A Canadian expert on urban issues says COVID-19 offers important lessons on the crucial need to make cities more equitable in a post-pandemic world.

Patrick Condon, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, says we have seen a whopping number of front-line workers in U.S. cities like New York contract the virus and die because they work in jobs that bring them in greater contact with the general public.

But the risk of many of these front-line workers increases because they can’t afford homes or apartments near their jobs, and likely face long commutes on crowded buses and trains, says Condon, author of the recently released book “Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class.”

He suggests a solution some might consider radical: spending less on megaprojects such as transit, new roads, bridges and other big ticket infrastructure projects, and instead investing in affordable housing close to downtowns where the jobs are.

Those front-line workers most impacted by COVID-19 have been typically low-income earners and people of colour — specifically African American and Latinos, studies in the U.S. have found. Although no similar data exists in Canada, Condon says he is “hypothesizing” that the same trend, in particular the low-income aspect, is happening in big Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.

“The lower income earners are the ones who have to go out and collect the trash or work restocking shelves at the local grocery story, or (are) the orderlies in the rest homes, those kinds of very high exposure occupations which are also associated with lower income and the necessity to leave your house to do those jobs,” Condon said in a phone interview from New Westminster, B.C.

Workers in the health-care sector have been particularly hard hit, he says.

Condon, 69, referred to an incident from his past to illustrate his point.

“I had a stroke two years ago in Boston while visiting family. And I was in the hospital and fully 80 per cent of the people I saw were not well-paid doctors, but the people who came into my room, emptied the trash, cleaned me when I couldn’t clean myself, and on and on.

“The health-care profession is probably more than 60 per cent people who are poorly paid and yet they’re exposed. Now, under these circumstances, they are very exposed to the dangers of COVID-19.”

The trend over the last 15 to 20 years, certainly in Vancouver and Toronto, has been that service workers can’t find housing close to where they work, he says. They have moved and continue to move outside the core to suburban neighbourhoods.

Rather than spend “billions and billions” of dollars on new bridges, highways and transit systems to move these folks from where they can afford to live to where their low-paying jobs are, government needs a new approach, he says.

“It would be far cheaper for society to figure out a way to take a significant portion of those public funds and put them into figuring out a way to get housing that’s affordable for all income cohorts within a reasonable compass — let’s say within a 10-minute bike ride — of where they have to work, so that there would be more choices throughout any metropolitan region for people than they are given now.

“And that’s a system we really can and should address, and we haven’t really focused on that at all, on the efficiencies and the social equity issues of actually putting people closer to where they work.”

In Vancouver, 15 per cent of the city’s housing is “nonmarket,” in the form of co-op housing or affordable rentals provided by non-governmental organizations.

One example of a great housing mix in Vancouver is False Creek South, he says, an inlet that includes 5,000 units of affordable housing.

It’s a beautiful place to live, he adds, made up mostly of medium-density housing, with co-ops, some social housing units for people with disabilities and some market rate condo units. The city was the developer.

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Canada stopped building social housing and affordable housing because a sentiment emerged that private business rather than government should be doing that, Condon says. But that approach hasn’t worked and the pandemic has dramatically revealed “a situation where we have cities that no longer function well, in terms of health and well-being, and in terms of social equity.”

One way to revive the nonmarket housing sector, he argues, is with fees developers already pay toward items such as roads, transit, sewer and water infrastructure.

“With the support of the federal and provincial governments who might put their billions into housing instead of expensive transportation systems, we could deal with the demographic dislocation.”