Everyone simply assumes that housing costs too much because there is not enough "supply". But Vancouver is the living proof thats not true. And yet, UDI speaks, the NDP listens.

cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/c...

Extracting 10 percent more each year out of renters who on average increase their income by only 3 percent is not an avenue that gets you to affordability - sadly.

That too

The Big Real Estate Q: If We Need More Housing, Why Can't We Just Build It? - Vancouver Magazine The refrain that Vancouver needs more housing supply goes back at least […]

www.vanmag.com/city/real-es...

Condon supports the taxing of landowners for the “land lift,” or increased value of land due to rezoning, and using the money for social benefit. In his book, Broken City, the message is not to wish for enough affordability after an upzone, but instead to insist on it

www.velj.org/uploads/1/2/...

Detailed study that shows zoning is not the reason why housing costs too much. Other things are at fault.

M comments on the Vancouver Broadway plan last night to council.

“you sadly increase the market cost of the ‘land price residual.’ That puts money that would have gone to public benefit into the pocket of the land speculator.”

The 'uglification' of Metro Vancouver quickens with mass upzoning Douglas Todd: Politicians are asking tower developers for fewer aesthetic features, community amenities. Residents lose, prices don’t fall.

vancouversun.com/opinion/colu...

"When the city and province reduce expectations that highrise developers have to contribute to the public good through such things as attractive design and green spaces, Condon said,

Book Review — Broken City: Land Speculation. Inequality, and Urban Crisis (By Dr. Francis K. Peddle) — Common Wealth Canada Broken City: Land Speculation. Inequality, and Urban Crisis - Professor Patrick M. Condon Vancouver: UBC Press, The University of British Columbia: 2024, 273, xiii  https://www.ubcpress.ca/brok...

www.commonwealth.ca/blog/broken-...

Book Review — Broken City: Land Speculation. Inequality, and Urban Crisis (By Dr. Francis K. Peddle) — Common Wealth Canada Broken City: Land Speculation. Inequality, and Urban Crisis - Professor Patrick M. Condon Vancouver: UBC Press, The University of British Columbia: 2024, 273, xiii  https://www.ubcpress.ca/brok...

Book review of Broken City. Thank you Francis.
"Broken City, though it leans towards realistic city-wide zoning approaches to combat the immediate crisis in housing and to restrain the seemingly inexorable rise in urban land prices"
www.commonwealth.ca/blog/broken-...

Visualizing the Broadway Plan Amendments build-out with our own 3D model (Staff recommendations likely going to Council Dec 11) How do the proposed Broadway Plan Amendments appear in a build-out scenario? Since it’s highly unlikely that Vancouver planners have any intention of showing you (or even City Council), we&#8…

This is not urbanism

cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2024/11/25/v...

1 pm community open air discussion tomorrow - city hall park - about the Broadway Plan. I have comments to make. Hope to see you there. Bring an umbrella!

This is an illusion, one that leads us away from the thoughtful urban planning traditions that have shaped our city for the better.

Friends and neighbors,
We find ourselves with a plan motivated by a falsehood—an unsupported belief that removing planning and development controls for new market rental towers along the Broadway corridor will lower rents.

When Care Becomes Control: The Hidden Violence of Urban Planning - Spacing Vancouver It seems to us that this connection—or better perhaps, confusion—between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recre...

Some deep thoughts from Erick Villagomez on the perils of "urban renewal" thinking

spacing.ca/vancouver/20...

Wait, You Have a Backyard?! | Literary Review of Canada Frances Bula reviews "Broken City" by Patrick Condon and "The Joy Experiments" by Scott Higgins and Paul Kalbfleisch.

A surprisingly charitable review of Broken City by Frances Bula.

reviewcanada.ca/magazine/202...

Revisit this plan and continue building the best modern city in North America.
Revisit this plan.

This is the opposite of planning and exhibits a maddeningly ignorant view of the way this urban land market works, and how we might capitalize on the strength of this vibrant urban land market to meet our social ends.

Revisit this plan. No one here is opposed to adding new residential density in the numbers anticipated. What is objected to is the narrow mindedness of this brutal non planning approach.

It wont, it will just make land speculators richer.

And yet this city and province are doing the opposite: they are removing zoning controls, removing land lift taxes, removing betterment fees, adhering blindly to the false premise that this will make housing more affordable.

Other cities are using these tools to secure 50% or more permanently affordable housing as a required feature of their plans.

- benefits such as parks, municipal infrastructure, and the social benefit we most need, affordable housing.

Tragically, the city is now intent on eliminating all planning controls - controls which if used intelligently as they have been used in the past, could shift a major portion of the increased real estate values spawned by the plan to be directed into social benefits

But the housing market can be leveraged to 'do the right thing" if the city uses the tools that it already has at its disposal: intelligent pro affordability zoning bylaws and development controls.

What then is to be done. First the market assumptions informing the plan must be challenged by the on the ground reality of how this housing market works. This housing market will never build affordable housing. The unfettered market only builds housing in areas where housing prices are going up.

Heartbreaking

The Broadway plan is thus critically flawed by its expressed faith in the ability of an unfettered housing market to meet our common desire for affordable housing - housing for our sons and daughters and the service workers who make this city run. We did more than anyone else. It didn't work.

The facts on the ground loudly proclaim that North America's most careful and multi generational project to add density - not just to the downtown but in every corner of the city - has made the city much better except in one crucial area: sadly adding density did not lower prices. Not one bit.