the public also benefitted…parks, schools, affordable housing and transit, as well as non-market housing. Taxing newly created land values [is] known as 'land value capture'…. In our panic to address the affordable housing crisis, we are moving away from taxing new land value created by upzoning, leaving billions in the already overstuffed pockets of urban land speculators. [clip] Policymakers must recognize that housing affordability is not simply a matter of supply and demand in the abstract; it’s about who controls and benefits from the value of urban land….[W]e must implement policies like taxes and development fees that capture the lion’s share of private land value increases. We should then use the revenue generated to build co-operative housing, land trusts, and other non-market models that remove housing from speculative pressures. Finally, we must move beyond the blame game that pits so-called NIMBYs against YIMBYs and frames local democracy as an obstacle to progress. Local residents and their elected officials are not enemies of affordability; they are essential partners in crafting sustainable, inclusive urban policies. The real barriers to affordable housing are not neighbourhood activists but systemic forces: unchecked speculation, inequitable land policies and a political culture that prioritizes short-term profits over long-term social well-being."
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