Gentrification destroyed the San Francisco I knew. Austin is next
Austin, Texas, is in the grip of the kind of gentrification that destroyed San Francisco, and it feels like my duty as a film-maker to document it. I think you have to be a thick-skulled, opinionated, cranky bugger to make films. As a failed comedian who needed to find another way to process everyday life, filmmaking and photography have maintained my sanity, and our latest film tackles the changes I’m seeing to my local community.
I lived in San Francisco in the 90s as big tech was incubating, and there was a belief that the coming democratization of technology was going to unite us and better the world. There was an incredible sense of anticipation. What we, as 20-year-old punks enjoying the SF Mission district, did not see happening was the complete overrunning of affordable neighborhoods by tech workers and real-estate developers. Housing had become an act of gladiator combat where the most powerful weapon was cash.
During the pandemic, it seemed as if Austin had become the number one city that people moved to on the social employment site LinkedIn. Like San Francisco 20 years ago, people are coming to Austin to work in the tech industry and bask in the weird pseudo liberal culture that the city has become known for. Houses now regularly sell at a hundred thousand dollars over asking price. This has coincided with the building of a Google tower downtown, Facebook ordering 2m sq ft of office space, and Tesla moving their headquarters to Austin.
The true human impact of this influx of highly paid and economically mobile workforce is felt in the form of a housing crisis. I have had a keen eye on this since 2010 when I did a master’s degree in sustainability in the architecture programme at the University of Texas with a focus on affordable housing. What I found so disheartening in architecture school was the focus on sustainability in the design of luxury houses and buildings that a majority of people could not afford or access. I understand sustainability more in terms of our ability to retain historical residents more than about designing energy-efficient structures. By 2014, I had refocused my energies on an equally brutal career: film-making. I believe that through visual storytelling we can communicate social needs and seek to preserve communities on the frontlines
of gentrification.
In my new documentary short, Happiness is a Journey, made alongside my film-making partner, Ivete Lucas, we try to place the audience with people who have very little power or ability to resist the changing cityscape of Austin. The experimental split-screen documentary follows warehouse workers through the night as they process newspapers for delivery on the night before Christmas. Their warehouse sits on one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the southern US, a place with plans for massive redevelopment. The physical newspapers they are bagging and delivering will be phased out in three years.
Our main protagonist in the film, Eddie “Bear” Lopez, lives less than a mile from the warehouse in East Austin, in a house he has called home for 60 years. Some of his colleagues are insomniacs, some have been delivering papers since they were teens, others are mothers working the night shift to keep their children fed, or formerly incarcerated men looking for re-entry to the workforce. When most people are huddled in their homes trying to sleep in anticipation of Christmas morning,
Bear and co are scrambling to get out of the warehouse with their papers before 3am.
What we hope to preserve in this film are the everyday routines of the invisible working class in a city that will soon be unaffordable for them. Much like I saw gentrification change the Bay Area, it is transforming Austin, and this film is an act of sustainability. We must recognize and give a face to the vulnerable people who make up our city before it is too late and they are forced to leave.
Happiness is a Journey is released on the Guardian today. Watch more Guardian Documentaries here. Sign up for the Guardian Documentaries newsletter here to be the first to hear about new releases and exclusive events.