ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the manner in which the questions of capital, race, culture, and taste appeared, intersected, and were manipulated in the Monster House saga. The large, so-called monster houses that were constructed in Vancouver's west-side neighborhoods threatened the symbolic capital of the way of life, a set of beliefs and practices predicated largely on the values of a British Protestant elite. The decentralization and consolidation of capitalist functions within an increasingly global economy were not spread evenly across space or by urban region, but tended to exacerbate preexisting unevennesses. The threat of massive devaluation of fixed capital interests in production plants and the loss of government support of the local real wage put a number of cities such as Vancouver in a precarious position. The desire of neighborhood activists to keep race out of the Monster House controversy was met with the equally fierce desire of marginal groups to advance their causes in the public domain.
