IN CLASSIC WESTERNS the conflicts are straightforward. Bad guys wear black hats, descend on a small town, and challenge our hero, the white-hatted local lawman. We head toward a violent climax where the baddies are killed, and the good guy and his woman ride off into a new life.
In The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a much-acclaimed 2019 indie film, the “villain” is less obvious. Audiences might assume they know who (or what) the “bad guy” is when the movie opens on an apocalyptic sermon about black displacement in the outskirts of the city. After all, it’s well known that black San Franciscans are being displaced. But instead of lecturing on any issue, the film subtly, artistically, and honestly shows how it’s sky-rocketing housing prices that are chasing them away.
The specters of gentrification and displacement haunt every inch of writer/director Joe Talbot’s first film, but he never actually names the story’s villain.
Talbot and his co-writer Jimmie Fails instead offer a semi-autobiographical story based on Fails’ life that is brilliantly nuanced. At its core, the movie is about a working-class black man who dreams of owning his own home, like his father and grandfather before him. The family once lived in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood in a Victorian home that, according to family lore, was built by Jimmie’s grandfather in the 1940s.
A financial hardship in the 1990s destroyed the family and they lost the house. Jimmie now lives with his best friend Mont on the outskirts of town, but he and Mont make regular trips back into Fillmore to visit the house.
When the elderly couple currently living there also loses the home, it goes on the market and Jimmie tries to buy it back, only to find that he doesn’t make a whiff of the money it would cost for a down payment. Few Americans can. By Zillow’s estimate, the average home in San Francisco now costs a staggering $1.3 million, compared to $245,000 nationwide.
The Last Black Man isn’t pushing simplistic narratives about gentrification. The villain isn’t a racist landlord, greedy developers, or any of the stereotypical targets we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fare. Instead, we have a story that humanizes the reality that black families truly have been squeezed out of San Francisco.
Housing has become unbearably expensive in San Francisco, and while the film admirably doesn’t blame one person for all the city’s hardships, that doesn’t mean there isn’t blame to assign. Both San Francisco and the State of California have seemingly done everything they can to restrict the supply of housing, through onerous layers of red tape, nonsensical zoning policy, and hostile laws for anyone brave enough to rent out their property.
While the stated rationale for the city’s restrictive zoning laws is typically couched in sentiments of “beauty” and “preservation,” the effects are clear. Rents rise, poor and minority families are squeezed out, and the only people remaining are the obscenely wealthy or tragic clusters of the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and family-less.
And San Francisco isn’t the only city where residents are forced to battle the nameless villain of restrictive zoning and housing policies. PLF clients Lyndsey and Sharon Ballinger are both members of the military, and they rented out their Oakland home when the military required them to temporarily move across the country. When they were ready to move back, they learned they’d have to pay their tenants over $7,000 in “move-out fees” despite the tenants having plenty of notice. Yes, they had to pay to move back into their own home.
Or take another set of PLF clients, the Cherks in Marin, California. They own a plot of land and wanted to split it into two, building a home for their retirement on one plot and selling the other plot for housing. Marin County government extorted them to the tune of $40,000 in “affordable housing fees” for the privilege of selling their own land for housing.
These are conscientious property owners who could be doing their part to alleviate California’s massive housing problem, if only government would stop stomping on their property rights.
At the end of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jimmie doesn’t get to ride off in the sunset. Nor does he get a (much-needed) showdown with San Francisco’s miles of housing regulations. Instead, he paddles a rowboat deep into the Bay, toward its iconic bridge. Tragically, he is lost at sea, when what he truly needed was a piece of land all his own.