If housing costs too much, there must not be enough supply. That’s Ottawa’s simple take on the affordable housing crisis in Canada. And their simple solution? Impose policy, including the housing accelerator fund, to get rid of zoning prohibitions and accelerate the building of new homes within existing urban footprints.
But, asks Patrick Condon, professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia: What if the feds are wrong?
If increased density delivered affordability, he counters, Vancouver would be cheap by now. And what does the current glut of unsold small condo units in glass towers — in places like Toronto and Hamilton — tell us about Ottawa’s theory?
“I think I’m considered a bit of a bête noire around here on the policy side,” Patrick acknowledges, in a recent video conversation. “Certainly the B.C. provincial policies have moved in a very opposite direction to the ones that I’ve been recommending,” he says with a grimace.
The professor doesn’t strike me as a contrarian. His three decades of experience as a city planner, and then as a teacher and researcher in sustainable urban design, lend undeniable credibility to what he’s saying. Originally from the U.S. (his voice retains traces of his Massachusetts roots), Patrick landed in Vancouver in 1992 to teach at UBC and work on urban design, including helping design the East Clayton project in the early 2000s in Surrey, B.C.
And the fact he’s honest enough to change his mind is telling; until seven or eight years ago, Patrick was an advocate for increased density. “My professional strategy was to add density into existing areas or create new neighbourhoods that had this kind of affordable density,” he says. “Unfortunately,” he admits, “that hasn’t worked.”
“A lot of people attack me as the old white guy,” he adds with a wince, “old white NIMBY guy.” I believe him when he says he’s heartbroken the dominant narrative blames single family home owners for the affordability crisis. “It’s a tragedy that there is confusion in the narrative,” he laments, pitting one generation against another. I couldn’t agree more.
“The dominant narrative to explain why housing is too expensive comes down to what I consider to be a rather naive notion about the laws of supply and demand,” explains Patrick. “Why isn’t there enough supply?” he posits. To the federal government’s way of thinking, Patrick responds, answering his own question, those who administer local zoning ordinances (which in Ottawa’s argument, guarantee the inviolability of the single family home) are the problem.
“If you’re saying that the problem is, we’re not adding enough housing to existing neighbourhoods, and if we would only get rid of zoning regulations, everything would be fine, you need to have proof of that,” Patrick asserts. “And when you look around for proof,” he says, “you find that there really isn’t any.”
The most obvious example, he suggests, is the city of Vancouver, where urban boundaries have not expanded in generations. “So all the housing that has gone into Vancouver,” he explains, “has been essentially infill housing that has been accepted through changes and zoning ordinances.”
Vancouver has tripled the number of housing units since the 1960s, Patrick reports. What’s less well known, he says, this densification hasn’t just been achieved by building high-rises in the city’s downtown; the rest of the city has accepted over 50 percent of the housing units in lower density formats (basement suites, duplexes, triplexes, four-storey buildings along corridors).
“That housing, advanced by me and others, was based on partly the premise that this would lead to affordable housing,” he says. “We tried really hard. We tripled the density. We tripled the number of housing units within the same footprint,” he reports, “and as a reward for our heroic efforts, we have the highest home prices, when measured against average regional incomes of any place in North America, and the third highest home prices in the world.”
So he’s warning the feds, and anyone else who will listen: “If you think the solution is just to get rid of the restrictions on zoning and let towers be built basically everywhere, which is what the Vancouver strategy is now, you’re gonna be disappointed.”
In his 2024 book, “Broken City,” Patrick explains what’s happening. “It turns out that the issue here is not the building, it’s the land under the building,” he argues. When a city allows for additional density, that changes the financial value of the dirt on the proposed building site. Thus, he reports, “If you go from allowing a one-storey building to allowing a 10-storey building, you get a 1,000-percent increase in the price of the land.”
“So the market is really a market-per-square-foot of the building,” he explains, “and by adding density, it doesn’t change the value of that square foot. What it does change is the value of the land underneath that building.”
“As the authorized use of land is increased,” Patrick elaborates, “the value of the land is going up and up and up, and it, unfortunately, goes up more or less in measure to what the market is allowing for that built price.”
The increase in land values created by up-zoning and densification are not going to the municipality, Patrick suggests. “That’s what’s so tragic about it, about the whole thing,” he contends, “the policy makers are saying (and I think many of them actually believe it), that this will help the community and it’s actually harming the community. It’s really helping the land speculators.”
And Patrick makes clear: The land speculator is different than the developer. “The developer is the good guy,” he says, chuckling. “They build a building. The building has social value. What doesn’t appear to have social value is the land, and the speculation part of it, which is preventing us from adjudicating land rights to the benefit of the community.”
“The way things are unfolding now,” he continues, “is that real estate nationally constitutes about 25 per cent of the gross domestic product in Canada, and that’s way too high a level. And it’s all structured on the idea that real estate values cannot go down … We’re seeing it here in Vancouver, where the real estate industry is begging for additional federal local and provincial assistance because of the downturn.”
The current collapse of the market for small condo units makes it obvious that the investor community has soured on the profit potential of this product, Patrick explains, stranding these assets in a financial limbo. “It is very strong proof that the driver for real estate in Canada has for many years been ‘housing as investment’ vs. ‘housing as homes,’” he says. “This distortion elevated the price of urban land making it impossible for developers to build housing for families at a price they can afford.”
Basically, we’re doing the wrong thing, Patrick concludes: “We’re going in and giving away land rights, hoping that that will lead to affordability. We shouldn’t do that, because it doesn’t work. But what we can do is give away land rights, insisting on affordability.”
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