"In most major cities, the value of land now far exceeds the value of the buildings on it. The price of dirt has inflated so drastically that buying or renting homes has jumped out of reach of ordinary wage earners, creating severe inequality and more. The myriad repercussions of inflated land prices are spelled out in clear, painful detail in a new book by University of B.C. architectural school professor Patrick Condon, titled Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis."

Vancouver Sun

"The old neo-liberal economic theory that deregulation will solve the problem of unaffordable housing is being contradicted by reality, with ugly consequences for social cohesion, mental health, urban vitality, and politics. New thinking and experiments with effective solutions addressing the problem – like those presented in Broken City – are urgently needed."

Robert Liberty, planning consultant

"There couldn’t be a more urgent problem for cities than housing affordability, and there couldn’t be a more welcome or well-targeted book than Patrick Condon’s Broken City. With calm and thorough logic, he walks us through the thicket of misinformation and misconceptions, to show where the overlooked truths still lie: obscured by distorted land tax policy, and the stubborn persistence of obsolete supply-side dogma. Critics might miss his point that, yes, supply is a factor, but housing cost is the result of multiple factors, and there is no silver bullet. What we might need is something more like ‘silver buckshot’ – which he describes here in refreshing detail, from zoning reforms, to innovative funding approaches, to land use and the economics of sprawl. You needn’t think his argument is gospel to find this a very welcome new take on one of the central urban issues of our time."

Michael W. Mehaffy, Ph.D., executive director, International Making Cities Livable

"This is an excellent book on an essential topic – the hyper-financialization of urban land – that is well-written and straightforward. The work is provocative but well-reasoned, and follows with practical policies."

Emily Talen, author of Neighborhood and City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form

"Condon offers what a modern tax on land value could do instead and how city-wide zoning approaches used in Portland or implementing an affordable housing overlay district in Cambridge, Massachusetts are models for moving forward. Armed with these case studies and a critical analysis of the problem, we are ready to address the role that land value plays—and undo it—to create a better future for our cities today."

City Watch