Scott Clark can’t afford to buy out the house he grew up in from his ex-father-in-law and so, in an attempt to drive the property value down and gain himself some time, he enlists his two best buddies to stage a drive-by shooting on his quiet Coquitlam cul-de-sac. No one wants to buy a house with gan activity surrounding it, right? Predictably, things quickly escalate out of Scott’s control and he finds himself at the centre of an inter-gang conflict. It’s a ridiculous premise that also kind of makes sense if you know anything about the Greater Vancouver housing market, and the whole thing comes together to make for a surprisingly charming novel.
I don’t know where Vancouver ranks in the worldwide listing for most expensive cities in the world but it certainly has to be up there. Housing and the cost of housing is ridiculous and has driven a lot of people – especially young people – out of the city. And those costs don’t drop off at the official boundaries of the city. Coquitlam is a suburb of Vancouver and Scott’s childhood home is located on the boundary of Burnaby and Coquitlam ( this area is often known by the terrible name of Burquitlam). It’s all equally unaffordable for people who have lived there their entire lives. I grew up in East Vancouver and at least part of the reason that I never returned after university is because Peter and I knew we could never afford to buy a home there. Average house prices in Vancouver are easily a million dollars.
So I can sympathize with Scott’s dilemma. His father-in-law helped him save his parents’ house from foreclosure but now that Scott is divorced, the house needs to sell. But Scott has lived there his whole life and feels it to be the last way he can stay connected to his beloved and deceased mother. So with two of his closest friends from high school, Pardeep and Josiah, he hatches a plan. It’s over the top, yes, but it’s also almost something I could see a few of the weirder kids I went to high school with deciding to do. It’s the core trio of Scott, Pardeep, and Josiah that really make the heart of the novel. They’re all a little bit arrested in their development in that they must be around 30-years-old and still seem to all be single and living with their parents. Pardeeep is set-up to take over his family’s restaurant (and I loved the detail of the Punjabi family running a Greek restaurant because that felt very classically Vancouver) and the restaurant is the trio’s regular hang-out spot.
At times it felt a bit too on-the-nose that their friend group was so ethnically diverse (they’ve lost touch with their fourth friend from high school but he was a Muslim kid with the last name Hussein) although it is an accurate reflection of the ethnic diversity of the area. In my East Vancouver high school experience, there wasn’t a lot of cross-cultural mixing in friend groups. But I do think that Demers nailed it in the ways that those youthful relationships shape you. Scott knows all the Punjabi swear words, just like I learned them from my Punjabi friend group in high school, and the three men feel at ease making cultural jokes and references that they might not outside of their friend group.
Property Value is very much a Vancouver-area book and that’s part of its charm. But I think it also works because this isn’t a Vancouver-area problem. Cost of living and housing is increasing all over the place and there are many cities where life-long residents can no longer afford to live. Demers approaches this issue with humour and humanity and while Scott Clark’s solution is ridiculous, he’s a hard character not to sympathize with.
Karissa Reads Books 