Patrick Condon was once what they now call a Yimby. A landscape architect, urban planner, and professor at the University of British Columbia, he worked with hundreds of others to build a sustainable, affordable city in Vancouver, BC.
For years, Vancouver was a case study for city planning. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association used to take local officials on tours of the Canadian city, talking about the “slender towers” and grand amenities that they said come with orderly but aggressive growth.
In fact, Condon told me, Vancouver has allowed and seen built more new housing compared to its population than any other city in North America. And it was all what’s known as “infill housing,” not suburban sprawl.
So, if the Yimby doctrine is right, and removing “obstacles” to growth and adding more infill housing results in prices coming down, Vancouver “ought to be the most affordable city in North America,” Condon said.
Except it’s not; it’s the most expensive. He has 30 years of solid data: The Yimby approach didn’t work. It backfired.
Condon came to San Francisco this weekend to address a crowd of at least 200 in an event planned by Neighbors and Communities United, which is organizing against the attempt by Mayor London Breed and her allies to upzone commercial corridors to eight stories.
That prospect has all kinds of downsides: Since it will only work if there’s massive demolitions of existing buildings in those areas and the displacement of rent-controlled tenants and small businesses.
But the mayor and the Yimbys say it’s worth risking, because the affordable housing crisis can only be solved with tens of thousands of new units of housing, including market-rate housing.
State Sen. Scott Wiener is among those who have authored, and won, legislation requiring cities to eliminate neighborhood notifications, streamline the planning process, and make it cheaper for developers to build more and more housing.
Condon told the audience that he once believed that was true. Now, he realizes it was a total failure.
“If your only reason to give up land rights is affordability,” he said, “you are in for a big disappointment.”
Condon, the author of a new book called “Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and the Urban Crisis,” said that upzoing increases the value, and thus the price, of land, and that global speculative capital, not Nimbys, is the force making housing so expensive.
“It’s about the price of urban land, and how is absorbs all of our good work.”
In Vancouver, he said, “we have tripled the housing stock since 1970. If there’s a case where adding supply should mean cheaper housing, the median price of housing compared to income has increased by 600 percent.”
This is all happening at a time when, as the economist Thomas Piketty notes, the economy is moving from one based on jobs and income to one based on assets. The rich make more money from existing wealth and investments than they, or any of the rest of us, can make from job-based wages.
Urban land as a speculative asset makes perfect sense for global capital, he said. “In markets like San Francisco, you have a guaranteed return of about 8 percent a year. You can’t lose money investing in land in Vancouver.”
Condon said that it’s essential for cities to recognize that upzoning land is a huge giveaway to property owners—it can double or triple the value of the land—and that the city needs to recapture some of that increased wealth by taxing it. The tax can come in the form of mandatory fees that consider the added value and make sure that the community gets its share.
Sup. Aaron Peskin, who joined Condon for a discussion after the talk, noted that “the industry that does not want this has created a narrative that says if you insist on affordable housing you don’t want any housing at all … opposing that means standing up to the real estate industry.”
We met with Condon over lunch before his talk. From our interview:
48HILLS: You have said in interviews that you wrote this book in anger after seeing all the claims about density creating affordability turn out to be false.
PATRICK CONDON: I wrote in a cold fury that came from a life of disappointment. I have been working to create sustainable, affordable communities, and I was among those who believed that adding a lot of different types of housing would bring us affordability. Our efforts were to create more affordable housing, and Vancouver has seen the most residential development in the past 30 years of any city in North America. And it’s correlated with the highest housing prices in North America.
48HILLS: So why is that happening? What went wrong?
PATRICK CONDON: You have to understand the shift we are seeing from a wage-based economy to an assets-based economy. And shelter is the major asset globally.
We’re seeing a free flow of money globally, and if you park money in some places—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver—you know you’re going to see your asset increase by 8 percent a year.
People don’t own land; they own certain rights to land. The government gives those rights, and with upzoning now, the government is giving away rights. You double the allowable density of land, and you give the owner of that land tremendous increased value.
48HILLS: So what do we do about it?
PATRICK CONDON: One way is to tax what we call the “land lift.” In Vancouver, we used to tax 80 percent of the increase in land value due to upzoning.
48HILLS: This all seems so clear and obvious, and the data you are presenting is so compelling. Why is the Yimby movement still dominating the discussion?
PATRICK CONDON: All of these smart people who don’t see this, it’s almost like they have been attacked by some sort of brain worm, and something that’s so obvious has been totally obscured.
Full disclosure: Both of my kids work for the Peskin for Mayor campaign.
