Scenes from the new class struggle in Lotusland

Moving to Vancouver changed me and my family in immeasurably good ways. We came here from Toronto when I was 11 years old, in 1979. We also had a couple of memorable family vacations in B.C. before that. My parents seemed enchanted with the place. When my mom was a little girl in London, Ontario, her brother told her about the special place on the west coast where people played tennis in February. Then there was the shoeshine guy in my dad's Toronto office tower, who took a holiday to Vancouver and was never heard from again. The allure turned Vancouver into Canada's mythical hidden gem. The city was a joke to the more serious folks back east, who thought of it as an empty place where life stopped. But that was also the appeal. You could fill the emptiness with the personality of your choice and live at your own pace.

The Vancouver I remember from those times was a modest place filled with laid-back artsy types. My dad opened his own law practice and wore jeans to work just because he could, a fashion choice that didn’t impede his success. He took up cooking, preparing family meals on the balcony barbecue, and did his own landscaping and gardening around the house. Mom had more free time. My brother took me on spontaneous hiking trips up Grouse Mountain, before there was a Grind. Deer would scavenge through our backyard for food, and we had to shush raccoons away from the cat dish we left on the patio. We all seemed so much more relaxed, and I developed a tangible, spiritual connection with the surrounding nature, which I never took for granted.

I know for certain my life would have been more sterile and perhaps more threatened had our family not left Toronto. While some of the kids I knew back in the Ontario suburbs were getting into cocaine and LSD at age 13, I was being left alone by the bullies in my North Van high school because I made them laugh. I was a passive, easily intimidated kid, and I credit Vancouver for helping me let go of my inhibitions and feel liberated and engaged with people from a variety of backgrounds.

I had always wanted to know what it was like to live abroad, though. Just for a few years. Vancouver was my home, it was where I wanted to permanently settle, but I also knew that working overseas, whether the Pacific side or the Atlantic side, or south of the equator, would make me a better, stronger person. An education you don’t get at school. So, since  early 2008, I've had some good stays in China, Singapore, and Taiwan, not to mention some lengthy excursions to Japan before and during those times.

When it was time to come back, some of my friends warned me not to. There were also the rafts of “I’m-breaking-up-with-you-Vancouver” op-eds you’d see in the press. The griping about Vancouver didn’t all start with the housing crisis, though. As far back as 1989, when I got my first apartment at age 21, co-workers were shaking their heads at the $400 a month I was paying for a bachelor suite. “You could get a 2-bedroom apartment in Calgary for that!” Cost of living has been the most favored of the perennial gripes of West Coasters, and after a while I simply tuned out. I loved it here. You get what you pay for.

Then there was the era in the 1990s when journalists went on a roll trying to paint Vancouver as “No Fun City.” This at a time when we had five nights of summer fireworks at English Bay, Pride weekend, the Indy, the Jazz Festival, Lollapalooza, Bard on the Beach, the Children’s Festival, Folk Festival, Writer’s Festival… but of course, these had to be Dickensian times because drinking in the park was forbidden. I wondered what happened to friendly, laid back, “hike in the morning, beach in the afternoon” Vancouver everyone bragged about a decade earlier.

In the early aughts, the complaints shifted to Vancouver’s flakiness. I’d hear people mutter about wanting to move to Alberta or anywhere because the city was full of indecisive half-wits who wouldn’t return phone calls. As if you had to be best friends with everybody – you can’t just find five decent friends in a city of three million people?

While I was away in the 2010s, the whinging turned to affordability. Back to that old “you can get a two-bedroom in Calgary for that” trope.

Vancouverites, throughout my entire life here, have been crying wolf. The thing about crying wolf, though, is that the wolf eventually arrives.

THE CRISIS: A SLOW PROCESS OF DISCOVERY

This is my second attempt at relocating back to my home city. The first time, between 2011 and 2015, I returned from working in Asia to rent a large one-bedroom apartment west of Denman Street. I happily paid the $1,400 rent on an average income of $25,000 a year, helped out by taking in a foreign student who took my room while I slept in a well-partitioned dining area. Granted, two people sharing a one-bedroom apartment isn’t ideal, but I chalked up my underemployment woes not to Vancouver’s “supposed” housing crisis, but to a corruption of capitalism that has been festering away in Western cities the world over. Any griping about Vancouver’s housing problems, as if we were unique, struck me as arrogant and giving the city more credit than it was worth.

I eventually went back to Asia because that $25,000 a year was mostly coming from my RRSPs, and three years of dwindling savings, plus many hundreds of unanswered, soul-crushing job applications, made life unsustainable. The crisis in Vancouver didn’t seem to be about housing. For me, it was a lousy job market coupled with byzantine HR practices that were reliant on technology and personality tests, something that was foreign to this aging job aspirant. But I didn’t expect it to be any different elsewhere in North America. These were changing times, not a Vancouver phenomenon, I thought.

I couldn’t bear to update my resume or sell myself to dismissive HR reps one more time, so I went for a linguistics masters degree in Taiwan.

In January this year, upon graduation, I planned to head back to Vancouver with better hopes of employment. This is when I started to hear the warnings. “Don’t.” “This city has changed.” “It’s way too unaffordable.” But I’d heard it all before.

In a Tyee article that went viral last year, Jessica Barrett laid out quite a gripping diatribe on her way out the door. Although I couldn’t argue with many of the facts she laid out about disappearing neighborhoods and skeezy landlords ripping off the most desperate citizens, it struck me as more of what I’d been hearing for 30 years. What offended me at the time was that she and her boyfriend, given a conservative estimate of their incomes (she as editor of Vancouver’s largest monthly magazine, he as a graphic designer), should have been able to afford quite a comfortable life here beyond the one she described.

I have now learned that her story is one that must be experienced to be authentically understood. So here I want to look at Vancouver’s “housing problem” not from the point of view of affordability, but how the situation here corrodes friendships, causes us to view community members with suspicion, and diminishes us as people.

THE NEW SUB-DIVISION OF CLASSES

Before I moved to Asia (the first time) in early 2008, I considered myself to be lower-middle-class. Not middle-class enough to own property, but enough to have a comfortable apartment downtown, travel to Tokyo or Singapore every year (with free digs from family and friends), tuck away some RRSPs, and enjoy a cheap meal out a few times a week. Since coming back to Vancouver (the second time), I find that I can no longer consider myself anywhere in the middle-class spectrum.

It’s not the high rents that are the barrier. Since coming back with my master’s degree, I now get work. I’m employed and pulling in enough, technically, to live in a nice apartment in one of the neighborhoods I love. The problem now is that landlords won’t rent to me.

Building managers these days ask for bank statements. Whether it’s legal or not isn’t the point. It’s probably illegal, but they do it and without consequence. There are so many newly minted millionaires who sold their houses for a fortune, who are now happy to rent a small place on a tree-lined street, that it’s most enticing for landlords to rent to whomever has the fattest bank balance. Why? Let me dig into this a bit. 

The thing Vancouverites don’t understand about government-regulated rent increases is that the set amount – say, 2% – only gives the tenant the right to challenge a higher increase. If the landlord raises rent by 3% and the tenant pays it, that increase becomes legal as soon as the first cheque is written because the tenant signaled agreement to it. Someone with $5,000 in the bank is highly likely to take a day off work to haul it out to New Westminster and fight the increase at a tribunal. Someone with $30,000, well, maybe, maybe not. Someone with $5 million in the bank, though, is far less likely to do something as “working class” as to attend a tribunal to save $20 a month. This is what probably goes through landlords’ minds. The richer the tenants, the more the landlord can get away with.

The plethora of vacancy signs is deceiving. There was a day when renting an apartment was as simple as calling the number on a vacancy sign and the place was yours if you were the first to write a deposit cheque and pass a reasonable credit check. Now, landlords use the vacancy signs to collect applications. You might like a suite, but so did about 10 other people in the past week, and the landlord will leisurely pick their favourite from the pile of collected bank statements.

Renoviction: When an entire building is evicted so the landlord can upgrade the building to luxury status and charge premium rents

There is a much broader, big-picture problem here, though. Even if I were able to secure my own pad, the housing problems here have caused new divisions in class. I’m going to relate a few common “Vancouver shitshow” tales, but what I’ll examine among them are the deeper social problems that become trickle-down issues even for those who are well housed.

Upon returning here this past February, I was invited to crash with a friend in his guest room. I started a part-time teaching job a couple of days after landing, and I paid my friend what I could afford. As I took on more work through a second job, I began to look for apartments. Then the rejections rolled in, which extended the time I stayed in my friend’s home.

So I took to looking at furnished rooms for rent. This is where I noticed how class structures were stratifying. Up until recently, Vancouver’s lower middle classes and the upper classes seemed to blend in and share civic spaces without getting in each other’s hair. In my social groups, some friends and acquaintances had condos and impressive professional careers while others struggled as coffee baristas or such. All of us were in our varied jobs and living situations based on our goals, our needs, and our wants. We didn’t consciously or unconsciously divide each other into separate social classes. We’d all have interesting things to talk about and stories to share, and viewed each other with a measure of equality.

That is less and less the case now. When someone today is renting a room from another renter, or is one of multiple people crammed into a shared house, it’s not because of a life choice, but a desperate necessity. It is not a temporary stage of life as it once was, but quicksand trap. As a result, such people feel ghettoized and fit in less with those who cashed in on the property boom. I now avoid social situations with old friends who “got it made” because I’m a bundle of anxiety with nothing positive or interesting to say about being back in Vancouver. I don’t particularly want to indulge home-owning friends in talk of their redecorating woes, something I once would have enjoyed as casual banter. There are a few well-off friends who remain genuine, warm people, but in general I witness how class groups are isolating themselves more within their own bubbles, simply to stay sane.

What’s even worse now than a few years ago are the rifts within the lower-middle-class spectrum. A few weeks ago, I watched a homeless man steal the last cigarette from another homeless guy as he slept on the curb. Likewise, the lower-middle classes, in their own desperation, are taking advantage of anyone within their own spectrum when one is more vulnerable than the other. Particularly, I’m referring to renters who have their own apartments and sublet space to those like me who don’t qualify for a lease. These individuals are not unlike the upper-middle classes who bought property at the right time – it’s just that these folks rented at the right time and don’t dare leave the market. As their rents rise and incomes flatline, they try to squeeze another body into the apartment. Nothing wrong with this – I did exactly the same thing a few years ago.

The room I prepared for a student in 2012

However, I unloaded possessions and made proper modifications for a private living space before showing the apartment to prospective tenants. This summer, in my own search for a similar situation with the roles reversed, I found that Vancouverites are trying to have it both ways – not wanting to give up any part of their lifestyle, not dispose of any mildly treasured knick-knack, show their “suites” unmodified with vague promises of what it will look like by move-in, all the while asking for the maximum amount of cash they can squeeze out of someone in a desperate situation. The archetypal “cat lady” is now hoarding tenants instead of pets.

The housing crisis has turned these renters into rentiers – a class of people who gain income from access to property. Up until recently, the rentier class would have been the owners of rental buildings, or homeowners who leased out their property. Now, those who were squeezed out of the rental market – those like myself who left the city temporarily, or perhaps others who got renovicted – are no longer dependent on landlords, but on people who were once equals within our social class. Leaseholders with a few extra square feet of space now have something of great value (something that had little value ten years ago) making them into a new sub-rentier class.

These sub-rentiers have their own landlords to answer to while becoming landlords themselves. The problem is that the sub-tenants don’t have access to modes of recourse that normal renters have when promises are not met. And this new rentier class takes full advantage of that.

While I was searching for my own corner of the city to lay my head, every basement-suite and “room-for-rent” leaseholder uttered the phrase, “This stuff will be gone by the time you move in.” Piles of books on the stove (“feel free to cook, but, uh, I’ll find a place for these later”), living rooms and hallways cluttered with boxes of things, sofas covered in someone’s entire CD collection, or in one case, a room that was advertised as furnished was completely empty, with a promise that a bed and such would arrive before move-in. I knew full well that I was being sold a bill of goods, but some desperate soul was certainly going to take each of these places.

Before: Arranging my apartment for two people in 2012. This took a few hours. After: I slept behind this partition of bookshelves. Leaseholders today are trying to rent out parts of their apartment in the "Before" state, hoping the new tenant will figure out what to do. 

I eventually took a room in a one-bedroom West End apartment, trusting that the dubious circumstances presented to me would be rectified by the time of my move-in. My July 1st move-in date was delayed by three days, on short notice, because the leaseholder wanted to pop into the Jazz Festival and didn’t have time to get the room ready (so much for No Fun City). When I moved in, the promised modifications weren’t done. I was paying $1,000 for a room while the leaseholder slept on a couch outside of my door because she couldn’t decide how she wanted to arrange her own living space. There were promises of her new bed arriving tomorrow or the day after, but each day she changed her mind about how she wanted to divide the living room or what kind of bed she wanted to buy. This went on for weeks. As a result, the living room was a shambles of various junk unearthed from re-arrangements – a chandelier on the floor surrounded by boxes of records, empty planters, a giant exercise ball – while I couldn’t cook because the stove, sink, and counters were jammed tight with unwashed pots and pans and gadgets that left no room to manoeuvre.

While one might be tempted to say “Welcome to the new Vancouver,” here’s what I found especially sad about the situation. A few years ago, this woman and I were in the same social class as downtown renters. If we had met each other at work or through shared hobbies, I would have really enjoyed her company. She was artsy, a little bit offbeat, loved all sorts of music, had a deep appreciation of the natural environment.

But because of this city’s new realities, we found ourselves in a transactional relationship where one of us had power over the other. How do you tell the landlord you live with to clean her own kitchen or get rid of possessions? How do you risk conflict with a “boss” of sorts who is sleeping outside your door? It was an abnormal situation that we had to pretend was ordinary. Not long ago, we simply would have been two equal, like-minded people sharing a community and minding our own business while living independent lives.

I had some sympathy for her situation, and I could understand why she didn’t want to part with the 20 teacups and multiple stacks of dishes she would never use. These possessions probably followed her through various homes for most of her life, maybe even handed down by her own mother, just as my apartment was once filled with things that were virtually useless but nonetheless spoke to some part of my identity and family history. While materialism isn’t a great thing in excess, we should still be able to fill our homes with things that give us comfort. Having said that, I’ve had to make the hard choice to put my collection of books, records, art, and family china into a storage locker, so I harbour some resentment toward a “landlord” who isn’t willing to do the same to make room for me beyond the bare necessities. This situation wasn’t unique; all the rooms I looked at before and after living there hinted at the same cake-and-eat-it-too attitudes from the new sub-rentier class.

I had to walk away from that living situation because of some boundary issues and the precarious nature of living in a home that I wasn’t supposed to be in (she instructed me not to tell the building manager I was living there, despite it being legal to share an apartment). In the process, though, my friendships have been altered. While true friends should help each other in hard times, I feel that I have needed more help than any employable, well-educated professional should ask for. Which leaves me feeling guilty and awkward about asking for such help, calculating who I can ask to stay with month to month and which friendship will be damaged the least by such a request. A couple of friendships have actually been lost along the way, while the strong friendships have been unnecessarily tested. Even when I pay market value for a friend’s room, this turns a healthy social friendship in a transactional one. My own literal and metaphorical baggage has darkened the doorsteps of five households (two of them twice) of friends who I would have rather not burdened.

Living elsewhere in the world, even when sharing a home with strangers, I was living a purposeful, independent life. In Vancouver, I am a problem that my friends are handling with grace on their part, with embarrassment on mine.

And that is the proverbial straw that breaks me.

My urge to escape this place is not spurred by the cost of living per se, but the way our new reality has negatively affected the way we relate to both friends and strangers in our communities, and the way we perceive ourselves in return. The new class structures have poisoned our relationships and tinged our personalities with ugly hues. I can see how I’ve become the type of person I once would have looked on with disdain. I would have said to another person in my situation, “You’re the common denominator in these stories. What are you doing to bring all this drama into your life?” It’s something I wonder if my more well-off acquaintances have thought about me, so now I avoid them out of shame.

The ironic thing is that my social relationships in Vancouver seemed to be more functional when I wasn’t here. Overseas, I was in charge of my own life and had far fewer things to whinge about. My friends and I had interesting things to share with each other, even if those chats were by WhatsApp or Facebook.

Embers of resentment are also burning a small hole in my soul. Where I once enjoyed cycling through wealthy Kerrisdale neighbourhoods, admiring the beautiful old houses of the rich, their money as old as the trees cloaking their boulevards; where I once had no problem hearing about a friend’s inheritance or property investments; where I once lived vicariously through the stories of acquaintances who had more fun with more money that I’d ever know – now I’ve become the bitter, envious person I would have once avoided. Instead of walking through a West End farmer’s market and seeing it as colourful part of my community, I now just see “privileged” middle-class people fussing over expensive artisanal jam.

In this respect, I empathize much more with the actual poor and homeless. If something were to tragically happen to me now, I would be listed in the papers as one of those people “of no fixed address.” I am fortunate that I have savings and can afford to start again somewhere else. Unfortunately, that has become my only option, because actual homelessness feels as though it’s just around the corner.

THE MYTH OF THE “LEFT COAST”

Vancouver is a victim of what some are calling the death-throes of capitalism – the playing out of Marx’s observation that well-regulated capitalism gets gradually deregulated and corrupted when those with the most money gain control of political systems. In some ways our problems are no different from what is happening elsewhere (San Francisco, Sydney, New York) and what has happened elsewhere in the past (London or Hong Kong in the 1970s). The thing is, I naïvely felt that there was something special about this place that would make the culture immune to the social effects of neoliberalism. Perhaps because those aforementioned cities have well-established economies and professional classes that are at more dramatic risk when rapid change occurs. What’s the worst an economic shift could do to a bunch of West Coast hippies? Is all this our own fault for clamouring to be a “world class city”?

Artist's depiction of a riot on the East Side street that is right outside the shopping complex it adorns

Vancouver would be worth fighting for, high rents and all, if the money virus that infected us hadn’t changed the way we all think about each other and how we view our places in the community. If we were all the “Left Coast” hippies we are reputed to be, we’d be calling for more socialist remedies to our housing crisis. Perhaps the city could take away the right of landlords to choose their own tenants, and leave the applicant selection process to independent bureaucrats. An extreme measure to be sure, but this is what landlords should get for illegally demanding unredacted bank statements and only renting to the rich. We could also insist that most (not just some) new developments be rental properties, and not the luxury sort with granite countertops and in-suite laundry that seem to be the new norm. Or how’s this for a mind-blowing idea: the province could regulate house and rental prices, telling property owners that they cannot sell or rent for more than the government-assessed value.

Of course, these ideas are full of flaws and there are massive loopholes that could be exploited. But crisis-proportion problems need creative brainstorming to ultimately find a workable solution. Some radical idea, no matter how imperfect, must be put on the table, if only to show landlords that they must start regulating their own greed before someone else does it for them. However, when I present my ideas to other suffering Vancouverites, they tend to defend the neoliberal capitalist systems that created this mess in the first place. Even those who suffer and complain will say, "Landlords are business-people, they have a right to make money." There is no substantive urge for change, no recognition that the systems that caused the crisis aren’t going to provide a solution. Likewise, talk of banning foreign property ownership is met with gaslighting charges of racism, ignoring the fact that Permanent Residents – the immigrants who come from a variety of social classes and contribute to our communities – would not be included in such a ban.

What I find particularly odious is when I hear young people venting about how they will never be able to own property, as if that was ever the norm. My parents were renters from 1984 until the day they died 10 years ago. My grandparents on both sides likewise died as renters. We weren’t exactly a working-class family either; my dad and his father were both prominent lawyers with their name on the door.

Vancouver’s rental-heavy West End has traditionally been home to pensioners, and regardless of whether they rent by choice or not, I have never heard a Vancouver senior in a rental apartment complain about being cheated out of a life of privilege the way some young people do here. If we could all accept that there is some economic sense and no shame in renting, perhaps we’d fight harder for that right – the right to simply have a home throughout our lifetimes, not the right for each and every one of us to own land and profit off the next generation. The Ponzi scheme of property investment is partly why are in this mess now.

BE THE CHANGE YOU CAN’T?

I wanted to come back to Vancouver full of optimism – “be the change you want,” “the grass is greener where you water it” – but at a certain point, dime-store philosophy doesn’t cut it. Telling a middle-class person to meditate or keep a gratitude journal to deal with depression might be good counsel, as it was for me at one point, but I'm at a place on the social ladder where yoga and positive affirmations are not going to put a roof over my head. I now realize how bourgeois my old life was, viewing the homeless with a distanced liberal guilt. Now that I cannot choose what part of town I live in, I cannot choose to live away from the "undesireables," commuting amongst them frequently. My liberal guilt has been replaced by a panicked sense of foreshadowing.

Vancouver's world-renowned Ovaltine Cafe. Seriously, it's world renowned.

A friend of mine who tried immigrating here from Taiwan but moved back once said, “Vancouver shrinks people.” I thought he was just being cynical or looking for a reason to move back home. But now I see how true that is. I left an editing career in Singapore in 2011 to find myself unemployable in Vancouver and eventually working in a warehouse (a job I loved; they were the most “real” colleagues I’ve ever had). Then this year I turned down a university teaching job in Taiwan because I thought the sacrifice was worth it for the luxury of what I believed Vancouver’s healthy environment to be, only to find myself too riddled with housing anxiety to enjoy much of anything, including other people’s company. While in Taiwan, I longed for fluid conversations in unbroken English, without having to simplify my vocabulary for my English-challenged friends. Now that I’m back, I wonder what the point is of sophisticated verbal repartee when conversations get stuck in a feedback loop of property hardships and property successes – neither of which are pleasant or intellectually engaging in my current state. As linguistically strained as some of my discussions were with the Taiwanese, we talked about politics, culture, national identity, and all the fun and not-so-fun stuff that connects us as humans.

What has become obvious in Vancouver is how meaning in friendship becomes diminished when we are robbed of participation in our communities, and when our conversations become tinged with anger and envy.

I have pretty much made the decision to flee Vancouver, this time permanently. Many people I know here wonder why I kept trying to come back. I hope they can see that my love for this city has kept me committed to this place, an attachment so intense that it has somewhat blinded me to its perils. The whole point of living abroad has been to return to Vancouver as a better person and a better citizen. We would all do better to live in other countries for a while and come back with some fresh ideas about what it means to be a Canadian, to be a Vancouverite, in a world that is closing in on us.

The problem is, Vancouver’s gates slam shut when you leave. Even if you’re willing to start over, as I am, the gatekeepers only let you back in with a visitor’s pass.

The barriers to meaningful participation in my city have made me feel more like a foreigner here than I do when I’m actually on a residence permit in another country. When it becomes easier to put a roof over your head in far away places, when your life can be lived with more independence and dignity in another country, one has to question what citizenship or civic responsibility truly mean anymore.

If there is one thing that pushes me out of Vancouver again, it won’t be the cost of living, but the odd way this city turns anyone who strives to live here, rich or poor, into part of its problem.