“Every good story needs a villain,” I tell my six-year old daughter, laying out the selection of finger puppets on the couch. Abigail settles on the raccoon, implicating the creature in wrongdoing he has yet to commit.
Later Abigail asks, “Do we know any villains, Mom?” by which she means someone we’ve had in our home. Her question puts me on the spot. I can’t think of anyone but come up with a list of villain categories: religious fundamentalists, right-wing conservatives, science deniers, certain American presidents, and the most worthy of adversaries: rich people.
That’s a big category and it helps to break it down. Realtors are a rich-people subcategory.
“They’re essentially gangsters,” my friend Rudi says. “They shake hands with the devil to do what they do.” Rudi, who dresses like Frieda Kahlo, has a lot to be bitter about. An acrimonious divorce cost her the darling house in which she’d birthed and raised her children. She’s since educated herself on the housing market and claims her realtor took full advantage of the vulnerable state she was in at the time.
“Every deal in this city is a high stakes transaction with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table,” she says, pointing out that housing prices in Vancouver jumped 88% between 2013-2018 and have been on a steady climb since. That the average price for a single detached home in Vancouver in 2021 sits at 1.67 million. “It’s a cut throat market for realtors who want to stay in the game. They come out with blood on their hands. It’s impossible not to.”
When my husband, Loren, and I were first married we lived on canned beans and ideals. This included the decision to put off home ownership to start an intentional community where Canadian host families could live with newly arrived refugee claimants.
Our proposed non-profit needed a multi-unit property and our benefactors put us in touch with James Murphy. I’d seen his face on enough bus-stop and city-bench REMAX ads to know we were dealing with the most well-heeled realtor in our end of the city. With Irish charm, dress pants, and a buttoned up golf shirt, James toured us around a few properties. We shook hands on a three-story building on the eastside. Prices were reasonable and James kindly donated a portion of his earnings back to our fledgling non-profit.
Twenty years passed. Loren and I, together with our two children, lived the intentional community dream - eating meals with refugee claimants from around the world; grieving hardship, trauma and separation; celebrating graduations, quinceaneras, Eid and Christmas; and finding the newly arrived families homes of their own to rent within months of their arrival in Canada. In the early years there were lots of housing options in the immediate neighbourhood of Kinbrace which kept kids in schools where they have enrolled and the families close to the heart of downtown for work and immigration appointments. As the cost of real estate continued to climb, however, families had no choice but to move further and further to the edges, and then beyond the city limits.
To celebrate the community’s twentieth anniversary we decide to hold a block party and invite everyone with a Kinbrace connection: refugee families past and present, benefactors and supporters, neighbours, members of Parliament and representatives from the UNHCR. When we find James Murphy’s name in the file, we invite him too.
Guests mingle with their tacos and agua frescas, and I find myself in conversation with James. For want of anything else to say I ask him how he got into real estate. He tells me of growing up in small-town Northern Ireland above his family’s mechanics shop.
“My father took out the hardships of his own life on me. He favored my older brother. Nothing I did pleased him. Said I would never amount to anything. So I left home. Came to Vancouver alone at 19. I started knocking on doors in one of the poorest, immigrant neighbourhoods in what was then a backwater city. It turned out I was in the right place at the right time, when Vancouver came into its own and housing prices took off.”
“And you proved your father wrong,” I say.
James shrugs.
“Has he been to visit?”
“No. I offered to pay his way, but only Mother came.”
“His heart may soften yet.”
“He died last year.”
“Oh.”
The following spring we get a call from James inviting us over for St.Paddy’s Day drinks. He tours us through the new state-of-the-art house he’s just built for himself in one of Vancouver’s up and coming neighborhoods. In the stairwell we pass a large painting of James in front of his dream house. To his right is his mother, and on his left stands his father.
“I thought your father never made it to Vancouver?” I ask surprised and a little too quickly.
“I had the artist paint him in.” James doesn’t elaborate, and we move on with the tour.
Back out on the front porch over pints of Guinness we learn of the long hours realtors put in to keep their jobs, how they give up weeknights and most weekends, how sleep is to come by, and how alcohol becomes an easy substitute.
Later that summer Loren and I decide it’s time to move out of Kinbrace. They’ve been good years but we are tired and at risk of founder’s syndrome. Besides, with our kids in their last years of high school, we want to share this final chapter of their childhood without the demands of community living.
But moving out is harder than we thought. Having (happily) squandered our house-purchasing years, and with mediocre-paying jobs in the non-profit sector, we find that we have been priced out of our own city. In our early-fifties and without equity or savings of our own, our only option is to rent, yet units with three-bedrooms are beyond our budget. We fall prey to all the rental scams in the classifieds: from unscrupulous landlords who tell ten different people to leave an envelope of cash in exchange for the same key, to landlords who request extensive personal information in exchange for a house that doesn’t exist.
There is a panic that sets in when you don’t have a roof over your children’s heads and the start of the school term is only a few weeks away. We note the irony of our situation: having spent 20 years helping others find housing, we find that now we are homeless ourselves.
Just as we are beginning to consider quitting jobs we love and moving to Moosejaw or Wawa, we find a small house on Fraser Street. It’s in slum-like condition, located across from a cemetery, and has five lanes of heavy traffic out the front door. Still, we are elated. The landlord is willing to negotiate rent in exchange for repairs and upkeep. We blast ABBA on repeat, give the walls a fresh coat of paint, plant bulbs out front, and within a week the four of us are comfortably settled in. Loren and I imagine ourselves contentedly retired on Fraser Street.
Then, three and a half years later, a pandemic that none of us could have predicted boosts real estate to all time highs. The owner of our Fraser Street house decides the time has come to cash in on his investment and puts a For Sale sign outside our front window. Our stomachs sink. Not again.
Informed of our predicament, James invites us over for a barbecue on his back deck. Between passing the potatoes and turning the steaks he says he has an offer for us: he wants to cover the down payment on a home for us.
We don’t know what to say. We gulp and stammer. “Thank you” falls short.
He goes on apologetically. “Given the realities of the market, it may not be within the city limits. A condo, in an older building, not a house. But it will be yours.”
I bike over to Rudi’s to tell her about the offer. She gets shivers down her spine. “Who does that?” She asks this twice.
“So this won’t make us complicit in blood money?” I ask.
“Tama, listen to me.” I’ve never seen her so serious. “There are deeper currents in this universe than any of us understand.” A Tibetan singing bowl sits on her coffee table and prayer flags hang from the magnolia tree on her front lawn. “These currents that will save us. They will save the world.”
“And remember,” she calls out as I cycle off, “it’s a greater goodness to him than it is to you.” In some full circle way it seems she’s in on the goodness as well.
Back on Fraser Street we’ve begun packing. By Christmas we’ll be in a two-bedroom condo along the Fraser River in New Westminster.
Out our front window I watch a racoon family navigate the five lanes of traffic, and wonder if it’s true that every good story needs a villain. Maybe not, though I can’t think of one. Especially when the villain, from whom everyone expects the least, ends up giving the most. When it comes to stories, at least in my experience, those ones are the best.
Tama is a writer (tamaleighward.com) and innovator in religious education (sacredcanopy.com) who lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. She considers memoir a spiritual exercise and an honest entry point into slow conversations about beautiful and difficult things.
