Condo Conquest

When condominiums first emerged in North American cities in the 1960s, they were a new kind of housing governed by boards of resident owners volunteering in a community. Condo Conquest shows how the condo and its inner governance have since become something else entirely, taken over – or conquered – by an assemblage of firms specializing in condo law, real estate, security, and property management, as well as growing numbers of non-resident investors who purchase condo units as commodities. Drawing on the accounts of residents and board directors in Toronto and New York and myriad other sources, Randy Lippert takes a closer look at the inner workings of condoization. Condo governance is revealed to increasingly involve a complex set of legal, social, and spatial relationships among various elements assembled together, including commercial agents, forms of knowledge, and technologies, with some troubling consequences for resident owners, renters, and urban life. A growing reliance on commodified technologies and emergent forms of knowledge – including surveillance systems and detailed information about property values, aesthetics, crime and other risks, and legal decisions and statutes – also threaten the condo’s future and its promise of community. The first major study of condominium governance in North America, Condo Conquest questions assumptions about the condo and its governance and considers its future. By illuminating the complex set of agents, processes, and forms of knowledge that have taken over the condo world, Lippert discerns a number of troubling trends that are not only threatening the condo’s future but also eroding the power of municipal governments and undermining the integrity of urban communities.