Home Is Where the House Is: Pride and Gentrification in The Last Black Man in San Francisco

The Last Black Man in San Francisco, © 2019 - A24

Gentrification. The word is typically used to describe the change a city or neighborhood will undergo as a series of adjustments are implemented to accommodate the influx of a wealthier class of people.

Sometimes the changes are seemingly small, like when a bodega frequented by locals becomes an artisanal café that boasts about their use of the newest strain of non-dairy milk to hit the market. Other times the changes are more noticeable, like when the rent-controlled apartment building across the street suddenly advertises million-dollar condos.

Looking at it from the perspective of a well-established outsider, it might seem strange that locals would frown upon what seems like a beautifying and updating of their city. However, when forced to imagine what it might be like to be pushed out of a multi-generational community because a wealthy app developer likes everything about a neighborhood except the people who built it, the emotions may start to well up.

Among those suffering from an overwhelmingly bleak disposition due to the tech industry boom overtaking the Bay Area are the native residents of San Francisco. Once lauded as a city made for outcasts, it now bears a strange intermingling of young hipster tech geniuses, starving artists, and working-class natives with community roots that span generations. A burning question permeates among its inhabitants as the population continues to shift: who deserves to be here?

To that, Jimmie Fails of The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) might ask, do you love it?

This question lingers throughout the film as the character exposes viewers to the city from end to end, providing a prideful lens of a hometown he slowly fails to recognize as time passes. One thing that he makes sure stays true to memory is what he considers to be his real home: his childhood house. Beyond the intricate molding and stained glass windows bears the legacy of the Fails family revolving around the local legend that Jimmie’s grandfather built the house from the ground up.

The traditional Victorian home in the film rests in the heart of San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The history of the neighborhood chronicles a transition from Japanese American to African American culture. Following the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, middle-class African American families moved into the vacant neighborhood and built a thriving community that would come to be known as Harlem West. The Fails family legend tells of Jimmie’s grandfather being among the earlier African American inhabitants. However, in lieu of wrongfully taking a house from an interned family, he honorably builds his own.

The film depicts current day Fillmore District as lacking any trace of its former African American or Japanese American roots, save for the historic Victorian structures (now worth millions of dollars). In the scenes where Jimmie admires his childhood home, he appears severely out of place and is often the only Black man in sight.

Nevertheless, his grandfather’s legend is a driving force for him as he strives to maintain the house that had been relinquished by his family decades prior. Surviving on the salary of a geriatric nurse, he’s reluctant to accept that he may never get to live there again. His pride for his home allows it to become an obsession. He touches up the trim, he removes trash from the garden, and he has his best friend, Mont, sketch him posing comfortably near the front window. Despite the efforts of the new owners to uproot him, Jimmie lingers.

When the opportunity arises for Jimmie to reclaim the house, he approaches his transition with enthusiasm seemingly unnatural to the new wave of inhabitants in the neighborhood. He works to restore the house to its former, classic state, allowing the Fails family legacy a form of rebirth. For a moment, he is allowed to feel at home in a house he’s always loved.

When he's forcibly displaced and once again forced to stare at his home from the outside, Jimmie’s pride remains. To him, the house has become a legend in itself; it is a beautiful structure in a city he refuses to be removed from. His home is not the house. It’s where the house is: San Francisco.

Jimmie’s character represents a breed of native San Franciscan that remains tethered to a city that is threatening to abandon him. The city is more than a place. It’s the culture created by the people who love it and take pride in what they’ve built, literally and figuratively. In a scene where Jimmie overhears two women complaining about their recent move to the city for tech jobs, he chimes in, “Do you love it?” Off-put by the question, the women brush him off. But he persists and says, “You can’t hate it unless you love it.”

As the level of displacement of working-class and middle-class San Franciscans continues, and more people are forced to leave the city, the subsequent level of hometown pride is overwhelming. Jimmie’s message serves to suggests that a prerequisite for incoming residents to the new, gentrified San Francisco is simple. If you must stay, you must love it. Unconditionally.

For Further Reading:

A Citywide Crisis in Gentrification? 

Gentrification Spreads an Upheaval in San Francisco’s Mission District

Gentrification and the Battle for the Heart of San Francisco

Urban Displacement San Francisco Map 

About the Author

Mercedes K. Milner is a Co-Founder and Administrator of the Write or Die Chicks and the Writers Group Coordinator. She is a staff writer for the WODC Blog and she heads the Reading on Writing column.