Vancouver housing troubles make for hot summer reading

A recent report ranks Vancouver as the world’s third most “impossibly unaffordable” city, behind Hong Kong and Sydney. The American firm Demographia has been doing this ranking for 20 years and Vancouver has consistently made the top three.

How the city’s housing has become so unattainable for local income earners is a constant debate, as is how to fix it. The authors behind three new books, released in time for the summer reading season, have their own theories. CBC journalist Gregor Craigie offers a host of solutions after searching for answers in cities inside and outside Canada in his book Our Crumbling Foundation. University of British Columbia professor Patrick Condon, James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments, explores the inequality that has arisen from unprecedented increases in land values in his book Broken City. And historian, artist and author Michael Kluckner delivers an illustrated overview of Vancouver’s evolution from a sleepy but charming port town to “a much harsher, more stratified place” in his new book, Surviving Vancouver.