Company Town Trailer from Snitow-Kaufman Productions on Vimeo.
The story of a neighborhood fighter, Aaron Peskin, taking back a seat on the Board of Supervisors from a shill for the tech money men is worth your time. Aaron is what I call a "good candidate" -- willing to do what it takes and put up with the ugly aggravations of fighting for an office for a purpose beyond personal ambition.
Gentrification isn't just about new people coming to town. An awful lot of San Franciscans moved here from elsewhere, either because elsewhere was intolerable or for this city's wacky attractions. It's true; people come and go and cities change. Lots of San Franciscans didn't much like it when hippies and gays over ran their "respectable" burg several decades ago, but we eventually came to terms.
Today's gentrification is about how big money is polluting our politics and crushing chances for people without hedge funds and tech billions to live here -- forever. And the excluded will include ordinary tech employees who don't hit the big time, as most won't.
Company Town is showing in the Bay Area several places in the next few weeks.
3 comments:
SF has never been respectable! Heh heh.
I dunno -- when I was dispatched at 18 to Berkeley via a relative in San Francisco (Union St), I was admonished to wear gloves if I went downtown. Shortly thereafter, I found North Beach.
Hattie -- I think you would like this movie, though I don't see that it is available anywhere. It is full of great scenes in the real Chinatown.
Oh, yeah, but that was pretty well over before the mid-sixties. It was a point of pride, but SF was never very pure. Joan Didion is the expert on all that.
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