Wait, You Have a Backyard?!

Gotta say, after being handed two books with the titles The Joy Experiments: Reimagining Mid‑sized Cities to Heal Our Divided Society and Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis, I had to admire my editor’s effort to force me to confront the galaxy-wide spectrum of human emotion related to one of Canada’s favourite topics: Why are our cities and the state of our housing so messed up, and what can be done about it? On the one hand, “joy” (a term the authors chose long before Kamala Harris memed it). On the other hand, “broken” (used by a writer whose previous book, from late 2020, was Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land). But it turns out that the authors of these very different works share a common perspective. Scott Higgins, president of HIP Developments in Cambridge, Ontario, Paul Kalbfleisch, a creative director, and Patrick Condon, a University of British Columbia professor of landscape architecture, are all more than alarmed about the way housing markets (and, as a result, cities) have been contorted by modern trends.

“Shitty capitalism,” the blunt phrase that Higgins and Kalbfleisch use, has wrecked many cities as big global firms that are devoted to efficiency and maximum profit have wiped out smaller, local businesses, then sent off the extracted revenue to corporate head offices far away. The current housing situation is a crisis “that grips almost every city in North America,” they write, one with “roots in the widening gap between haves and have‑nots, the globalization of our economy, the fact that our homes have become the primary investment vehicle for most citizens, and the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) movement.” Condon, who spends many more words outlining housing dysfunction in several countries, emphasizes how markets — distorted by bad government policies that favour homeowners and their equity and warped by speculative activity, profit-oriented construction, and the segregation of the wealthy and the poor — have led to inequality, health problems among those forced into crowded housing, and untenable outcomes.

From there, the solutions diverge sharply. Higgins and Kalbfleisch highlight community-building projects they have developed in the Ontario region of Waterloo, along with examples from other cities, primarily in the United States and Canada, that aim to create connections among residents. Interactive art installations, cycling expeditions, murals and art spaces, and overpass parks are just a few of the initiatives they include. I should note that their book makes for a pleasant reading experience, very suited to those whose brains have been short-circuited by social media and are unable to focus for more than five minutes. It’s composed of bits and pieces: interesting illustrations, quickie descriptions of successful “joy experiments,” short essays, and Q & As, plus lots of colour. It’s a different universe over in Condon’s broken city, which is a policy- and citation-heavy look at the very complex question of how governments can shape housing markets to better serve all of their citizens, not just the increasingly elite group of homeowners with equity.

I’ve been talking to Patrick Condon on and off almost since I began covering the housing development/homelessness/urban policy beat thirty years ago. When I first got to know him, he and some of his UBC students were involved in helping Surrey plan a new kind of suburban neighbourhood, one that would be much denser than the norm, with townhouses and rental suites and with less land given over to gigantic streets and more to green space.

When he started writing books, beginning with Sustainable Urban Landscapes, from 2002, he examined ideas not that far removed in aspirations from those of the Joy Experiments team. Published in early 2020, his Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities mainly emphasized how communities can use design to tackle emerging issues like climate change, the disappearance of the middle class, and explosive urban sprawl. But somewhere along the way, Condon became a serious critic of the financial side of housing development, arguing that the tool most cities have used when trying desperately to lower housing costs — rezoning land for greater density and often allowing smaller homes than were normal in the past — is accomplishing nothing. Basically, that’s because increasing density just raises the cost of land that has been rezoned and doesn’t actually result in housing with a lower cost per square foot.

That preoccupation, which dominated Sick City as it does Broken City, led him to run for mayor of Vancouver in 2018, before he bowed out for health reasons. Now he’s one of the major flag-bearers for the anti-developer, anti-development, anti-density, anti-most-current-city-housing-policies faction in this very polarized place. Condon regularly reiterates his base position on social media and on the news. “No other NA centre city built more infill housing, relative to population, than Vancouver,” he wrote on X in early September. “If adding new infill housing lowers prices, why does Vancouver have NA highest housing costs.”

Condon is a patron saint for the group that believes Vancouver is being destroyed by all the high-density developments (as it happens these days, many of them Indigenous-led) and just-build-more-supply policies in the city and province. Many see him as a prescient guru, a champion in bucking current conventional wisdom on how to solve the housing crisis. At the same time, he has variously exasperated, enraged, or baffled local builders and active Yes in My Back Yard housing advocates, who repeatedly insist that Condon doesn’t seem to understand math or financials; that he has never talked to an actual builder to test any of his theoretical calculations on how affordable housing could be achieved; that he misrepresents the Vancouver situation by focusing on the amount of supply added only in the central city, instead of the whole region, which has grown by 1.1 million people since 1990; and that he comes up with wildly unrealistic solutions given the actual facts of contemporary North American politics.

So I expected hundreds of pages of non‑stop polemic. But this book isn’t that at all. Instead, Condon starts by going through a lot of basics about housing policy and outcomes that many in the YIMBY camp would likely agree with. He points out that large lot sizes in the U.S. were instituted as a way to keep poor (mainly Black) families from buying homes. He notes that landowners have become so wealthy through rising prices caused by shortages that they are opposed to any political efforts that might cause those prices to decline. He questions why land value increases are taxed at a much lower rate than income or even capital gains.

Condon spends a whole chapter on Henry George, the nineteenth-century political economist who is much beloved by housing economics wonks for his thesis that the value of land is something created by the community where it sits — and that this value should go back to the community. That could be through a higher tax on the land than on buildings (particularly relevant in Vancouver, where the land often represents 90 percent or more of a property’s assessed value). Or it could be through some other mechanism that allows the community, rather than all the individual home sellers, to reap the profit that is created when land gains in value because it exists in the middle of a city that has invested in good schools, parks, community centres, public safety, and all the other things that support thriving urban life. (Several years ago, I received support to attend a seminar at Harvard University that was organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which is dedicated to exploring and amplifying Henry George’s ideas.)

Condon also presents a concise summary for the TL;DR crowd of the various policies that have been tried in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as they’ve wobbled between heavy government intervention in housing supply (outright investment, tax policies to encourage apartment construction, supports for non-profit and co‑op models, light versions of George’s land value tax idea) and other measures aimed at facilitating the market to just build more and more, with perhaps some density bonuses in exchange for small amounts of housing that could be sold or rented at below-market rates.

In Broken City, Condon acknowledges that some theoretically ideal solutions are not going to fly, because suddenly putting in place a big land value tax is not politically viable: “A clear majority of citizens throughout the English-speaking world own at least some small share of urban land and thus are now disinclined to support a 1,000 percent increase in their property tax.” That pragmatic take seems more grounded in reality than a proposal Condon made while campaigning for mayor: that properties along the planned Broadway subway line should all be zoned for co‑ops, a massive downzoning that surely would provoke a minor civil war if enacted. But when Condon starts setting out his own calculations on how to produce cheap, affordable housing, and when he lays out his preferred policy solutions, things take a sharp turn away from those who proclaim that one of the main solutions to the current state of housing unaffordability is to simply build a lot more. That’s where I’m left with questions that I had hoped would be answered.

Condon makes no effort to address the oft repeated statistics from both Canadian and American economists and analysts showing that one major reason for today’s housing crisis is that both countries have been unable to replicate the level of home construction seen in the postwar years, even as populations have soared. He never takes on the YIMBY argument that housing production slowed because established residents in almost every city, powered up by the anti-development, anti-government sentiments of the 1970s, threw obstacles in the way of any serious efforts to increase supply. He simply asserts his own thesis: “that the housing crisis is not caused by an impeded supply of homes but by the asset value of the land below them.” He does not grapple with whether a shortage of available land to develop might be the reason for that ever-increasing land cost. And he cites only one person from the housing supply camp, the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, mainly to dismiss the idea that land prices would moderate if all controls on land development were removed — a pretty far‑out proposition that you don’t see any pro-supply politician actually endorsing. Instead, Condon leans on analysts who support his kinds of housing ideas.

Another point Condon makes frequently is that rezoning for higher density without putting in a mechanism for the government to capture some of the land lift just results in higher land prices. That is true. When land is rezoned so that two families or forty families or a hundred families can live on it, it ends up being purchased by developers for much more than if it were a single-family house. But the resulting housing does mean that each household gets to pay less for land, even with the increased price. On my street, for example, a neighbour on one side has a single-family house. The land is assessed at just over $2 million, the house at $195,000 (it’s old). On the other side are two families in two ten-year-old duplexes that are each assessed at almost the same value as the single-family house. But their land cost is only $1.34 million apiece: they saved almost $500,000 each by not being forced to buy large pieces of property surrounding their homes.

Condon takes the position that Vancouver did a better job than most at capturing the increased value that comes when land is rezoned. But he also argues that the city proves the case that adding density doesn’t produce affordability. “Vancouver,” he writes, has “done more than any other metro area in North America to capitalize on the engine of its rapid development to deliver social benefits.” He notes that city planners aimed to capture 80 percent of the increased value of land due to a rezoning by having developers put that money back into social amenities. And he constantly claims that Vancouver added more housing than any other city in North America in the last thirty years but still ended up with the least affordable stock. So I’m left wondering: If the planners here did such a good job of capturing land lift for so long, as he says, how is it that we still have the worst house prices?

Finally, Condon praises two cities with policies that build on the idea of keeping land costs suppressed through other policy mechanisms. Interestingly, they are two cities that have chosen the mechanism most available in Canada and the U.S., one that many city planners have tried: providing permission to build more and bigger in exchange for some affordable housing. One is Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the city council voted in 2020 for the Affordable Housing Overlay. That policy allows owners or developers to build higher and denser — double the square footage that is normally allowed — as long as every new apartment is affordable to people who are making 80 percent or less of the area’s median income. The other is Portland, Oregon, where that city’s council, also in 2020, passed a policy allowing any residential owner or developer to build up to six units on a formerly single-family lot with the proviso that, if they do build six, three have to be permanently affordable to people making 60 percent or less of the city’s median income.

But I did a quick check, and neither approach seems to have produced a housing revolution. In Portland (population 635,000), only two sixplexes are currently going through the permitting process (with another fifteen apparently somewhere “in the pipeline”). In Cambridge (population 118,500), there are 727 units in eight projects going through the approvals process, according to a February 2024 summary by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The policy has been tweaked in the intervening years to add even more density and to loosen the price restrictions a bit (the affordability limit now extends to anyone making up to 100 percent of the local median income), to make construction financially feasible for the mostly non-profit developers. As a Joint Center analyst noted, the 700-some units are better than just fifty or sixty social housing units a year, but “numerous obstacles and challenges remain.” Needless to say, home prices and rents appear to be unchanged at this point, in spite of the efforts.

The results in Portland and Cambridge, along with various mechanisms tried in the Metro Vancouver region, show that it’s a very finicky calculation to get affordable housing to work. Both Vancouver and Burnaby have recently seen developers withdraw from projects where they were going to be given extra density in return for some below-market apartments, saying that the requirements were so onerous that they weren’t financially feasible, even with height and density bonuses.

Since Condon seems to be hugely invested in this topic, turning out two books in three years along with a proliferation of essays and social media opining, he might direct some of his energy toward examining in more detail how various other governments are working to find the right formula in the density/affordability equation. In the meantime, it would be lovely if the authors of these two books, who identify similar problems but concentrate on wildly different projects, could join up in some fashion. Imagine if the three worked on community initiatives aimed at getting people together in a non-polarized, constructive way to talk about how to create more affordable housing. They could design collaborative exercises for building political consensus, to at least minimize the huge inequities that exist in today’s housing market, especially between the older and younger generations. Their next book could be called Exploring Joyful Ways to Create Healthy, Unbroken Cities. I can hardly wait.