Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis

Analyzes the skyrocketing urban land prices driving our global housing market.

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon in Broken City, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing cos...