Urban fantasy has always been about power dynamics—who has it, who takes it, who's caught in the middle trying to survive the fallout.

When I set my stories in neighborhoods where magic collides with rising rents and pushed-out families, I'm asking: what happens when the monsters are competing with human greed? What happens when a vampire buys up half a block to expand their territory, and in doing so, displaces the very humans they've coexisted with for decades? What happens when a werewolf pack's ancestral hunting ground gets bulldozed for a tech campus? Who benefits? Who loses? And who gets caught in between?

Because here's the thing: supernatural beings don't exist in a vacuum. If they're living in our cities, they're affected by the same forces we are. Maybe more so, because they can't exactly file a formal complaint when their sacred grounds get paved over. They have to adapt, negotiate, or fight back—and all of those choices have consequences.

In my books, I deliberately place human protagonists at the center—not as victims to be rescued by some brooding alpha, but as navigators and sometimes even architects of change. They're the ones who see both sides. They work with the monsters, live among them, love them even—but they also understand what's being lost when a neighborhood transforms overnight. They're mediators, activists, survivors. They have agency, and they use it.

Sometimes they're the ones who broker peace between a vampire coven and a tenant's union. Sometimes they're the ones calling out the supernatural community for being just as complicit in displacement as any human developer. Sometimes they're the ones who have to make impossible choices about whose home gets saved and whose gets sacrificed.

This is what draws me to urban fantasy as a genre. The paranormal becomes a metaphor without losing its teeth. The wolves aren't just wolves—they're indigenous communities being erased. The vampires aren't just vampires—they're old money, generational wealth, the kind of power that doesn't care who it crushes. The witches clinging to their storefronts are small business owners watching their rent triple. The fae who can't touch iron are immigrants navigating a system designed to keep them out.

And yet they're still wolves. Still vampires. Still dangerous, magical, other.

The metaphor works because it's grounded in something real. The fantasy elements amplify the stakes without overshadowing the human cost. When a demon gentrifies a block, it's not just a plot point—it's a question. What does power look like when it wears a thousand different faces? What does resistance look like when your enemy isn't a single villain but an entire system?

Urban fantasy lets me ask those questions in a world where magic is real and anything is possible—but where the struggles still feel achingly familiar. Where the monsters might be supernatural, but the harm they cause is devastatingly human.

And sometimes, the scariest monsters aren't the ones with fangs.

They're the ones with contracts and demolition permits.