Expect No Mercy: Crime Fiction, Gentrification and Upheaval

No other genre is as closely associated with city life as detective fiction. From Mathew Scudder’s New York to V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago, detectives have been associated with their cities like Bond with his martini. Thanks to Rankin and Rebus, readers who’ve never been to Edinburgh know about the Oxford Bar, and who hasn’t imagined hailing a hansom cab and racing through London beside Sherlock and Watson?

In a way, crime novels serve as anti-travel guides: instead of discovering only tourist-friendly hot spots, readers follow a detective through the areas usually kept hidden, observing the lives of city dwellers on the margins. When you want to learn what a city is really like — its neighbourhoods, its social strata, its hidden systems of power — turn to detective fiction.

Given this connection, gentrification isn’t a new topic for the detective novel. Fictional cops and private eyes frequently lament the loss of neighbourhood character, the encroachment of Starbucks, and the pricing out of the working class.

But the critique of gentrification and its effects often stops there. It’s rare for a detective to be affected firsthand by gentrification. Often the characters are wealthy enough to afford homes in affluent areas or suburbs, and the run-down or troubled neighbourhoods are places they only visit. A stilt house in the Hollywood Hills or a Manhattan loft are great places to live, but don’t exactly offer the best vantage point on the realities of lower income areas.

There are exceptions. Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River comes to mind, where the decay of a working class Boston neighborhood mirrors the dissolution of the relationships at the centre of the book. Yet a great many detective novels take an “oh, well” approach to the subject. Things change, but things are always changing. What can you do? Accept it, shrug, and move on.

The surface effects of gentrification are both cosmetic and survivable, and maybe that accounts for the topic’s short shrift in detective fiction. The deeper issues at stake — housing affordability, access to social services, and the pressing question of who gets to live here — demand more introspection, and are less likely to provide an easily dispatched villain.

As I write this, Vancouver has replaced San Francisco as the least affordable city in North America. There is an insatiable demand for housing, both from people looking to live here, and from investors and property speculators. Housing prices are woefully inflated, with no sign of the bubble bursting. Most 20- and 30-somethings have already fled, and those that remain face constant danger of “renoviction” — a forced eviction under the guise of improvement so that the landlord can hike the rate. That’s if the property is rented at all: according to one study, as of 2016, there are an estimated 25,500 “empty homes,” unoccupied or temporarily occupied housing units, a 98 per cent hike since 2001.

Upheaval and erasure, and above all, change. It’s a lot to take in.

When people talk about Vancouver’s housing crisis, I want to correct them — these are housing crises. One faces folks like me: somewhat young, somewhat educated professionals who are steadily being priced out, who will never be able to afford a house in the city they were born in.

The other crisis faces people in more desperate circumstances. Seniors, single parents, those with addictions or disabilities. People for whom gentrification isn’t about leaving or staying so much as it is about survival.

A new condo tower can drive up prices in neighbouring buildings. Even with units being rented out below market value, there’s no guarantee of social acceptance. One new complex proposed not only a separate door for tenants living in the low-income suites, but also a separate poors-only playground for their children.

J.G. Ballard would be proud.

Change and upheaval are at the heart of my latest novel, Cut You Down. Vancouver PI Dave Wakeland is someone who’s always felt at home in the slightly seedier parts of the city, even though his business is thriving.

Wakeland holds on to both his old office, which is only months away from being demolished, as well as his self-identity as someone from his working-class East Side neighbourhood.

One of the strengths of detective fiction is the way it can move between social strata, much like detectives themselves. Phillip Marlowe can float from the gutters of Los Angeles to the mansions of oil tycoons in the Hollywood Hills, while Laura Lippmann’s Tess Monaghan is equally at home in the rowing clubs or row houses of Baltimore.

In Cut You Down, Wakeland moves through a Vancouver he’s increasingly alienated from, through suburbs and border towns and the wilds of Washington State. At each stage of his investigation, he’s forced to trade his assumptions for a glimpse at what’s really going on.

From suburban fathers who spend four hours a day commuting to and from the city, to college students contemplating crimes in order to afford a home, to Wakeland himself, whose East Van apartment seems less of a sanctuary as development moves closer, the characters of Cut You Down face economic challenges and moral decisions unheard of by previous generations.

Who gets to live here?

To talk about gentrification, you need to talk about housing, and that comes down to a deceptively simple question: Who gets to live here?

There is something frustrating about being born in a place and gradually losing the means to stay there. That’s a reality that the characters in the novel as well as countless individuals in today’s thriving cities (myself included) live with, part of the bargain for staying here. On some days that bargain seems increasingly difficult to justify.

What complicates things for Vancouver is that the city is built on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. In a way, we’re all squatters, and any discussion of “who gets to live here” has to take this into account. A 2011 condo development was stopped by the Musqueam band when they pointed out it was to be built on c̓əsnaʔəm, an anecestral village and burial site with a 4,000-year history.

Confronting those issues is terrifying, but also liberating. What are the rules for a colonial city on unceded First Nations territory that’s also home to one of the largest Asian immigrant communities in North America? Better question: What should the rules be?

In a way, it’s what’s been lost that generates hope for the future.

Watching for ghost signs

At a critical moment in Cut You Down, Wakeland notices what’s called a “ghost sign.” These are old-fashioned hand-painted advertisements from the early part of the 20th century, usually done on the side of brick buildings, that have somehow survived to the present day.

Sometimes, when a building comes down, a ghost sign becomes visible on its surviving neighbour. These can be beautiful phenomena, holdovers from a bygone era, but also reminders of how much has been lost.

In a way, all books are ghost signs. You set out to write about a neighbourhood, a city, and by the time the book comes out it’s changed. The cool punk bar you mentioned has been “discovered,” the highway through Surrey has been renamed a boulevard, and a middle-class house in the suburbs now serves as a launchpad for gangsters.

And a house in the city?

“Vancouver Specials” were affordable two-storey houses thrown up in the 1970s. In 2018, they serve as an achingly visible reminder of what’s become unattainable.

A lack of housing options is a disastrous issue for a city to face. For those who think the market should decide who gets to live where, I’d ask, which market? The housing market has been subsumed by a global market of property speculators. When my home has to compete with your investment, the situation literally becomes untenable.

As my favourite bookseller says, this city has become an incredibly difficult place to be an adult in.

One of the reasons I love Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress is how passionately he depicts what a house can mean to someone, the hope it can hold. Dave Wakeland comes from a different time and place than Mosley’s Easy Rawlings, and he will probably never afford to own a home in his city, but like Easy, he’s all too aware of what home stands for, even in its absence.

I’ve tried to convey some of that feeling in Cut You Down. Wakeland and the other characters face a world of constant upheaval, where doing the right thing is often impossible, and where the things you’re most sure of are the things that bring you down. That’s Vancouver circa 2018, and I’m sure that mirrors how a lot of people feel.

By showing how that feeling can drive us to desperate lengths, hopefully we can become more aware of our shared alienation and rootlessness, and the questions we have ahead of us. Sometimes all you can do is bear witness to the tumult.

To quote a popular graffiti slogan of East Vancouver street gangs: Expect No Mercy.