Planner and professor says massive increase in density and new housing didn’t bring costs down; in fact, costs are way up.
By Tim Redmond / 48 Hills / September 15, 2024
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.”
For the balance of this article — the interview with Condon — please go here.
Where is there apparently zero focus on encouraging rehabbing of existing affordable properties, and/or adding deed restrictions to them? And what about affordable starter homes, for purchase? How about an equity sharing agreement with SDHC to help them gain a foothold, rather than just enriching existing property investors.
Nope. Let’s upzone the property, evict the residents, tear it down, build a luxury apartment building, and deed restrict a few of the units (less than what you started with) as “affordable” to forever-renters earning 110% of the median income for 15 years.
Who is this really helping?
It’s helping the developer donors who bankroll our electeds, that’s who. Any pretense that it benefits anyone else is intentional deceit — which is what makes YIMBY’s cynical appropriation of the “progressive” label to sell their lies the most pernicious bovine excrement of all.
yup. the only thing progressive about this, is that a progressive rock band wrote a tune about it once: genesis – get ’em out by friday.
100%
Our nut in charge gives away fees designed to benefit the budget. Why?
Great article. You might want to check the link to the full article.
As a long time San Diegan, I remember elected republican leaders like Bill Cleator, who helped father the sports arena area and Ed Struiksma who advocated for urban sprawl. They and their development backers sold residents a bill of goods, when it came to a well-planned city.
Now that the Dems are in control and open space is scarce, these development and investor interests have reinvented themselves as YIMBYs.
And YIMBY branding has served them well. It has allowed them to neutralize their opposition by calling them elitists and non-inclusionary and claiming only they and their policies are the recipe for more affordable rents and ending homelessness.
As this article states, up-zoning, which the city has done aggressively and YIMBYs have advocated for, has resulted in higher home values, fewer starter homes first time buyers can afford and more market rate rentals.
If Gloria, Elo-Rivera and others really cared about affordable housing they would be building housing on City owned land. There is nothing stopping them from leveraging City owned land and building affordable housing above a new library or fire station, or on the Chargers old practice facility property or lobbying the state to build a new DMV in Hillcrest with affordable housing. If they can’t make affordable housing pencil with no land cost, they never will.
We need to vote our current group of elected officials out of office and start planning a better more livable city.
DiegoK – the link to the original post does work.
Mr. Redmond!
great to read you
Ehhhh, this is rather biased and narrow view of a much bigger picture. When I was doing my Master’s in Urban Planning, I did a semester at UBC in Vancouver during 2006. I am at least somewhat familiar with the place and the context of their growth.
Right off the top, my view is that the issue here is less about supply and more about demand. Greater Vancouver has added a million or so residents over the 30 years of data being referred to here – a growth rate of around 60%. There are several reasons for the pace and scale of that population growth. For starters, when Hong Kong was handed over from the UK to China in 1997, there was an absolute exodus of immigration in Vancouver, especially among the elite. They are very similar cities if you squint hard enough.
Mostly through the infill and urban renewal being decried here, Vancouver also made a rapid transformation from gloomy, forgotten, dying port city to a beautiful, walkable, vibrant, and well-designed place to live. This transformation put Vancouver on the global map and people and businesses from everywhere took notice.
Last, Canada itself is undergoing massive population growth. Since 1997, the population of the country had grown from 30 million to over 40 million today. They have to live somewhere, and perhaps not surprisingly, a lot more of them chose thriving cities like Vancouver over places like Winnipeg.
IMO, Vancouver is a major success story for urban renewal and growth done right. It was not accomplished without major challenges and trade-offs, but lesson to take from there is that people like Vancouvers. We need more of them and not less.
There’s a saying in planning that the two things people hate most are density and sprawl. There is ultimately very little to do in the way of stopping the massive population growth that cities like Vancouver and San Diego have been facing and will continue to face. People don’t want to live in cold, dying cities like Cleveland or Halifax if they can help it. People will continue to flock to much more desirable places like Vancouver and San Diego no matter what, no matter how. Even if there are no jobs. Even if there is no water. Even if housing prices are insane. The only real question is where to put them.
For San Diego, I would say not OB, for starters. But I would also say not out past Alpine or up in Julian. If the choice for San Diego’s future is becoming Los Angeles or Vancouver, I’m taking Vancouver all day long. Density done right is good. It means pedestrians over cars, urban community over suburban isolation, and more walkable cities with usable and active public spaces.
Whether I trust San Diego to do density right is a different question entirely, but pragmatically speaking, there are ultimately a finite number of places to steer the population growth the region is facing. UTC and Hillcrest? I get it, and I also get why many of the residents of those places don’t like it. There are ultimately winners and losers in every land use decision, and as long as OB is on the right side of that line, that’s enough for me.
but the politicians are pushing this under the guise of “affordable housing”. what you describe is very expensive housing, which is always a lot easier. to be really big picture, where is the affordable housing then?
yeah, duh, fancy developers (building and AI) how’s about “less is more?”
factoid: we are expecting a massive decrease in the demographic due to us baby boomers all dying out in the relatively near future…who is gonna maintain all these constructions?
Seth, the key phrase here, repeated twice, is “density done right.” From my perspective, San Diego has clearly been going in the direction of density done wrong.
For example, a major development of vacant land in the Carmel Mountain Ranch area (btw, located on a major rapid bus route) ended up with density less than my OB neighborhood. If ever there were a place of an urban village created from scratch, this would be it. Instead the city pretty much let the developer do what he/she wanted. This could have been a model for sane development, instead of business as usual.
By Seth’s logic, there should be a major densification of the neighborhoods south of the 94 to transform them into Vancouver-like areas, but are we seeing that happen?
The statement of “the issue here is less about supply and more about demand” as well as doing a semester 18 years ago, told me enough.
Chris, like I said, it makes me at least somewhat familiar with the place. Also like I said, Canada’s population has grown by 1/3rd in the last 25 years or so. Where exactly were these 10 million new residents going to move to IYO? Rural Manitoba? Housing demand was going to completely skyrocket in Vancouver and every other Canadian city regardless of any policy or development that was undertaken or not. The end.
Paul, I hear all that. It is very difficult for governments to create policy that promotes smart growth, especially in spacious places being built up after automobiles became the standard for transportation. For every Vancouver, there are ten Phoenixes. And I don’t have a ton of faith of our local governments to be as successful in this tall task as their equivalents in Vancouver were.
But I would bring it back to demand. For as much as people like walkable places like Vancouver (or OB), there’s also a lot of people who like that cookie-cutter subdivision life. As consumers, we have had decades of cultural conditioning telling us that this was the American ideal. A single family house, with a grassy yard. For a long time, this was the cheapest, most profitable, and least risky way to build – and that is what developers did.
Unfortunately, that promotes urban sprawl and all that comes with it. Traffic, emissions, more expensive infrastructure across the board, social isolation, greater consumerism, and a host of other things.
At the risk of repeating myself once more, for my money, sprawl is the enemy here, not density. Especially in the context of climate change and a cultural shift that increasingly favors “me” over “we”. Density is very hard to do right, but it behooves us to figure it out.
Just don’t densify OB. We are already at capacity haha.
The price of housing is set by supply and demand
No, not entirely. Look at the U-T Sunday supplements with all the Mcmansions for sale. As a recent post here demonstrated, housing policies have a tremendous effect on the supply of housing; for example, despite the demand for affordable rentals, city policy allows for umpteen short-term rentals to remove housing stock from the market.
The fact that supply (or demand) can be affected by housing policy does not contradict that the price of housing is set by supply and demand. When markets are influenced by government action as most are, they do not cease to be markets; their inputs (supply and demand) are just modified, and the price is determined by the supply and demand net of these effects or distortions.
In case of housing, zoning arbitrage which allowed residential properties to become hotels (short term rentals) met the demand for lodging of travellers while reducing the supply of residential housing units. Regulations on residential development like minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, density limitations, years-long impact and environmental reviews, etc lower the rate of increase of supply of lower-middle range housing units, which puts upward pressure on the price of the existing housing stock unless demand subsides proportionally.
Whoops, I must have fallen into a trap; should have known with that ucsd ringer attached to the email address that the expression I responded to was actually bait. I apologize for underestimating your motivation for commenting here. As Mat said, so much better than me, “Treating housing as just another commodity is the original sin, full stop. Saying it’s simply a matter of “supply and demand” is willful disregard of the complexities of the economics …” involved. If housing is a right and obviously, there’s a huge demand for housing, so much so that there’s thousands sleeping without a house on the sidewalk, yet there’s thousands of empty housing just sitting there unused – where does your mantra of “supply and demand” come in then? One huge factor are the profits developers are allowed to make off of a human right. How does that fit into your quaint little box? Please allow the real world to enter your thoughts and forget all those little rules the textbooks demand.
Thanks for your response. It’s a bit unsettling to see you un-anonymizing a portion of my email address, which I assume you can only see because you are staff here. I hope either OBRag policy or your personal boundaries make that the end of that exercise.
“Treating housing as just another commodity is the original sin, full stop. Saying it’s simply a matter of ‘supply and demand’ is willful disregard of the complexities of the economics …”
I never stated that it was “just another commodity”. The economics being complex does not mean the market is not governed by supply and demand; it means there are many complex factors that influence both supply and demand; some natural and some artificial. We could sit and list many of these factors.
“If housing is a right and obviously, there’s a huge demand for housing, so much so that there’s thousands sleeping without a house on the sidewalk, yet there’s thousands of empty housing just sitting there unused – where does your mantra of ‘supply and demand’ come in then?”
There are many non-economic factors that contribute to people sleeping on the street, unfortunately. But lack of housing affordability is believed to play a role: Pew has done some research on this, if you are interested:
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/08/22/how-housing-costs-drive-levels-of-homelessness
One main takeaway was a strong correlation between changing median rents and levels of homelessness.
With respect to vacancy rates, it is more useful to look at percentages of housing units, rather than absolute numbers (“thousands”). In San Diego most recently it was measured to be ~6.4% which is fairly high. Interestingly it was measured coincidently with a year-on-year _decrease_ in rents… to be expected if there is a relationship between the net of supply vs demand and the market clearing price.
It is often speculated that people purchase housing units and leave them vacant, only to pay property tax and miss out on any potential income from rental (long term or even short term as is now common). Surely this occurs to some extent, but it is never made clear why a typical person buying and holding a residential property for speculative purposes would forgo the significant additional income available from renting it out.
It would be another thing if you stood by your opinions enough to use your real name. Try it.
Gracious — how biblical the ‘Rag the commenters’ names have become! All anonymous and new, and not-at-all coordinated, echoing in unison the praises of YIMBY!
Treating housing as just another commodity is the original sin, full stop. Saying it’s simply a matter of “supply and demand” is willful disregard of the complexities of the economics of anything gets bought, sold or built in the realm of Big Real Estate. And that’s before even getting into morality of homelessness being as mandatory as unemployment in public policy models.
The simplistic “supply and demand” mantra comes with a huge asterisk, with more caveats than a prescription drug disclaimer. If this were the 19th Century, no doubt you’d be peddling snake oil for a living.
Mat, since my name is somewhat biblical, let me just say that I am neither a new poster here nor a YIMBY, and certainly not coordinating with anyone else. I was on the OB Planning Board for a good 5 years, and Frank knows exactly who I am. I used to post here under my full name until I realized that my posts were coming up prominently in google searches, including posts where I urged Obecians to take up a citizen’s lawsuit about the underground parking loophole that many were trying to use to skirt the FAR limit. A major reason local governments are kowtowing to the whims of developers is that those developers are willing to sue them at the drop of a dime. Concerned citizens are remiss if they ignore that tool in the box, IMO.
I am not an advocate for this City’s government, and quite frankly do not even trust them to pave the roads here. But I have a lot of thoughts about Vancouver and its urban planning, and as an environmentalist, am firmly on the side of urban density over exurban sprawl.
Vancouver’s urban renewal is a major success story for urban planning, smart growth, environmentalism, etc… albeit not one without a few lessons and caveats. Given the massive population growth of Canada on the whole the last 25 years or so, I definitely reject any sort of notion where the incredible demand for housing in their cities was created by increasing supply or really any of the policies or developments on a local scale.
Ah Seth, always enjoy it when you grace our pages with your thoughts. Were you on the board when the city trotted out that 3D model of the new and expanded library … back in 2000 or 01?
Frank, grace is generous. I’m glad this blog is still going. Keep fighting the good fight.
I was on the board 2008-2012, and again in 2014. There was some OB Library stuff that was presented at that time, but nothing actionable, I think.
“If it quacks like a YIMBY…” The key point is your saying you studied Vancouver a few months in 2006 — eighteen years ago. As this article shows, it’s changed a lot since then — as does this news report, https://globalnews.ca/news/10401449/vancouver-full-blown-crisis-housing-affordability-report/.
You mention nothing that addresses the author’s concerns, or indicate support for any of the proposed solutions such as value recapture, but instead hold yourself up as an authority that should just be trusted to know more than he does with a lifetime of experience living there.
Your simplistic insistence on “density or sprawl” is a false binary, which you use to advocate density at all costs — whatever the price. As this dovetails exactly with the lobbying of Circulate San Diego, the suspicion that this is not a coincidence is warranted.
I don’t think I overstated my familiarity or knowledge, nor do I think a YIMBY label accurately applies to someone who has twice stated in these comments that I don’t want to see increased density in OB, where I live.
I do think living in downtown Vancouver and studying urban planning there during the period in question affords me permission to have opinions on the article. I have plenty of other connections to place I can go into if you would like. This doesn’t mean I have the one and only truth, just that I think the argument being put forth in that article is omitting a bunch of other factors.
I fully grasp that upzoning increases property values and that this was at least something of a factor in terms of the real estate speculation that has taken place there. But there were other forces at work, on a national and global scale. The exodus of the Hong Kong elite to Vancouver in the mid-to-late 1990s, the *massive* population growth of Canada on the whole in the last 25-30 years, and the wild success of a period of urban renewal that turned Vancouver from an obsolete backwater port city to a place that has been near the top of basically every list of worldwide livability rankings in the last 25 years. In the same breath that these Vancouverites are overstating their influence, they are also being too hard on themselves.
FWIW, I don’t think I have ever met an urban planner that was a free market capitalist. The entire premise that it is within the purview of government to intervene into markets to try to promote and incentivize optimal outcomes in land use is pretty much the polar opposite of kowtowing to the market.
To get right down to it, the major difference between Vancouver and San Diego in terms of urban planning as I see it is that Vancouver put their planners and designers in charge, while San Diego has done everything possible to neuter theirs while giving developers free reign.
As to density vs sprawl, in terms of the major population growth facing places like Vancouver and San Diego, it kind of is that simple. You are either going to grow vertically or horizontally — and especially so if you are a city that is constrained by geography and surrounded by water like Vancouver, NYC, or SF.
“… California YIMBY: The price of housing is set by supply and demand. Building new homes creates a “moving on up” effect that creates new vacancies at the low end of the market and keeps those homes cheap…”
WTF?
Indeed, Vern: because we all know how famously affordable Mission Hills and every other legacy neighborhood has become.
It’s like they keep trying to make it make sense to themselves.
mr condon is just talking sense. “upzoning” is just another grift by rentseeking rentiers. “global speculative capital” in his words… it’s like expecting a ball to roll uphill. how can affordable housing possibly result from extraction of capital from a neighborhood?
Sad that Vancouver couldn’t solve their housing problem. Sad that our mayor believes 12 ADUs in backyards is a quick and easy way to fill the governor’s housing quota. Happy to read an honest admission of error from Vancouver and their desire to share their story to prevent the same thing happening elsewhere. Sad that our mayor and city council members don’t read The OB Rag!
A wild stat that I heard recently was that nearly 70% of Canadians actually live south of Seattle. In the context of where to put that population increase of 10 million people over the last 25 years, that’s worth nothing. It’s a massive country but there just weren’t that many places to put people given the existing infrastructure.