Racial disparities played a significant role in shaping unequal COVID-19 mortality rates. What is less widely understood is how overcrowded housing conditions were an even deadlier variable.
In California’s Bay Area, for instance, residents of overcrowded apartments — many of them recent immigrants — were found to be significantly more likely to die from COVID-19 than residents of demographically similar, but less crowded, apartments.
Even less examined is the root cause of this overcrowding. Overcrowding is not just a matter of zoning or population growth, but something more systemic and difficult to confront: the speculative financial forces acting on the land beneath our feet.
Urban land is now assessed by people not for its consumption value for a home but for its ability to hold and increase in cash value — in other words, its “speculative value.”
My recent book, Broken City, paints a picture of how the same market logics that defined the Gilded Age of the late 19th century have quietly returned in our own century, with similarly corrosive consequences for urban life.
Echoes of the Gilded Age
A growing share of average workers’ incomes is being swallowed up by housing costs, often for homes that fail to meet their basic needs. This is not the result of natural scarcity, but mechanical economic processes that inform the price of urban land.
We now find ourselves in circumstances uncomfortably close to those of Victorian England or Gilded Age America, when mass migrations to urban centres were driven by the need for jobs.
Read more: What's behind Canada's housing crisis? Experts break down the different factors at play
Back then, as now, a small number of urban landowners were able to extract enormous wealth — what political economist Henry George called the unearned increment — from the labour of others by virtue of owning the right patch of ground.
The demands for the unearned increment, George explained, was only limited by how much a region’s wage-earners and entrepreneurs collectively produced. Almost all of that value eventually went into land price.
Today, we appear to be experiencing the same phenomenon. The social and epidemiological pressures produced by inflated land prices are no longer confined to historically marginalized racial or ethnic groups.
As my book explains, millennials and Gen Xers, who are increasingly working service-sector jobs that dominate today’s economy, especially in countries like Canada and the U.S., are facing housing pressures once reserved only for the poor.
In short, housing precarity has gone mainstream.
Skyrocketing land prices
At the heart of the housing crisis lies a deeper problem: runaway urban land prices are not just a crisis of housing affordability, but a problem of equitable urban design. They are eroding our political capacity to solve many urban problems.
The same inflated land values that burden tenants and aspiring homeowners also restrict what cities can do to address housing and transportation needs, whether through planning, taxation or direct provision.
Urban land prices are spiralling due to the collision of two long-term trends. First, the global economy has shifted from being primarily driven by wages earned through labour to one dominated by returns on assets. Urban land is now the single largest category of fixed capital asset in the world.
Second, this asset-driven economy has widened the gap between wages and home prices, and helped drive the explosion in inequality. Housing has become the primary site where that inequality is expressed.
Public frustration over this yawning gap between stagnant incomes and sky-high housing costs has erupted into political conflict. Many now blame local governments and planning regulations for blocking the supply of new homes. If only we could build more, they argue, prices would fall.
But the evidence tells a different story. Take Vancouver, a city that has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, largely through infill development. If the supply theory held true, Vancouver should be the most affordable city in North America. Instead, it is the least affordable.
A landmark study published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that supply constraints didn’t explain rising housing prices or housing growth across American cities. In other words, building more housing isn’t enough to bring down prices.
A path out of the housing crisis
My book offers several solutions and examples for how cities can reclaim land wealth for the common good.
One promising approach lies in tying new housing approvals to affordability requirements. This policy framework — known as inclusionary zoning — requires developers to include a certain number of permanently affordable units as a condition for increased density.
Without such requirements, upzoning — meaning increasing the maximum building size the city authorizes for a parcel — can inflate the value of land, rewarding speculation and driving prices further out of reach.
Examples of effective inclusionary zoning abound. In Cambridge, Mass., an affordable housing overlay mandates 100 per cent affordability in exchange for permission to double density across the city. In Vancouver, new legislation related to inclusive zoning was introduced in 2024 and a development tax on new high-density projects has helped finance non-market housing directly.
The path forward is not mysterious. But it does require confronting the truth that the housing crisis is not the result of broken systems — but of a speculative financial systems working exactly as designed.
Patrick Michael Condon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
