Landlords

SF supervisors vote to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s short-term rentals

Sasha Cuttler
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SF supervisors vote to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s short-term rentals

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today approved controversial legislation to legalize and regulate short-term housing rentals to tourists, voting 7-4 on the package after supervisors narrowly rejected a series of amendments to rein in an activity that has taken thousands of units off the market for local residents.

Amendments to limit hosted rentals to 90 nights per year, to require that Airbnb pay about $25 million in back transient occupancy taxes it owes the city before the legislation would go into effect, to exclude in-law units from eligibility for short-term rentals, and to limit rentals in single-family home neighborhoods failed on a series of 5-6 votes.

Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Norman Yee, and Jane Kim voted as a block on the amendments to limit the scope of short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and other companies, as a broad coalition that includes tenant, landlord, labor, neighborhood, and affordable housing groups had sought. Kim parted from that block to vote yes on the final legislation, which the others opposed.

Amendments proposed by Kim to give housing nonprofits the right to file injunctive lawsuits to help enforce the legislation and by Campos to ban short-term rentals in units that have been cleared of tenants by Ellis Act evictions were approved 8-3. But because those changes were substantial, they were turned into trailing legislation that must go back to the Planning Commission.

Despite a series of amendments since Board President David Chiu proposed the legislation over the summer, its basic tenets have changed little. It requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city and rent out only their primary residence, which they must live in for at least 275 days out of the year, with the Planning Department enforcing the regulation on a complaint basis.

That effectively limits the rental of entire homes to 90 days per year, but Chiu, Airbnb, and its hosts strenuously rejected calls to extend that cap to hosted rentals, such as spare bedrooms that might otherwise be available to permanent city residents. Chiu said his legislation was “framed through the lens of our housing affordability crisis,” arguing that many San Franciscans rely on Airbnb income to make their rent.

Avalos said he understands that position, but he said tourists shouldn’t be displacing San Franciscans, proposing the 90-day limit on all short-term rentals. “I think it’s important to maximize our residential housing stock to the utmost,” he said. Mar also voiced strong support for extended the cap, criticizing the “cult-like” beliefs by some home-sharing advocates.

As I’ve been reporting in the Guardian over the last two and a half years, Airbnb and its hosts have been openly defying city laws against short-term rentals, as well as ruling by the Tax Collector’s Office that the city’s transient occupancy tax (aka hotel tax) of about 15 percent applies to short-term rentals.

Airbnb just began to collect that tax for its guests last week, but Campos argued that it should pay those back taxes going back to the city ruling in the spring of 2012 before the city legalizes and validates its activities. Company representatives have said its TOT collection would total about $11 million per year.

“I believe it’s only right that Airbnb make good on its back taxes before this legislation becomes law,” Campos said, arguing this $10 billion company is being rewarded for defying city regulators. “Do we give special treatment to a multi-billion-dollar company?”

But supporters of the legislation were anxious to move it forward, despite the dizzying series of complicated amendments, something Avalos said was unusual. “I’m surprised it was given the green light to leave today,” Avalos told reporters after the vote. “There was a lot of pressure to move it forward.”

Now the question will be whether the Planning Department can effectively enforce the regulations, particularly given that Airbnb has been unwilling to share data that might help in that effort. City officials have seemed powerless to enforce laws against short-term rentals that have been on the books for decades, even with rising public concern about the issue over the last year.

“I’m concerned that the legislation simply isn’t enforceable,” Kim said, arguing for the private right of action component that will be returning for board consideration in the coming months.

The other question is whether we’ve heard the end of an issue that has polarized city residents, or whether the coalition of opponents will succeed in a threatened initiative campaign to put more stringent new short-term rental regulations before voters next year.

Sup. Mark Farrell thanked Chiu for taking on the issue despite the intractable positions on both sides, saying, “I think everyone recognizes this to be a no-win situation.” Wiener are referenced the wide emotional divide on the issue: “The views around it are so intensely divergent.”

“The status quo is not working. This system of home sharing is happening in the shadows with little or no oversight,” Wiener said. “It’s time to bring it out of the shadows.”  

Even supporters of the legislation, such as Breed, said they would continue closely monitoring the situation to ensure the legislation helps curbs widespread abuses of lucrative short-term rentals, including landlords evicting rent-controlled tenants to use Airbnb and entrepreneurial tenants renting out multiple apartments through Airbnb, practices Chiu sought to curb.

“The one thing that I think everyone can agree upon is the status quo is not working,” Chiu said early in the hearing.

After the legislation — which comes back to the board for a perfunctory final vote next week and goes into effect in February barring legal challenges — Airbnb’s Public Policy Director David Owen told the Guardian, “It’s a tremendous step forward and we have a lot of work to do.”

Opponents seek changes in Airbnb legislation before big hearing

Sasha Cuttler
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Opponents seek changes in Airbnb legislation before big hearing

The broad and diverse coalition opposing Sup. David Chiu’s legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental companies — which the Board of Supervisors will consider tomorrow [Tues/7] — have boiled its many concerns down to three particular demands.

The coalition of tenant and landlord groups, affordable housing and neighborhood advocates, hotel workers and homeowners, and asundry other community leaders held another in a series of rallies on the steps of City Hall on Friday, again raising a variety of concerns.

But now, they’re penned a letter that has “three core recommedations.” The first is a call to limit rentals to 90 nights per year. That has been a feature of Chiu’s legislation from the beginning for unhosted rentals, given that it requires hosts to be permanent residents who live in their units at least 275 days per year, but the legislation still allows hosts to rent out a spare bedroom through Airbnb with few limits.

“If this is not done, the current proposal will allow year-round tourist rentals in every residential unit in the City which will drive up housing prices, create further economic incentive to increase evictions, further deplete housing stock for residents, and deteriorate the quality of life in our residential neighborhoods,” the coalition wrote in a letter to Chiu.

The supervisor had been a little cagey about the 90-day limit in the past, but when we pressed him on the issue during his endorsement interview with the Guardian last week, he confirmed that his legislation would allow spare bedrooms to be rented for more than 90 nights per year.

Chiu said his primary concern with the legislation was ensuring entire homes can’t be rented more than 90 nights per year, which he said was the main threat to the city’s rental housing stock, but he was open to amendments that would limit the rental of spare rooms, although that’s a practice he still wants to allow.

“We are grappling with the idea of what that balance is,” he told us.

The coalition is also asking for the legislation to explicitly ban short-term rentals of below-market-rate units and other affordable housing built with public subsidies. The third recommendation seeks to include “expedited private right of action” in the legislation, allowing neighbors and other third parties to file enforcement actions with the courts without waiting for city enforcement processes to slowly play out first.

That’s been a big problem recently as the San Francisco Tenants Union and other groups try to file lawsuits against landlords that have evicted rent-controlled tenants in favor of tourist rentals through Airbnb and other sites, but they’ve been prevented from doing so by foot-dragging in the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection.

Members of this coalition will also present individual demands tomorrow, but the coalition also conveyed its opposition to supervisors approving this legislation tomorrow:

“We are unanimous in our position that the process being pursued by Supervisor Chiu is rushed. The City will live with the intended (and unintended) consequences of this legislation for many, many years. We implore you to amend the legislation with the recommendations articulated above, and as necessary postpone the Board hearing on this measure. This is one of the most important housing policy issues the City has faced in a decade, and the ‘solution’ by the Board of Supervisors must be done right and not hurried.”

The legislation will dominate the otherwise sparse agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, which starts at 2pm in City Hall. We’ll be live-tweeting the action, so follow along @sfbg or check back here for the full report. 

Tenants face absurd lawsuits as “low-fault” evictions increase

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Tenants face absurd lawsuits as “low-fault” evictions increase

An annual report issued by the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC) highlights some of the outrageous reasons landlords use to evict tenants. Since 2009, EDC reported, there’s been a 62 percent increase in the number of breach-of-lease cases citywide.

Violations cited in the report included offenses such as “parking outside the parking lines,” or even cooking during nighttime hours.

One tenant, Clifton Reed, was evicted along with his young family after a sudden $1,000-per-month rent increase, which the landlord claimed was for storing construction equipment in the garage of their Bernal Heights home, something they’d previously done without a problem. “We were tenants living in the neighborhood for 20 years,” Reed told the Guardian.

The family sought assistance from EDC, who fought the eviction charges and negotiated a settlement with the landlord.

The drawn-out eviction case eventually ended with an $8,500 settlement and a 90-day timeframe for him and his family to move out, Reed said. After evicting the other tenants in the building following Reed’s eviction, the landlord eventually sold the property for approximately $1.8 million. 

Reed, who now lives in Vallejo but still commutes to the city, said the recent wave of evictions in San Francisco has particularly impacted artists and musicians from his old neighborhood. “They’re targeting income levels, and musicians don’t make a lot of money,” he said. “It’s really a shame.”

According to the EDC report, 20 percent of evicted households assisted by the nonprofit legal aid group – which represented 94 percent of San Francisco tenants facing just-cause eviction lawsuits in 2013 – had at least one child under 18 years old.

Families weren’t the only disproportionately impacted group, as 88 percent of total tenant households targeted with eviction lawsuits were also low-income, defined as making at or less than $36,950 per year for an individual. And 29 percent of the eviction cases concerned tenants housed in units owned by landlords who receive city funding, such as supportive housing in single-room occupancy hotels.

The EDC report also signaled that San Francisco’s communities of color remain at the forefront of the eviction crisis. According to the report, although San Francisco’s black population is only 6 percent, people who identify as African American represented 29 percent of those impacted by eviction in 2013. Additionally, 40 percent of tenants evicted from the Bayview neighborhood identified as black or African American.

Non-English speakers were also targeted, as 22 percent of evictions from the Mission District impacted households who spoke a language other than English.

The rise in “low-fault” evictions in 2013 occurred on a parallel track with no-fault evictions, which have received a great deal of media attention. Evictions that are based on an alleged action or violation by a tenant, as opposed to no-fault evictions initiated under the Ellis Act, for instance, grant less time for a tenant to vacate their unit. They’re easier on landlord’s wallets and don’t restrict subsequent use of a unit.

Low-fault evictions, or minor breach-of-lease cases, are providing the ideal platform for landlords to oust their tenants while still claiming some type of violation, the report indicates. The lengthy, complicated suits are often difficult for tenants to defend themselves against.

The EDC report showed an absence of court appearances in 38 percent of the 3,423 Residential Unlawful Detainers cases in 2013, demonstrating that tenants did not respond to the eviction notice in within the five-day deadline. 

“Tenants just miss this narrow window,” said Tyler McMillan, executive director of the EDC. “It’s one of the shortest timelines in the court system.”

Eviction notices have demanded tenants leave in as little as 10 days, as was the case of EDC client Joann Agnew-Porter. Agnew-Porter’s daughter, who lived in the unit, was laid off her job and scraping by on a fixed income. Their rental building, Friendship Village, an affordable housing community in the Western Addition, had been paying back-rent, when suddenly the mother and daughter pair received an eviction notice, giving them 10 days to come up with $2,100 of back-rent or leave the premises.

“I couldn’t come up with that,” Agnew-Porter said. “We’ve always been good tenants; we’re working people, we haven’t had loud music or people hanging out outside, none of that,” she added. After receiving assistance from EDC, a court determined that the apartment manager had mistakenly charged them that amount of back-rent.

“The story of increasing “low-fault” evictions is one that impacts some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable communities and ultimately threatens the diversity that makes San Francisco so unique,” the EDC report said.

The full report is available online at the EDC website here.

Rising tenant buyouts in SF targeted by new legislation and map

Sasha Cuttler
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Rising tenant buyouts in SF targeted by new legislation and map

A new interactive map published today by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project shows the spike in tenancy buyouts over the last year in San Francisco, just in time to raise awareness for Sup. David Campos’ proposed legislation to document and regulate tenant buyouts, which has a hearing later this month.

The map only records buyouts reported to the San Francisco Tenants Union, up 126 percent from 2012 to 2013 and expected to be even higher when data for 2014 is collected, but the Tenants Union estimates the number to be only about one-third of the buyouts actually taking place.

Campos’s legislation, which will go before the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee on Sept. 22, seeks to record any buyout taking place in San Francisco with the rent board, and to guarantee the information of tenants rights to the tenant being bought out. [UPDATE: Because of the likely fiscal impacts of the legislation, it has been moved to the Budget & Finance Committee for its first hearing, with no hearing date scheduled yet]. 

“Regulating and recording buyouts isn’t going to stop them, we don’t believe that’s something within our power or within our rights,” Erin McElroy, a member of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, told us.

The legislation will, however, impose the same condo conversion prohibitions that are already in place for no-fault evictions. The buyouts were virtually nonexistent before 2006, when San Francisco passed legislation severely limiting the conversion to condos of units that had been cleared of tenants use no-fault evictions.

“Buyouts are really the main way that landlords are evicting tenants,” Ted Gullickson, executive director of the Tenants Union, told us. “They threaten them with an Ellis Act eviction, then come in sweet with a buyout. We need legislation that takes away the incentive for one of the biggest methods of displacement in the city.”

“There are just so many components to the housing crisis [in San Francisco] that we need to know all that we can,” McElroy said. “Most tenants don’t know their rights and they often aren’t being offered enough.”

But groups with opposing views don’t believe that keeping a public record of a private contract is legal.

“Buyouts are mutually beneficial for both landlords and tenants. A tenant can get the money they need so that they can put down a mortgage on their own home,” Charlie Goss from the San Francisco Apartment Association told us. “It’s also a private contract. At face value, there is nothing wrong with recording buyouts, it just may not be constitutional.”

Both sides of the aisle are heated, and Gullickson expects a long fight before the legislation makes any progress, but he thinks that if the tenants side can persuade the more moderate supervisors, it can go through.

Racing for solutions

Michael Redmond
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Racing for solutions

rebecca@sfbg.com

Although there are five seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors up for reelection this fall, incumbents face few contenders with the requisite cash and political juice needed to mount a serious challenge. The one race that has stirred interest among local politicos is the bid to represent District 10, the rapidly changing southeastern corner of San Francisco that spans the Bayview, Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.

Sup. Malia Cohen, who narrowly beat an array of more than a dozen candidates in 2010, has raised way more money than her best-funded opponent, progressive neighborhood activist Tony Kelly, who garnered 2,095 first-place votes in the last D10 race, slightly more than Cohen’s, before the final outcome was determined by ranked-choice voting tallies.

For the upcoming Nov. 4 election, Cohen has received $242,225 in contributions, compared with Kelly’s $42,135, campaign finance records show. But Kelly, who collected the 1,000 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot and qualified for public financing, has secured key progressive endorsements, including former Mayor Art Agnos, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Sups. David Campos and John Avalos, and the Potrero Hill Democratic Club.

Others who’ve filed to run for this office include Marlene Tran, a retired educator who has strong ties to families in the district, especially in Visitacion Valley, through her teaching and language-access programs (she’s known by kids as “Teacher Tran”); Shawn Richard, the founder of a nonprofit organization that offers workshops for youth to prevent gun violence; and Ed Donaldson, who was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and works on economic development issues. DeBray Carptenter, an activist who has weighed in on police violence, is running as a write-in candidate.

But the outcome in this dynamic district could be determined by more than campaign cash or political endorsements. That’s because the D10 supervisor faces the unique, unenviable challenge of taking on some of the city’s most intractable problems, which have disproportionately plagued this rapidly changing district.

Longstanding challenges, such as a high unemployment and crime rates, public health concerns, social displacement, and poor air quality, have plagued D10 for years. But now, fast-growing D10 is becoming a microcosm for how San Francisco resolves its growing pains and balances the interests of capital and community.

 

MIX OF CHALLENGES

While candidate forums and questionnaires tend to gauge political hopefuls on where they draw the line on citywide policy debates, such as Google bus stops or fees for Sunday parking meters, neighborhood issues facing D10 have particularly high stakes for area residents.

While other supervisors represent neighborhoods where multiple transit lines crisscross through in a rainbow of route markers on Muni maps, D10 is notoriously underserved by public transit. The high concentration of industrial land uses created major public health concerns. A Department of Public Health study from 2006 determined that Bayview Hunters Point residents were making more hospital visits on average than people residing in other San Francisco neighborhoods, especially for asthma and congestive heart failure.

Unemployment in D-10 hovers near 12 percent, triple the citywide average of 4 percent. Cohen told us efforts are being made on this front, noting that $3 million had been invested in the Third Street corridor to assist merchants with loans and façade improvements, and that programs were underway to connect residents with health care and hospitality jobs, as well as service industry jobs.

“The mantra is that the needle hasn’t moved at all,” Cohen noted, but she said things are getting better. “We are moving in the same downward trend with regard to unemployment.”

Nevertheless, the high unemployment is also linked with health problems, food insecurity — and violence. In recent months, D10 has come into the spotlight due to tragic incidents of gun violence. From the start of this year to Sept. 8, there were 13 homicides in D10.

Fourth of July weekend was particularly deadly in the Bayview and D10 public housing complexes, with four fatal shootings. Cohen responded with a press conference to announce her plan to convene a task force addressing the problem, telling us it will be “focused on preventing gun violence rather than reacting to it.”

The idea, she said, is to bring in expert stakeholders who hadn’t met about this topic before, including mental-health experts and those working with at-risk youth.

“I think we need to go deeper” than in previous efforts, Cohen said, dismissing past attempts as superficial fixes.

But Cohen’s task force plan quickly drew criticism from political opponents and other critics, including Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who dismissed it as empty rhetoric.

“How many people are cool with yet another task force?” Kelly said in a press statement challenging the move. “We can’t wait any longer to stem the deadly tide of violence in District 10. Supervisor Cohen’s task force won’t even propose solutions till 2017. We can’t wait that long.”

Kelly told us he’s formulated a five-point plan to tackle gun violence, explaining that it involved calling for a $10 million budget supplemental to bolster family services, reentry programs, job placement, and summer activities aimed at addressing poverty and service gaps. Kelly also said he’d push for a greater emphasis on community policing, with officers walking a beat instead of remaining inside a vehicle.

“How do you know $10 million is enough?” Cohen responded. “When you hear critics say $10 million, there is no way to indicate whether we’d need more or less.” She also took issue with the contention that her task force wouldn’t reach a solution soon enough, saying, “I never put a timeline on the task force.”

Cohen also said she wanted to get a better sense of where all of the past funding had gone that was supposed to have alleviated gun violence. “We’ve spent a lot of money — millions — and one of the things I am interested in doing is to do an audit about the finances,” she said.

She also wants to explore a partnership with the Guardian Angels, community volunteers who conduct safety patrols, to supplement policing. Cohen was dismissive of her critics. “Tony was not talking about black issues before this,” she said. “He hasn’t done one [gun] buyback. There’s no depth to what any of these critics are saying.”

Tran, who spoke with the Guardian at length, said she’d started trying to address rampant crime in Visitacion Valley 25 years ago and said more needs to be done to respond to recent shootings.

“There was no real method for the sizable non-English speaking victims to make reports then,” Tran wrote in a blog post, going on to say that she’d ensured materials were translated to Chinese languages to facilitate communication with the Police Department. “When more and more residents became ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement, community safety improved,” she said.

Richard, whose Brothers Against Guns has been working with youth for 20 years and organizing events such as midnight basketball games, said he opposed Cohen’s task force because it won’t arrive at a solution quickly enough. He said he thought a plan should be crafted along with youth advocates, law enforcement, juvenile and adult probation officers, and clergy members to come up with a solution that would bolster youth employment opportunities.

“I’ve talked with all 13 families” that lost young people to shootings this year, Richard said, and that he attended each of the funerals.

 

CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD

Standing outside the Potrero Terrace public housing complex at 25th and Connecticut streets on a recent sunny afternoon, Kelly was flanked by affordable housing advocates clutching red-and-yellow “Tony Kelly for District Supervisor” campaign signs. The press conference had been called to unveil his campaign plan to bolster affordable housing in D10.

Pointing out that Cohen had voted “no endorsement” at the Democratic County Central Committee on Proposition G — the measure that would tax property-flipping to discourage real estate speculation and evictions — Kelly said, “This is not a time to be silent.”

While Cohen had accepted checks from landlords who appeared on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s list of worst offenders for carrying out Ellis Act evictions, Kelly said he’s pledged not to accept any funding from developers or Ellis Act evictors. Asked if any had offered, Kelly responded, “Some. They’re not knocking down my door.”

Cohen told us that she hadn’t supported Prop. G, a top priority for affordable housing advocates, because she objected to certain technical provisions that could harm small property owners in her district. As for the contributions from Ellis Act evictors, she said the checks had been returned once the error was discovered. Her formal policy, she said, is not to intentionally take money from anyone involved in an Ellis Act eviction.

Speaking outside Potrero Terrace, Kelly said he thought all housing projects built on public land should make at least one-third of their units affordable to most San Franciscans. He also said renovation of public housing projects could be accelerated if the city loaned out money from its $19 billion employee retirement fund. Under the current system, funding for those improvements is leveraged by private capital.

Mold, pests, and even leaking sewage are well-documented problems in public housing. Dorothy Minkins, a public housing resident who joined Kelly and the others, told us that she’s been waiting for years for rotting sheetrock to be replaced by the Housing Authority, adding that water damage from her second-floor bathroom has left a hole in the ceiling of her living room. She related a joke she’d heard from a neighbor awaiting similar repairs: “He said, Christ will come before they come to fix my place.”

Lack of affordable housing is a sweeping trend throughout San Francisco, but it presents a unique challenge in D10, where incomes are lower on average (the notable exceptions are in Potrero Hill, dotted with fine residential properties overlooking the city that would easily fetch millions, and Dogpatch, where sleek new condominium dwellings often house commuters working at tech and biotech firms in the South Bay).

Home sale prices in the Bayview shot up 59 percent in two years, prompting the San Francisco Business Times to deem it “a hot real estate market adorned with bidding wars and offers way above asking prices.”

One single-family home even sold for $1.3 million. Historically, the Bayview has been an economically depressed, working-class area with a high rate of home ownership due to the affordability of housing — but that’s been impacted by foreclosures in recent years, fueling displacement.

Although statistics from the Eviction Defense Collaborative show that evictions did occur in the Bayview in 2013, particularly impacting African Americans and single-parent households, Cohen noted that evictions aren’t happening in D10 with the same frequency as in the Tenderloin or the Mission.

“When it comes to communities of color in the southeast, it’s about foreclosure or mismanagement of funds,” explained Cohen.

She said that a financial counseling services center had opened on Evans Street to assist people who are facing foreclosure, and added that she thought more should be done to market newly constructed affordable units to communities in need.

“There’s an error in how they’re marketing,” she said, because the opportunities are too often missed.

But critics say more is needed to prevent the neighborhood from undergoing a major transformation without input from residents.

“This district is being transformed,” Richard said. “A lot of folks are moving out — they’re moving to Vallejo, Antioch, Pittsburg. They don’t want to deal with the issues, and the violence, and the cost.”

At the same time, he noted, developers are flocking to the area, which has a great deal more undeveloped land than in other parts of the city.

“The community has no one they can turn to who will hold these developers accountable,” he said. “If the community doesn’t have a stake in it, then who’s winning?”

 

Airbnb must work with SF

Michael Redmond
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EDITORIAL

Airbnb and other companies that facilitate illegal short-term apartment rentals to tourists visiting San Francisco need to engage in a more honest and direct dialogue with this city’s political leaders and stakeholders, something that became clear during last week’s Planning Commission hearing on legislation that would legalize and regulate short-term sublets.

This is a complicated, vexing issue that defies simple solutions, as Board of Supervisors President David Chiu learned as he and his aides spent more than year developing the legislation. They did a pretty good job at striking a balance between letting people occasionally rent out their homes and preventing Airbnb from being used to remove apartments from the already strained local housing market.

A key provision for striking that balance was to limit rentals to no more than 90 nights per year, but the Planning Commission — dominated by appointees from Mayor Ed Lee, who has long coddled Airbnb’s scofflaw approach to the city (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13) — removed that provision, which the Board of Supervisors should reinstate.

The commission also seemed to side with landlords who want to prevent their tenants from renting out rooms, calling for landlords to be notified when their tenants seek to become Airbnb hosts, another provision the board should reject. Landlords using Airbnb to get around rent control laws is at least as bad as tenants who violate their leases by subletting rooms, and this legislation shouldn’t favor one group over the other.

If the city decides to end its decades-old ban on short-term apartment rentals, it should have a compelling reason to do so. Maybe we want to allow struggling city residents to make some extra money while they’re out of town, or to have some flexibility in renting out rooms without taking on permanent tenants, which are legitimate if difficult policy questions.

But it seems like much of the discussion is about how to rein in the widespread violation of city housing and tax laws caused by Airbnb, which has refused requests to share more of its occupancy data, dodged its obligation to collect the city’s transient occupancy tax, and failed to even send a high-level representative to last week’s hearing. Yet the legislation would require the company’s cooperation to help enforce the regulations.

If Airbnb and its hosts want the city to legalize lucrative short-term rentals in San Francisco, then the company should be willing to engage in high-level public discussions with city leaders to shape this important legislation, rather than simply whipping its hosts into a libertarian frenzy with deceptive public relations campaigns.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has gotten rich with a business model that is illegal in its home city, so the very least he can do is show up at City Hall next month to make a good faith effort to help solve the divisive problems that his company is creating.

 

Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

Sasha Cuttler
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Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

People are talking about this article from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about how much three fall ballot measures will cost the city, but many progressives and political outsiders are more focused on the juicy details lower down in the article about the spiteful, bullying political tactics practiced by the Mayor’s Office these days.

Mayor Ed Lee and his top aides are said to be “fuming” that Sup. Scott Wiener and five of his colleagues placed a measure on the fall ballot that would give Muni more money as the city’s population increases — and that “the mayor’s office seems to be hinting that it will target programs important to the six supervisors who voted to place Wiener’s proposal on the ballot.”

The measure is retroactive to 2003, the last time Muni had an increase in its funding from the city General Fund, so it would mean an immediate funding bump of $20 million or more, which the mayor is disingenuousnessly casting as budget buster. Keep in mind this same mayor unilaterally ended Sunday meters this year, costing Muni about $10 million a year, and supports corporate welfare programs that cost the city $17 million last year.

This spiteful and retaliatory approach to public policy by Lee, the elected official with the most control over the city’s pursestrings, and his minions was also a big factor in Sup. Jane Kim’s capitulation to the Mayor’s Office on her housing balance measure. Sources tell the Guardian that affordable housing advocates were threatened with reduced city funding from the Mayor’s Office if they continued to push for Kim’s original measure.

The Chronicle article was based largely on a Controller’s Office memo claiming the three ballot measures — the Muni measure, a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2018, and reauthorization of the Children’s Fund — would be the “largest voter-directed increase in general fund spending in a single election in city history,” costing $104 million by 2018.

More than half of that is from the minimum wage increase, which will increase the city’s cost of contracting low-paid nonprofit workers to perform public services. But in this increasingly expensive city, does anyone really think $15 per hour is an unreasonable wage? Should the city itself be exploiting workers?

After the city recently slashed building and planning fees charged to developers, and in a city that continues to coddle big corporations and landlords rather than tax them fairly, the Mayor’s Office ire over policies that help low-wage workers and Muni riders is particularly telling of its values and priorities.  

Landlord plaintiff in eviction fee case has history of tenant law violations

Sasha Cuttler
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Landlord plaintiff in eviction fee case has history of tenant law violations

San Francisco landlord attorneys filed a lawsuit on Thursday against San Francisco and five tenants in an effort to overturn Sup. David Campos’ new law requiring higher relocation assistance payments to tenants evicted under the Ellis Act, but the main plaintiff in the case may not be the helpless victim the suit purports him to be.  

Under the recently implemented measure, landlords must now pay the difference between their tenants’ current rent and the cost of “comparable” units for two years, as determined by the City Controller’s Office. Though many property owners haven’t been deterred by the measure, as evidenced by the Ellis Act evictions that continue to sweep the city, a group of landlords and their attorneys filed a lawsuit (Jerrold Jacoby et al. v. City and County of San Francisco, et al.) claiming the new law is unjust.

“The city has tried to change the rules on them,” said attorney Andrew Zacks, who represents the plaintiffs. “We don’t think that is allowed under the law.”

Jacoby, the lawsuit’s main plaintiff, is an 80-year-old property owner who, according to tenant attorney Joseph Tobener, is a “slumlord” who has mistreated his tenants and failed to adequately maintain his valuable rental property.

“He is in the business of landlording. That is all he does,” Tobener, who represents three of the five tenants being sued in the lawsuit, told the Guardian. “The lawsuit against the City only used Jacoby as plaintiff because he is a senior…They think this guy Jacoby, a slumlord, is a perfect plaintiff, but they misrepresent this story in their complaint.”

One of Tobener’s clients, Judith Barrett, is a 62-year-old single mother who teaches English at Galileo High School in San Francisco. She has lived in her current unit for 25 years, and she lives paycheck-to-paycheck.

Barrett, who Jacoby recently evicted using the Ellis Act, has been involved in protracted legal proceedings with her landlord in the past. Tobener said Jacoby and unit co-owner Jeanmarie Hryshko (Jacoby’s ex-wife) have collected more than $22,500 in illegal rent since October 2009, according to a ruling by the San Francisco Rent Board. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Tobener, who said there was “much more prior” but that it extends beyond the statute of limitations.

Using a clause in the San Francisco Rent Board’s regulations, Jacoby claimed “financial hardship” when sued by Barrett over the illegal rent collection. “He tried to file a hardship exemption for the $22,500 at the Rent Board and he lost,” said Tobener, who also noted that Jacoby and Hryshko still owe Barrett an additional $8,000 because they executed the eviction before the reduced rent could cover the landlord’s debt to his tenants.

Barrett’s eviction, according to Tobener, was prompted by a lawsuit filed by tenants that claimed the landlords wouldn’t make “even the most basic repairs to the subject unit.” The lawsuit, which is still pending, claims that Jacoby and Hryshko have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, though they have an equity of $1.8 million on the two-unit property.

“That’s flat out untrue. There is a chronology that completely undercuts Mr. Tobener’s statement,” Zacks said, noting that aggressive moves by the tenants—specifically ”legal threats” from Tobener—ultimately resulted in the Ellis evictions. “This is exactly why we have the Ellis Act and why it’s an important right for property owners. The notion that [Jacoby] should have to pay $100,000 to stop being a landlord is not only unfair, it’s illegal by state law.”

The “aggressive moves” in question are chronicled in Tobener’s letter to David Wasserman, an attorney involved in the case. Tobener believes Jacoby and Hryshko have no intention of living together, and that they instead hope to rid their debt by evicting their rent-controlled tenants.

“If we are successful in proving that your clients have ulterior motives or are retaliating against the tenants, we will then file a wrongful eviction action against your clients,” Tobener wrote. “By now, I am sure your clients have wrongful eviction insurance. Perhaps they take comfort in the protections this insurance will provide them should they lose their unlawful detainer bid. But, what your clients may not know is that their insurance policy will not cover our largest seam of gold — the treble-damages penalties under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance for wrongful eviction.”

In the event of an unfavorable ruling, Zacks said he and his client don’t plan to remain complacent. “If the local judge agrees with the city,” he said. “We will appeal.”

Indeed, could be just the beginning of epic court battles between landlord and tenants advocates in San Francisco, where the hot housing market has triggered an eviction epidemic. The November ballot includes a tax on real estate speculation, which landlord groups have already threatened a lawsuit to challenge.

“Ellising a two-unit building is a real estate speculation play,” Tobener told the Guardian. “They are going to remodel and sell as TICs [tenants-in-common] to wealthy new owners. They cannot re-let the units, so they have to remodel and sell.”

 

Last chapters?

Michael Redmond
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27
Last chapters?

news@sfbg.com

The tale of the threatened independent bookstore, quivering under the might of Amazon, is nothing new.

It’s only been two months since Marcus Books was evicted from its Fillmore District location. Both Adobe and Forest bookstores fled the Mission’s 16thh Street last year. But ebook sales growth is shrinking, and sales for many of San Francisco bookstores are up.

Instead, the tale of the struggling indie bookstore has become less about Amazon and more about a different monster: gentrification. San Francisco’s rising rents, demand for commercial space by deep-pocketed chains, and lack of commercial rent control are putting the squeeze on the city’s remaining bookstores.

Take Bibliohead, for instance. Its owner has recently been forced to relocate in spite of her bookstore’s success. Bibliohead is an easily navigable, highly curated, and tiny book jungle — more like a carefully manicured garden, really. The whole store can be explored in minutes, and there’s a gumball machine that dispenses poetry out in front once the book-happy are satisfied.

Its size has served it well. Sales at Bibliohead — Hayes Valley’s only bookstore — have risen solidly 7 percent each year since the store opened 10 years ago.

“We’re small, but mighty,” Melissa Richmond, Bibliohead’s owner, told the Guardian. “Although recently we haven’t been feeling so mighty. I’m kind of a wreck.”

In May, Richmond learned that she has until January 2015 to leave her store for four months while her building undergoes mandatory earthquake retrofitting. The landlord will double Richmond’s rent after the retrofitting, and has asked Richmond to pay for further renovations to the building when she returns.

“It’s off the table that I can stay here,” Richmond said. “I will not be offered a new lease. I don’t hate landlords, but I want a landlord who will contribute to the spirit and creativity of San Francisco.”

On June 22, Richmond launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the $60,000 she’ll need to move and attract new customers. So far, with a little less than a month to go, she’s raised almost $3,000.

“What really breaks my heart is when a new customer walks in,” Richmond said. “They ask you how you’re doing after they’ve fallen in love with the place a little bit. Then you have to break their hearts by saying you don’t know what’s in store for your future right now.”

 

DISPLACEMENT TREND

Richmond is not the only bookseller in San Francisco forced to relocate. Last year, Adobe Books and Forest Books were forced out of 16th Street within three months of each other when their rents increased. Forest Books slipped quietly off to Japantown, and has since experienced an increase in sales. Adobe Books’ anticipated closure was met with an invigorating Kickstarter campaign that raised $60,000. It was enough to keep the store alive, but not on gentrifying 16th Street.

Nowadays, Adobe is re-branded as Adobe Books and Art Cooperative at its 24th Street location. The original Adobe’s charming, lackadaisical, and no- structured structure has been traded for alphabetized and carefully curated books. There are only two staff members, and its used books are selling far faster than in the old location, despite its shrunken size.

“It’s strange. A lot of the times I was not sure if it would work at all, and now here we are in this shop,” Brett Lockspeiser, a member of the Adobe Books and Art Cooperative, told us. “Things are running differently, but it’s still Adobe.”

Adobe will soon be celebrating its first anniversary in the new spot. The store might not be making any profits, according to Lockspeiser, but the cause for celebration is that it’s survived.

There has been discussion among the collective members about whether or not Adobe should try to sell eReading devices, like Green Apple Books has done without much success for almost two years with the Kobo eReader. Adobe’s collective voted against Kobo, preferring not to use the same weapons as its competitor.

“I’m pretty technology positive, but I think some people in the group thought it was an ‘us or them’ kind of thing,” said Lockspeiser. “Like either you’re a book reader or you’re a techie who reads on a Kindle.”

Besides, it seems that ebooks’ incredible growth rate has finally simmered down. According to the Association of American Publishers, ebooks accounted for 27 percent of all adult trade sales in 2013. While that was up from 23 percent in 2012, it marked the first year ebook growth was down to the single digits. In January, a Pew study reported that among adults who read at least one book in the past year, just 5 percent said they read only an ebook.

Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, reports that book sales throughout San Francisco bookstores have increased overall in the past two years. Green Apple Books, an expanding bookstore with an growing collection of books and records, is even poised to open another location in the Sunset below beloved video rental store Le Video on Aug. 1.

Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of Green Apple Books, said he recently got a call from Bibliohead’s owner asking for advice on potential neighborhoods and techniques for negotiating with landlords. But he can’t always explain his own store’s success.

“Some of it is just the economy. All that money floating around South of Market is maybe trickling over here,” he told us. “Or maybe the waiters are getting better tips. I don’t know what it is, but things have been better for us.”

The growth of bookstore sales, Landon said, is mainly because Barnes & Noble has been cast out of San Francisco. Last year, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, reported that its revenue decreased by 8 percent in the final quarter. The company’s Nook division, meanwhile, slid down 32 percent.

Yet Joe Marchione, who owns Mission Street’s Valhalla Books, still places the blame for his diminishing foot traffic on Amazon, which has made his hard-to-find books pretty easy to locate online. In 1998, when his store opened, 90 percent of Valhalla’s business came from people browsing through his odd and unique assortment of rare and used books. Now, 95 percent of his business is online.

“People forgot the joy of browsing,” Marchione told us.

As soon as his landlord makes him commit to a lease, he says he’s going to have to leave the business. “When we first opened, we were smug. We said there was no way trendy was ever going to come to Mission between 17th and 18th [streets]. Get real!” he said. “But trendy creeps in closer by the week. There’s no problem with that, except it’s forcing us out.”

 

“TRENDY CREEPS IN”

It’s even forcing successful booksellers, like Bibliohead’s owner, to worry. Her faith in the printed word remains strong. “I find that there’s a whole core of people who are relieved to feel something in their hands, to flip the pages of really cool, beautiful books and kind of remember with their bodies what reading is like,” Richmond said.

When Kate Rosenberger opened a fourth bookstore in 2011 — Alleycat Books on 24th Street — many questioned her sanity, the owner said. The store has only recently been able to pay its own bills, having been relying on Rosenberger’s other store, Dog Eared Books, for survival. But the rent at Dog Eared Books is set to increase, and that means trouble.

“You can talk about e-readers, and people being distracted. You can talk about people slipping out since the Gutenberg press was invented, and all that’s true, sure,” Rosenberger told us. “But when you get hit with a huge increase in your rent, how do you deal with that? When the lease is up, you can pretty much figure you’re gone.”

These days, you deal with it by setting up a crowdsourcing campaign, and crossing your fingers that people with money like you. Or maybe you transform into an art cooperative. Or you just go somewhere else. But Richmond doesn’t want to leave San Francisco.

“I would like to preserve the culture of the city,” Richmond said. “I still think there’s something really special here.”

Barnes & Noble might be gone, ebook sales might have stabilized, and the printed word might just still be alive — but for San Francisco’s booksellers, that no longer means anyone in the book business is safe.

Purr-suit of happiness: SF SPCA aims to save more lives with its new adoption center

Sue Vaughan
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1

Last year, the SF SPCA assisted with 5,084 cat and dog adoptions. With its new adoption center near Bryant and 16th Streets, which opened June 13, it aims to increase capacity by 20 percent — saving 1,000 more furry lives in the process.

“When our old adoption center opened in 1998, it was the first shelter in the country to house animals in condominium-style rooms instead of cages,” SF SPCA co-president Jason Walthall said in a June press release. The upgraded shelter continues this tradition — and continues to offer dog training classes, volunteer programs for youth, and other community-service activities — but with even more enhancements for the animals. Each glassed-in enclosure features a touch screen pad that provides more information about the pet inside, with an emphasis on personality type (“social butterfly,” “busy bee,” “delicate flower”) over breed — a more efficient way of linking animals with potential new families. 

For dogs, there’s a small indoor park that’s used to make introductions (especially important if the potential new owner already owns a dog — gotta make sure the new pooch gets along with the pack), while the cats, housed in a separate section of the building, get to scamper across SF-themed cat condos. (So far, there’s a Golden Gate Bridge, a Transamerica Pyramid, a cable car, the Sutro Tower, and the SF Giants logo; a Castro Theatre design is in the works.) These improvements make the shelter life more comfortable for the animals — though most dogs only stay two weeks; cats, just slightly longer — but they also help entice visitors.

“We want to make it a fun, happy experience,” says SF SPCA media relations associate Krista Maloney, pointing out that the shelter — which was founded in 1868, has an attached vet hospital (providing free and sliding-scale spay-neuter procedures, among other services), and is a nonprofit funded by donations — competes with pet stores and breeders to place animals in homes. Earlier this year, it joined forces with fellow nonprofit Pets Unlimited, which is located in Pacific Heights, to further its mission: “to save and protect animals, provide care and treatment, advocate for their welfare and enhance the human-animal bond.”

But wait! You’re a San Francisco renter! The words “NO PETS ALLOWED” haunt your nightmares! How can visiting an animal shelter be anything but depressing? SF SPCA’s website has an entire section offering advice for landlords and tenants (one tip: create a “pet resume” to include with your rental application) on the subject of pet-friendly housing. And if the landlord won’t consent to a dog, the SF SPCA just might be able to help out anyway. Coming soon to the new facility: adoptable small mammals, including rabbits, hamsters, and guinea pigs.

This Week’s Picks: July 16 – 22, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

Brrrr-illiant!

WEDNESDAY 16

 

 

Jessica Hernandez

Since Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas recorded a full set of tunes for an album two years ago, long stints of touring, writing, and other facets of life delayed their complete release. An excellent EP, Demons, came out last year, and gave fans a taste of what is to come when their new full-length album Secret Evil (Instant Records) is finally released next month. The Detroit-born band plays a tasty blend of blues, jazz, soul, rock and more retro-roots goodness, all building a perfect foundation for Hernandez’ gorgeous and powerful vocals. (Sean McCourt)

With Hungry Skinny, The Tropics

9pm, $12

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

 

 

THURSDAY 17

 

 

Summer Slaughter

While there are plenty of outdoor music festivals and tours crisscrossing the country this summer, metal fans with an aversion to the sun can rejoice that there is one such touring package that hits indoor venues — so you don’t have to worry about a searing sunburn on top of your ringing ears. The promoters of Summer Slaughter 2014 are billing it as the “Most Extreme Tour of the Year,” and it may well be, with death metal legends Morbid Angel headlining the day-long session of debauchery. Joining them will be Dying Fetus, The Faceless, Thy Art Is Murder, Goatwhore, Origin, Decrepit Birth, Within The Ruins, Fallujah, Unhailoed, and Boreworm. (Sean McCourt)

3pm, $29.50-$32

The Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

 

 

San Francisco Symphony: Pixar In Concert

While the films of Pixar Animation Studios may have revolutionized the way movies and cartoons are made with their innovative use of computer animation and their resulting reputation for gorgeous visuals, music also plays an important part in the company’s artistic arsenal. Pixar director Lee Unkrich, CCO John Lasseter and writer-director Brad Bird will act as hosts this weekend as the San Francisco Symphony performs parts of the scores from fan favorite films live, including the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, A Bug’s Life, Wall-E, Cars, Up, The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Brave, and Monsters University. (Sean McCourt)

Through Sun/20

7:30pm Thu-Sat; 2pm Sun, $35-$150

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

 

 

 

 

Dark Entries 5th Anniversary

Labels like Josh Cheon’s Dark Entries exist to remind us that no matter how much (or how little) good music might be coming out presently, there are always gonna be underappreciated gems from the past to discover. With this digger’s mentality and assistance from prolific mastering master George Horn, the San Francisco label has been attentitively re-releasing ’80s dance obscurities. Hi-NRG, Italo disco, minimal, post-punk, etc: If it’s avant, analog, and (obvs) dark, it’s perfect. Starting off on a anniversary tour, Cheon will be joined by some of the label’s contemporary artists including REDREDRED (Michael Wood) and Bézier (the live synth project from Cheon’s Honey Soundsystem collective-mate, Robert Yang.) (Ryan Prendiville)

With Max+Mara

July 17, 9pm-2am, $8

The Eagle

398 12th St, SF

www.sf-eagle.com

 

July 19 +Flora Palmer

9pm, $7

Terminal

3957 San Leandro St, Oakl.

 

FRIDAY 18

 

 

 

Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival

The name says it all: Pretty much any mode of transport — even, probably, roller-skating or Segway-ing, though maybe leave your team of draft horses back on the farm — is acceptable conveyance to the Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival. Once you arrive, settle in (BYO lawn chair or blanket) for an old-school drive-in experience, with films projected on a big screen and sound provided by FM radio as well as amplified speakers. What’s not old-school is the programming: genre-spanning shorts and the occasional feature (this year: a Bollywood pick!), mostly of the “underground” variety, which means you might not catch ’em anywhere else. (Eddy)

Fri/18-Sat/19 and July 25-26, $12

NIMBY

8410 Amelia, Oakl.

www.brainwashm.com

 

 

Erk tha Jerk with Kev Choice

June was a busy month for Erk tha Jerk, the Richmond rapper and producer known for his clever wordplay and catchy, often intensely sexual hooks. On the 12th, he dropped a new video produced by frequent collaborator Fly Commons called “Blast Somebody.” A smooth beat finds Jerk getting existential about his stresses while a near-nude woman gyrates on his bed. The video premiere was bolstered by the announcement that the duo’s upcoming EP, Food and Vegetables comes out on July 15th — the gig doubles as a release party. Fellow East Bay MC Kev Choice opens for Erk. Where Erk often embraces an id-driven and autobiographical style, Kev is far subtler and more socially conscious. A prodigious pianist and bandleader, his set should provide a soulful introduction to Erk’s intensity and bombast. When two of the most idiosyncratic and up-and-coming Bay Area rappers come together, sparks will inevitably fly. (Kurlander)

8pm, $15

Slim’s

333 11th St, SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

 

 

San Francisco Frozen Film Festival

Foggy days, windy nights — yep, it’s summer in San Francisco. No need to the seek air-conditioned comfort of a movie theater in this town, unless the films on offer are as tempting as this year’s San Francisco Frozen Film Festival lineup. The two-day fest offers a stack of shorts by indie, international, and youth filmmakers, grouped into thematic programs: dramatic shorts, animated shorts, LGBT shorts, experimental shorts (including at least one music video), documentary shorts, and the sub-category of short environmental docs, spanning locations as close as Mt. Tam and as far as Antarctica. Brrrr-illiant! (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sat/19, $12 (fest pass, $20)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.frozenfilmfestival.com

 

 

SATURDAY 19

 

 

Sara Lautman at the Cartoon Art Museum

Macrogroan, Sara Lautman’s ongoing booklet series and accompanying blog, is remarkably diverse. Lautman, July’s cartoonist-in-residence at the Cartoon Art Museum, deconstructs tiring pop culture trends (one illustration includes a speech bubble by a young woman sitting a desk with a computer: “If you heard Matthew Sweet in some bar he’d fit right in but you’d be like Holy Fuck!” Near the bottom right corner of the same illustration: “Gross. I sound like Marc Maron.”) and larger societal issues (“Clothes People We Are Afraid of Becoming” is made up of four sketches of archetypes Lautman fears, with corresponding labels that describe their respective outfits). Her self-referentiality and distinctive, often experimental drawing methods — she has created entire comic books using a crude drawing program on a flip phone — has earned her spots in publications as varied as Bitch Magazine and The Hairpin. Lautman will present her work and discuss her process with visitors to the museum. She sums up her vision of the experience on her site: “Come see me yammer for a while, then hang out.” (Kurlander)

1pm, free

Cartoon Art Museum

655 Mission, SF

(415) 227-8666

www.cartoonart.org

 

 

Jimmy Cliff

Bob Marley may adorn more stoner dens with his smiling face, but the credit for bringing reggae to a worldwide audience goes first and foremost to Jimmy Cliff. As the star and main soundtrack composer of the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come, Cliff brought the once-obscure Caribbean pop style to national attention and broke open the door for the genre’s success in the 1970s. But he couldn’t have done it without a set of killer songs — the film’s title track included —and a voice that puts nearly every stateside soul singer to shame. At 66, he’s still a respected live performer, appearing frequently at festivals — as well as at the Fillmore, where he’ll play on the 19th. (Bromfield)

9pm, $39.50

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, San Francisco

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

 

 

SUNDAY 20

 

 

The Hole

Sometimes landlords just refuse to openly admit that they’re renting you a dilapidated apartment. On the surface, the similarities between modern life and the 1998 Taiwanese film The Hole end there — unless you think our tenacity for lining up in the rain for day-old bagels imported from New York is a sign we’d prosper in a post-apocalyptic world. The screening is the first in this summer’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series comprised of obscure movies selected by local cinema aficionados. There’s just something about the renter’s dilemma (a modern twist on the prisoner’s dilemma) and a fondness for hoarding toilet paper that resonates with viewers. (Amy Char)

2pm, $8-$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF (

415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

TUESDAY 22

 

Say Anything

Like many pop-punk bands, Say Anything caught their big break with a completely ridiculous, comically sexual earworm. “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too,” a song about phone sex that includes zombie references and the word “interweb,” is still the band’s most popular track and a mainstay in teenage bedrooms, but Say Anything’s catalog is anything but shallow and kitschy. Through a decade and a half of mental health issues, drug habits, and music crit’s endless ridicule of pop-punk, Max Bemis and company have continued to turn out catchy and lyrically sharp and funny records. It is perhaps their distinctly un-hip and unapologetically self-aware musical style (they released a record called In Defense of the Genre) that makes the band most earnest and entirely loveable. (Haley Zaremba)

With The Front Bottoms, The So So Glos, You Blew It!

7pm, $23

The Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com


White Lung

Who said music writers can’t make music? When Mish Way isn’t busy freelancing as one of America’s most passionate and hilarious music writers, she’s rocking harder than any other architecture-dancer since Patti Smith as the leader of punk outfit White Lung. After making a splash in Vancouver’s punk scene with its debut It’s The Evil, the band found its profile substantially increased when Rolling Stone included sophomore effort Sorry in their top 10 albums of the year — no small feat for a punk album, least of all one that barely runs 20 minutes. They’ve added Wax Idols member and Bay Area native Hether Fortune on bass for album number three, Deep Fantasy, whose hearty reception should secure the band’s footing in both the critical and the die-hard punk worlds. (Bromfield)

7pm, $12

The Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, San Francisco

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

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Angry building owners threaten lawsuit over anti-speculation tax

Sasha Cuttler
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21
Angry building owners threaten lawsuit over anti-speculation tax

Opponents of the anti-speculator tax that will appear on the November ballot blasted the proposal in a City Hall hearing yesterday [Thu/10] — pledging to defeat the measure in court even if voters approve it — but they were overwhelmed by a strong turnout from supporters who said real estate speculation drives up the cost of housing without adding any value.

“We can sue you in court on the many of the unconstitutional aspects of this and we will do that,” Janan New, director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, said of the measure that would charge a 24 percent tax on properties flipped within a year of purchase down to a 14 percent tax if flipped within five years.

New and other allies — including San Francisco Association of Realtors, Small Property Owners of San Francisco, and Sup. Katy Tang — claimed that the measure is illegally retroactive because it affects those who recently bought property and that it doesn’t account for people who need to sell their properties because of job loss or other life changes.

“This is almost tantamount to a confiscation of property,” Peter Rich of SPOSF said at the hearing.

But Sup. David Campos — who placed the measure on the ballot along with Sups. Eric Mar, Jane Kim, and John Avalos — refuted allegations that the measure isn’t legally sound and carefully questioned City Attorney’s Office staff to clarify the laws that allow for the measure.

“I know there’s a lot of ulterior motives here because we do know this is going to be challenged in court, so I want to be very clear,” Campos said in response to a line of questioning from Tang, who continued to maintain, “So it’s retroactive in a sense” after being told by the deputy city attorney that it wasn’t retroactive because the tax only applies to future property sales.

The anti-speculation tax was first introduced by then-Sup. Harvey Milk shortly before his assassination in 1978 (Dianne Feinstein killed the measure after becoming acting mayor), and it was revived this year during a series of tenant conventions and sponsored by Mar.

“What we’re proposing is very reasonable to deal with the affordable housing crisis,” Mar said at the hearing, noting that it exempts single-family homes, projects larger than 29 units, and sales triggered by the death of the property owner. “It’s been crafted with enough exemptions to protect the small guy and really go after the profiteers.”

During the public comment period, where supporters on the measure vastly outnumbered opponents, several speakers referenced Harvey Milk and said housing in San Francisco wouldn’t be so expensive today if the measure had passed back then, a time when evictions and displacement were also on the rise.

“He was assassinated before it came to fruition. The parallels to that time and today are striking,” testified Tom Temprano, president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, who urged supervisors to “honor the legacy of Harvey Milk by passing this thoughtful and well-crafted legislation.”

Brian Basinger, head of the AIDS Housing Alliance, played old video footage of Milk talking about the measure back in 1978, shortly after he was evicted from his Castro Street camera store by a landlord seeking higher rents, noting that profiteering forces San Franciscans to spend too much on housing and have too little left over for other needs.

“So when you look at that, it’s going to affect the larger economy,” Milk said of real estate speculation.

Gen Fujioka, who works at Chinatown Community Development Center and spoke for San Franciscans Against Real Estate Speculation, cited recent evidence of properties snapped up by speculators and quickly flipped for profits of 50 percent of more.

“Basically, what we’re seeing today is an escalation in the sales prices of multi-unit buildings beyond what people can pay in rent,” Fujioka testified, noting how that essentially forces landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants to make the investments pencil out. “That kind of price escalation is causing instability in our communities.”

But opponents lashed out at the measure and the characterization that they were profiteering in ways that hurt people. “It’s a housing tax and it doesn’t make sense to have a housing tax in the most expensive city in the country,” said Jay Chang of the Association of Realtors.  

Aaron Jones said he and his wife invested their children’s college savings in a small apartment building, and that they’re good landlords who should be able to sell the property when they want to without penalty.

“We can’t sell until 2017 with this retroactive, punitive tax,” Jones said, saying there were many other small investors like him who were afraid to speak up because “in San Francisco, to be an investor — not a speculator — is to be the devil.”

But supporters of the measure say their intention isn’t to demonize property owners but to do something about the eviction and displacement crisis that is changing the face of the city, and to create a disincentive to bad behavior.

“It’s really the most vulnerable people who are being affected by evictions,” said Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, citing her group’s research showing 72 percent of recent evictions have been of the elderly or disabled.

“Speculation is the commodification of housing and housing is essential,” said Chris Durazo of the Veterans Equity Center.

Campos said most landlords should support the measure as check against speculators that are pushing up the price of housing, triggering evictions, and creating a divisive politcal climate: “Speculators are giving landlords in San Francisco and property owners in San Francisco a bad name.”

San Francisco to provide right to counsel for tenants facing eviction

Michael Redmond
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34

OPINION San Francisco is the second most unequal city in the nation. Working and middle-income people and families are being forced to flee the city they love. Between 2010 and 2013, Ellis Act evictions alone increased by 170 percent.

In 2013, a total of 3,662 San Franciscans were served with eviction notices. Over 1,000 of these tenants went to court without lawyers. According to court statistics, 90 percent of landlords hire attorneys, while only 10 percent of tenants have a lawyer. This inequity has made it more difficult for tenants to adequately assert their rights.

To level the playing field, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee just designated $1 million to fund 10 nonprofit housing attorneys to perform full scope legal services for any tenant facing eviction in San Francisco. We teamed up with tenant rights organizers and attorneys to fight for this budget allocation in order to address San Francisco’s affordability crisis. This funding will ensure that all San Franciscans facing eviction will receive legal assistance if they need it.

Crucial to ensuring economic diversity in this city is protecting our rent-controlled housing stock. Every time a tenant is evicted from his or her apartment, we lose another unit of price-controlled housing that is safe from the current astronomical market rental and sale prices. The board has passed local legislation that helps tenants remain in the city after an eviction, including Sup. Campos’ legislation increasing relocation assistance amounts after an Ellis Act eviction.

However, only the state Legislature has the power to change the law in a manner that would make a large impact on the frequency of evictions. Sadly, last week, Sen. Mark Leno’s bill that would have curbed Ellis Act evictions died in the Assembly Housing Committee. Leno said he will not further pursue the bill this year. Therefore, we must continue to act locally to deal with our housing crisis.

Legal representation for tenants is a crucial part of the fight against displacement. Several academic studies have shown that tenants are five to 10 times more likely to stay in their homes after receiving an eviction notice if they are represented by an attorney throughout the eviction process. Furthermore, having an attorney protects the tenants against abusive practices by landlords.

Tenant advocates report that illegal harassment by landlords is on the rise in an effort to force out tenants without having to resort to the formal eviction process. It is common practice for landlords to attempt to “buy out” tenants by offering a monetary sum to vacate a unit outside of the legal process. Vulnerable tenants, including immigrants and tenants who live in Section 8 housing, are often forced out of their units because they do not understand or assert their rights. Even if the action results in the tenants leaving, an attorney can help tenants avoid having an eviction on their record, which makes it much more difficult for the tenants to rent again.

We are fortunate to have 14 excellent nonprofit organizations in San Francisco that provide no- or low-cost legal services to tenants. However, these organizations have been woefully underfunded and do not have sufficient staff to address this housing crisis. The budget allocation of $1 million to fund 10 additional tenant attorneys will have a profound impact on San Francisco’s housing crisis. It will also make San Francisco one of the first cities in the country to provide a right to legal assistance to tenants facing eviction. Just as the Constitution allows an attorney for a person accused of a crime, a person threatened with the loss of his or her home should have legal assistance. San Francisco can and should lead the way when it comes to providing legal assistance to those tenants who need it.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi and Supervisor David Campos are elected officials in San Francisco.

Protect light industrial businesses from Big Tech sprawl

Sasha Cuttler
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15
Protect light industrial businesses from Big Tech sprawl

[Editor’s Note: With the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee scheduled on Monday, July 7, to act on a proposal to allow the new owner of the San Francisco Design Center to evict existing tenants to accommodate tech company Pinterest, Jim Gallagher of Garden Court Antiques, one of those tenants, wrote the following guest editorial for the Guardian.]

The San Francisco Design Center has been a doing business at 2 Henry Adams street for the last 40 years.  During that time it has created thousands of good paying jobs in the city.  We are currently at risk of losing the majority of the building to tech office space.  The building is zoned for PDR-Design but a loophole in the law is being exploited by the new owners, a Chicago based investment firm.  This would lead to the loss of SF based small businesses and the jobs that they create.

 We have worked with countless interior design firms, architects and contractors as a resource for their projects.  In addition, we are an intrinsic part of a network of the PDR(Production, Distribution and Repair) businesses here in San Francisco.  These are the upholsterers, fabrication workrooms, cabinet makers, finishers, metal workers, installers and movers that make up our industry.  This industry offers above average paying jobs to a variety of people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds that don’t necessarily have college degrees.  These jobs and those that work at them are being squeezed out of this city and when they are gone, we lose yet another piece of the soul of San Francisco.

There is no question that PDR space is being lost in San Francisco.  A recent study of PDR space in SF, showed that we currently have the lowest available PDR space of any major American city at less than 7 percent.  Mayor Lee along with Supervisors Cohen and Campos introduced legislation at the end of last year to expand the amount of PDR space and shore up the manufacturing and light industrial sector in the city.  Why then, would the Board of Supervisors even consider giving up a quarter of a million square feet of PDR space that is currently 90% occupied with viable PDR businesses?

The sad reality is that it is a simple matter of corporate greed.  The new owners of the Showplace Building at 2 Henry Adams bought the building as a PDR building, knowing the use limitations of designated PDR building and immediately began to find ways around the laws.  The loophole that they discovered was the Landmark designation.

The Landmark designation was an exception put into the PDR protections in order to help with the cost maintaining some of the historic architecture that is often found in these PDR buildings.  The idea being that PDR rents do not always bring in enough income to retrofit and maintain these old buildings.  The Landmark status would allow the owners of PDR buildings to rent out part of the building as higher paying office space in order to offset the retrofit and maintenance cost.  This sounds like a good idea until you bring in the greed factor.  This Landmark exception has become the favorite loophole for corporate investors and greedy landlords to move out PDR businesses all over the city.

In the case of the Showplace Building, it is currently 90 percent occupied by PDR-Design businesses.  According to the building owers, there are approximately 262,000 square feet of rentable space in the building.  The Common Area Maintenance or CAM fees that tenants of the building pay beyond their monthly rent is $1.25 per square foot per month.  This would mean that the owners of the Showplace building are currently bringing in nearly $3,500,000 just in Common Area Maintenance fees annually.  In what universe is this not enough money to maintain a building that was fully retrofitted 15 years ago and is only five stories high?

The idea that this building needs to granted Landmark status from the city in order to create enough revenue to maintain the building just does not pass the smell test!  This is a case of simple greed on the part of a Chicago based investment company.  They believe that they can skirt the laws that are in place to protect San Francisco based small businesses and San Francisco workers.  They do not have the best interest of our city or our workers in mind.  They simply want to exploit this Landmark loophole in the PDR protections to line their own pockets.

I would hope that the members of the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee do not let this happen.  Please consider the consequences to our city.  Do not choose to allow a Chicago based investment company to skirt our laws and exploit this loophole.  Do not allow this greed to put several San Francisco small businesses out of business. 

This building is 90 percent full of viable PDR businesses.  We pay nearly $3.5 million dollars a year to maintain this building.  This is the perfect example of what a well-run PDR building should look like.  This building is this beautiful and well-maintained because of us.  Please don’t allow the exploitation of the Landmark status to kick us out.  We built our businesses here because we love this place and we want to continue to work and thrive here.

Solving the housing crisis takes all San Franciscans, even big tech

Michael Redmond
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56

 

By Joseph Tobener

 

OPINION This week, San Franciscans learned that they will not be able to rely on Sacramento to fix the housing crisis. State lawmakers voted down Senate Bill 1439, which would have stopped speculators from using the Ellis Act to evict and convert buildings to upscale offices and TICs. One Assembly Democrat said that San Franciscans were “exaggerating the problem.” That same day, my office received Ellis Act eviction notices for 21 tenants from an artist building at 16th and Mission streets. The building has a new buyer, and it will soon be a high-end commercial space.

I was a tenant rights attorney during the first dot-com boom, and without question, this new housing crisis is much worse. The gentrification is more widespread and permanent. This time around, the evicted teachers, musicians, and artists are not simply moving down the street to smaller units, they are being priced out of San Francisco altogether.

We need to decide now, as San Franciscans, what we want our city to feel like in a decade. Here are five things I believe we need to do now to address the crisis:

1. Collaborate with tech leaders, rather than vilify them. I have been as guilty as the next person in blaming and berating big tech, ignoring the fact that many of my neighbors, clients, and friends are long-time San Franciscans who work in the tech industry. Enough blaming. We need to somehow bring tech to the table to help create large-scale solutions to the housing crisis. It may not be easy to do.

Earlier this year, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, criticized tech companies for being “stingy” in giving to their communities, and I have heard nonprofit fundraisers echo this. If true, we need to find out why. On the other side, our healthy anti-corporate, ‘us and them’ mindset, which is deeply rooted in San Francisco’s political tradition, is not serving us in collaboratively addressing the housing crisis.

While there are a handful of high-profile examples of tech workers wrongfully displacing tenants, tech workers are not the real problem. It is true that tech money drives up prices, but the real villains are the predatory speculators who are profiting from our shared crisis. The bottom line is, like it or not, tech is here to stay, and tech leaders have the resources to fund the arts, help our schools, and yes, help us address the housing crisis.

2. Stop illegal mergers of multi-unit buildings into single-family mansions. It is not enough to have regulations in place to prevent mergers. Real estate speculators are merging units surreptitiously, without permits. The Department of Building Inspection needs to actively police projects. And all San Francisco residents need to share in the responsibility of ensuring that speculators are not doing major construction without permits in our neighborhoods.

3. Support legislation to stop landlords from renting their units as hotel rooms. It is estimated that more than a 1,000 units in San Francisco are being rented out full-time for short-term corporate or tourist use. We need a law to get these units back into the permanent housing stock.  

4. Donate to the Community Land Trust and the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. Community land trusts are buying property to permanently preserve residential housing and art space. We need to do more to support these organizations. Other cities do a much better job than San Francisco in partnering with corporations to preserve culture.  

5. Support an anti-speculation tax. Tenant activists have introduced an anti-speculation tax designed to stop real estate flipping. Our office sees the same LLCs flip properties time and time again.

Ultimately it is up to all San Franciscans to embrace this cause if we hope to preserve the diverse and complex character of our city. One thing is sure: We cannot wait to add our voices, or it will be too late.

Joseph Tobener is a tenant rights attorney.

Guardian Intelligence: July 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

GUARDIAN ON THE MOVE

There were a couple of big changes for the Bay Guardian this week. We and our sister newspapers within San Francisco Media Company — San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly — moved into the Westfield Mall. Yes, the mall, but in the fifth floor business offices formerly occupied by the San Francisco State University School of Business extension program. The company, owned by Black Press in Canada and Oahu Publications in Hawaii, also named Glenn Zuehls as the new publisher and Cliff Chandler, who worked for the Examiner for years, as the senior vice president of advertising. Zuehls, who comes from Oahu Publications, replaces Todd Vogt as the head of SFMC. Zuehls and Chandler told the staff of all three papers that their primary goal is to grow the company’s revenues.

QUEER SPIRIT ROILS PRIDE

Even as an awareness of the ever-growing commercialization of SF Pride dawned on younger participants, a spirit of activism also took flight. Community grand marshal Tommi Avicolli Mecca led a fiery parade contingent (above) of housing activists in Sunday’s parade, protesting skyrocketing evictions in San Francisco. The anti-eviction brigade staged a die-in in front of the official parade observation area. Friday’s Trans March was the biggest so far, and Saturday’s Dyke March featured a huge contingent marching under the banner “Dykes Against Landlords.” Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors targeted a Kink.com prison-themed party, saying it glorified a prison-industrial complex, which “destroys the lives of millions of people.” Seven of the protestors were arrested, and charges of police brutality are being investigated.

LESBIANS BASHED AT PRIDE

While there were some disturbing anecdotal reports of homophobic slurs and queer bashing at Pride this year (including one of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and her husband being attacked at Pink Saturday), San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Albie Esparza said police are only investigating one incident so far as an actual hate crime. It occurred on June 28 around 5:30pm near the intersection of Mission and Ninth streets when two young lesbians were subjected to homophobic taunts and then severely beaten by five young male suspects, all of whom remain at large. They’re described at 16 to 20 years old, two black, three Hispanic. Esparza said hate crimes are defined as attacks based solely on being a protected classes, so that doesn’t include robbery or assaults in which racism or homophobic slurs are used, if that doesn’t seem to be the motivation for the attacks.

LIFE’S A STAGE

Hark! It must be summer, because all the companies dedicated to outdoor theater are opening new productions in parks across the Bay Area. Aside from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ripple Effect (see feature in this issue; www.sfmt.org), Marin Shakespeare is presenting As You Like It in San Rafael (pictured), with Romeo and Juliet opening later in July (www.marinshakespeare.org); Free Shakespeare in the Park brings The Taming of the Shrew to Pleasanton and beyond (www.sfshakes.org); and Actors Ensemble of Berkeley goes stone-cold Austen with Pride and Prejudice in John Hinkel Park (www.aeofberkeley). AS YOU LIKE IT PHOTO BY STEVEN UNDERWOOD

TEN YEAR GRIND

Kids and pro skaters from One Love boards tore up “the island” — between the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero — with flips, kick tricks and plants June 29, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the much loved skate spot. Local Hunters Point pro skater Larry Redmon sat watching the new generation of skaters and offering pointers. Sure downtown has more grind blockers then it did a decade ago, but as Redmon says, “We out here.” PHOTO BY PAUL INGRAM

THE WILLIE CONNECTION

Muni’s workers and the SFMTA reached a final labor deal over the final weekend of June, but Mayor Ed Lee is telling news outlets the real dealmaker was former mayor Willie Brown. “He’s someone who understands the city, understands labor, the underlying interests,” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin told various news outlets. Reports say Brown went unpaid by the city for the deed. That’s hard to believe: Anyone who knows Slick Willie knows he seldom does anything for free.

WAXING NOSTALGIC

The new Madame Tussauds wax museum attraction opened June 26 at Fisherman’s wharf — and includes SF-specific figure replicas like Mark Zuckerberg, Harvey Milk, and, of course, our real mayor, Nicolas Cage (pictured). See the Pixel Vision blog at SFBG.com for more creepy-ish pics and a review.

SHARON SELLS OUT (THE INDEPENDENT)

Despite her catalog full of confessional songs about nasty breakups and other dark subject matter, Sharon Van Etten was all smiles during two sold-out shows at the Independent June 29 and June 30. Leaning heavily on songs from her new album, Are We There, Van Etten and her four-piece band even led the adoring crowd in a cheerful sing-along at one point. On her next pass through town, we expect to be seeing her on a much bigger stage.

UNION PROUD

If BBQ and black-market fireworks aren’t your idea of showing civic pride, make your way over to the Mission’s Redstone Building (2940 16th St. at Capp) for a street fair Sat/5 with local musicians, poets, visual artists, and more, to mark the 100th anniversary of the SF Labor Temple and call attention to current labor issues like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Built by the city’s Labor Council in 1914, the building formerly housed SF’s biggest labor unions and was the planning center for the famous 1934 General Strike. This celebration is part of Labor Fest, now in its 20th year, which runs throughout July around the Bay Area — for more: www.laborfest.net

 

A great week for (indie) sci-fi and docs: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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0
A great week for (indie) sci-fi and docs: new movies!

This week, Frameline continues (our coverage here!), plus offbeat sci-fi winners Coherence and Snowpiercer are well worth seeking out … especially if you’re not in the mood for more giant robot smash-ups from the Michael Bay factory. Plus: new docs and more! Read on.

Breathing Earth: Susumu Shingu’s Dream Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has built his career through his concerted engagement with the natural world. The wise and eternally smiling 75-year-old creates angular and often gargantuan mobiles that harness the power of wind and water to gyrate in ever-changing directions. In Breathing Earth, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer crafts a deliberately paced rumination on Shingu’s life philosophy that, while devoid of the frenetic facts, figures, and trite biographical rehashes that punctuate hyper-informative pop-docs, uses a beautifully simplistic narrative arc to illuminates Shingu’s attempt to create a hilly, open-air collection of windmills. The sculptor’s impassioned narration and charming conversations with potential landlords and investors (who usually entirely miss the point of his mission to raise environmental consciousness through aesthetic beauty) make Shingu impossible not to fall in love with — he is laid-back, funny, and astonishingly youthful. Riedelsheimer’s camera is similarly relaxed, gliding sumptuously over the green and wild landscapes on which Shingu installs his works. Despite his meditative tempo, Riedelsheimer manages to explore a remarkably wide scope; Shingu’s late-life marriage to a fellow sculptor, his appeals to both Japanese and German schoolchildren to care for the earth and help to avoid environmental disasters, and his intricate technical processes all receive intimate and inspiring sections. (1:37) (David Kurlander)

Citizen Koch After quietly influencing conservative ideology, legislation, and elections for decades, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have found themselves becoming high-profile figures — much to their dismay, no doubt. The relative invisibility they hitherto enjoyed greatly abetted their impact in myriad arenas of public policy and “popular” conservative movements. Look behind any number of recent red-vs.-blue flashpoint issues and you can find their fingerprints: Notably state-level union busting; “smaller government” (i.e. incredible shrinking social services); seeding allegedly grassroots organizations like the Tea Party; furthering the Corporations = People thing (see: Citizens United); and generally helping the rich like themselves get richer while fostering working-class outrage at everybody else. This documentary by Trouble the Water (2008) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen touches on all those matters, while also focusing on Wisconsin as a test laboratory for the brothers’ Machiavellian think-tank maneuvers, following a Lousiana GOP candidate on the campaign trail (one he’s marginalized on for opposing corporate influence peddling), and more. Any one of these topics could support a feature of their own (and most already have). Citizen Koch’s problem is that it tries to encompass too much of its subjects’ long reach, while (despite the title) leaving those subjects themselves underexplored. (It also suffers from being a movie completed at least 18 months ago, a lifetime in current US political terms.) For the reasonably well-informed this documentary will cover a lot of familiar ground—which is not to say that ground isn’t still interesting, or that the added human interest elements don’t compel. But the film covers so much ground it ends up feeling overstuffed and unfocused. (1:26) (Dennis Harvey) 

Coherence See “Vortex Room.” (1:29)

Korengal This companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Restrepo — one of the best docs about modern-day warfare to date, offering unfiltered access to an Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — uses previously unseen footage shot during the year filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent shadowing their subjects. Korengal is structured as a more introspective work, with musings on what it feels like to be a soldier in the Korengal, surrounded by rough (yet strikingly beautiful) terrain populated by farmers who may or may not be Taliban sympathizers, not to mention unpredictable, heavily armed opponents referred to simply as “the enemy.” Interviews reveal sadness, boredom, a deep sense of brotherhood, and the frustrating feeling of going from “100 miles an hour to a dead halt” after the surreal exhilaration of a firefight. Korengal also functions as a tribute to Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Not only does his death add a layer of poignant subtext, it also suggests why Junger felt moved to revisit this story. That said, though Korengal‘s footage is several years old, its themes remain distressingly timely. (1:24) (Cheryl Eddy)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious setpiece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer’s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) (Dennis Harvey)

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) (Lynn Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction In Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment a villainous Black Ops leader (Kelsey Grammer) allies with a snarky Steve-Jobs-alike (Stanley Tucci) to build Transformers de coeur: designer impostor robot-cars they hope will reinvent the face of war. In IMAX 3D, “TransFOURmers” is packed with relentless rock-‘em-sock-‘em action, spectacular property destruction, and about as much sense as a bucket of worms. After 60 minutes, you think you’re getting more than your money’s worth. At 90 minutes, you’re tired. At two hours, confusion sets in: If Autobots get stronger together how could Optimus be in so much trouble? Who is the bounty hunting Terminator lookalike? HOW MUCH MORE COULD THERE BE? And then … the action shifts to China, Optimus rides a Dinobot, and chaos reigns. I’ve always liked the working-class poetry of the Transformers themselves — the leader is a trucker and the cast is stacked with ambulances, tanks, and the metal workforce that preserves American lives. If that’s not traditional hero worship, I don’t know what is. But Age of Extinction is the soulless designer imposter it lampoons — the whole sequel-snarking ordeal makes you long for Buzz Lightyear, who saw a thousand Buzz Lightyears on a store shelf and survived that existential crisis heroically — while also riding a dinosaur and fighting Frasier. This Transformers movie (sadly, it won’t be the final one) starts with a thesis: Mark Wahlberg walks through an abandoned movie theater and a Wilford Brimley twin (Ron Shedd) bellows: “Movies today! Sequels! Remakes! Crap!” Age of Extinction follows that moment with nearly three hours of evidence that the cause of extinction is redundancy. (2:30) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

Under the Electric Sky Hey, raver! This 3D concert film enables you to experience the Electric Daisy Carnival without punching any holes in your brain. Or, y’know, dying. (1:25)

Violette Taking on another “difficult” woman artist after the excellent 2008 Séraphine (about the folk-art painter), Martin Provost here portrays the unhappy life of Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose fiction and autobiographical writings eventually made her a significant figure in postwar French literature. We first meet her waiting out the war with gay author Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), one of many unrequited loves, then surviving via the black market trade before she’s “discovered” by such groundbreaking, already-established talents as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It is the latter, a loyal supporter who nonetheless retains a chilly emotional distance, who becomes bisexual Violette’s principal obsession over the coming 20 years or so. Devos does her best to portray “a neurotic crazy washed-up old bag” with an “ugly mug” — hardly! — who is perpetually broke, depressed, and awkward, thanks no doubt in part to her mean witch of a mother (Catherine Hiegel). “Screaming and sobbing won’t get you anywhere,” Simone at one point tells her, and indeed Leduc is a bit of a pill. For the most part lacking the visual splendors of Séraphine (this character’s environs weren’t so pastoral), Violette is finely acted and crafted but, like its heroine, hard to love. (2:18) (Dennis Harvey)

Film Listings: June 25 – July 1, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete film listings, see www.sfbg.com.

FRAMELINE

Frameline 38, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, runs through June 29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

Breathing Earth: Susumu Shingu’s Dream Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has built his career through his concerted engagement with the natural world. The wise and eternally smiling 75-year-old creates angular and often gargantuan mobiles that harness the power of wind and water to gyrate in ever-changing directions. In Breathing Earth, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer crafts a deliberately paced rumination on Shingu’s life philosophy that, while devoid of the frenetic facts, figures, and trite biographical rehashes that punctuate hyper-informative pop-docs, uses a beautifully simplistic narrative arc to illuminates Shingu’s attempt to create a hilly, open-air collection of windmills. The sculptor’s impassioned narration and charming conversations with potential landlords and investors (who usually entirely miss the point of his mission to raise environmental consciousness through aesthetic beauty) make Shingu impossible not to fall in love with — he is laid-back, funny, and astonishingly youthful. Riedelsheimer’s camera is similarly relaxed, gliding sumptuously over the green and wild landscapes on which Shingu installs his works. Despite his meditative tempo, Riedelsheimer manages to explore a remarkably wide scope; Shingu’s late-life marriage to a fellow sculptor, his appeals to both Japanese and German schoolchildren to care for the earth and help to avoid environmental disasters, and his intricate technical processes all receive intimate and inspiring sections. (1:37) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (David Kurlander)

Citizen Koch After quietly influencing conservative ideology, legislation, and elections for decades, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have found themselves becoming high-profile figures — much to their dismay, no doubt. The relative invisibility they hitherto enjoyed greatly abetted their impact in myriad arenas of public policy and “popular” conservative movements. Look behind any number of recent red-vs.-blue flashpoint issues and you can find their fingerprints: Notably state-level union busting; “smaller government” (i.e. incredible shrinking social services); seeding allegedly grassroots organizations like the Tea Party; furthering the Corporations = People thing (see: Citizens United); and generally helping the rich like themselves get richer while fostering working-class outrage at everybody else. This documentary by Trouble the Water (2008) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen touches on all those matters, while also focusing on Wisconsin as a test laboratory for the brothers’ Machiavellian think-tank maneuvers, following a Louisiana GOP candidate on the campaign trail (one he’s marginalized on for opposing corporate influence peddling), and more. Any one of these topics could support a feature of their own (and most already have). Citizen Koch‘s problem is that it tries to encompass too much of its subjects’ long reach, while (despite the title) leaving those subjects themselves underexplored. (It also suffers from being a movie completed at least 18 months ago, a lifetime in current US political terms.) For the reasonably well-informed this documentary will cover a lot of familiar ground—which is not to say that ground isn’t still interesting, or that the added human interest elements don’t compel. But the film covers so much ground it ends up feeling overstuffed and unfocused. (1:26) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Coherence See “Vortex Room.” (1:29) Presidio.

Korengal This companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Restrepo — one of the best docs about modern-day warfare to date, offering unfiltered access to an Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — uses previously unseen footage shot during the year filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent shadowing their subjects. Korengal is structured as a more introspective work, with musings on what it feels like to be a soldier in the Korengal, surrounded by rough (yet strikingly beautiful) terrain populated by farmers who may or may not be Taliban sympathizers, not to mention unpredictable, heavily armed opponents referred to simply as “the enemy.” Interviews reveal sadness, boredom, a deep sense of brotherhood, and the frustrating feeling of going from “100 miles an hour to a dead halt” after the surreal exhilaration of a firefight. Korengal also functions as a tribute to Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Not only does his death add a layer of poignant subtext, it also suggests why Junger felt moved to revisit this story. That said, though Korengal‘s footage is several years old, its themes remain distressingly timely. (1:24) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious set piece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer‘s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) (Harvey)

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction Mark Wahlberg and the Dinobots star in the latest installment of Michael Bay’s action sci-fi series. (2:30) Presidio.

Under the Electric Sky Hey, raver! This 3D concert film enables you to experience the Electric Daisy Carnival without punching any holes in your brain. (1:25)

Violette Taking on another “difficult” woman artist after the excellent 2008 Séraphine (about the folk-art painter), Martin Provost here portrays the unhappy life of Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose fiction and autobiographical writings eventually made her a significant figure in postwar French literature. We first meet her waiting out the war with gay author Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), one of many unrequited loves, then surviving via the black market trade before she’s “discovered” by such groundbreaking, already-established talents as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It is the latter, a loyal supporter who nonetheless retains a chilly emotional distance, who becomes bisexual Violette’s principal obsession over the coming 20 years or so. Devos does her best to portray “a neurotic crazy washed-up old bag” with an “ugly mug” — hardly! — who is perpetually broke, depressed, and awkward, thanks no doubt in part to her mean witch of a mother (Catherine Hiegel). “Screaming and sobbing won’t get you anywhere,” Simone at one point tells her, and indeed Leduc is a bit of a pill. For the most part lacking the visual splendors of Séraphine (this character’s environs weren’t so pastoral), Violette is finely acted and crafted but, like its heroine, hard to love. (2:18) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Coffee in Berlin How do you say “mumblecore” in German? Jan Ole Gerster’s debut feature has certain arty pretensions — it’s shot in black-and-white, and scored with peppy jazz — but it’s more or less a rambling day in the life of law school dropout Niko (Tom Schilling). It happens to be the very day Niko’s golf-loving father decides to stop funding his shiftless son’s slacker lifestyle, though that crisis (which, you know, Lena Dunham built an entire HBO comedy around) receives nearly equal heft as a cutesy ongoing gimmick that sees Niko incapable of getting a cup of coffee anywhere in Berlin. Hipster ennui can be compelling if it has some underlying energy and purpose (see: 2013’s Frances Ha, to which this film has been compared), but A Coffee in Berlin comes up short on both. That said, it does offer an intriguing portrayal of Berlin — a city whose modern-chic façade barely contains the history that haunts it — and some of its supporting characters, particularly Friederike Kempter as a former schoolmate of Niko’s who has outgrown him emotionally by about one thousand percent, provide pleasant enough distractions. (1:28) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Fault in Our Stars I confess: I’m no card-carrying, vlog-flogging Nerdfighter in author John Green’s teen-geek army. But one can admire the passion — and teary romanticism — of the writer, readers, and the breakthrough novel that started it all. Much has been made over the cinematic tweaks to the best-selling YA book, but those seem like small beefs: OK, male romantic lead Gus’s (Ansel Elgort) perhaps-understandable brattiness seems to have been toned down a touch, but we’ll all get the somewhat-subversive push and pull of Green’s love story centered on two cancer-stricken innocents. Sixteen-year-old Hazel (a radiant Shailene Woodley) has been battling cancer almost all her life, fighting back from the brink, and now making her way every day with an oxygen tank and her devoted parents (Laura Dern, Sam Trammel) by her side. Her mordant wit, skeptical attitude, and smarts attract Gus, a handsome teen with a prosthetic leg, at a cancer support group, and the two embark on what seems like the most normal thing in the world — sweet, sweet love — albeit cut with the poignancy of almost-certain doom. Would the girl who calls herself a grenade dare to care for someone she will likely hurt? That’s the real question on her mind when the two reach out to the solitary author (Willem Dafoe) of their favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. The journey the two make leaves them both open to more hurt than either ever imagined, and though a good part of Fault‘s denouement boils down to a major puddle cuddle — with solid performances by all, but particularly Dern and Woodley — even a cynic is likely to get a bit misty as the kids endure all the stages of loss. And learning. (2:05) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia Nicholas Wrathall’s highly entertaining documentary pays tribute to one of the 20th century’s most brilliant, original, and cranky thinkers, with extensive input from the man himself before his death in 2012 at age 86. The emphasis here is less on Vidal’s life as a literary lion and often glittering celebrity social life than on his parallel career as a harsh scold of US social injustices and political corruption. (Needless to say, recent history only sharpened his tongue in that department, with George W. Bush dismissed as “a goddamn fool,” and earlier statements such as “This is a country of the rich, for the rich and by the rich” seeming more apt than ever.) He’s a wellspring of wisdoms both blunt and witty, sometimes surprising, as in his hindsight doubts about the virtues of JFK (a personal friend) as a president. We get plenty of colorful archival clips in which he’s seen verbally jousting with such famous foes as William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, invariably reducing them to stammering fury while remaining exasperatingly unruffled. His “out” homosexuality and outré views on sexuality in general (at odds with an increasingly assimilationist gay community) kept him controversial even among many liberals, while conservatives were further irked by his rock-solid family connections to the ruling elite. In our era of scripted political rhetoric and pandering anti-intellectualism, it’s a joy merely to spend an hour and half in the company of someone so brilliantly articulate on seemingly any topic — but particularly on the perpetually self-mythologizing, money-worshipping state of our Union. (1:29) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Grand Seduction Canadian actor-director Don McKellar (1998’s Last Night) remakes 2003 Quebecois comedy Seducing Doctor Lewis, about a depressed community searching for the town doctor they’ll need before a factory will agree to set up shop and bring much-needed jobs to the area. Canada is still the setting here, with the harbor’s name — Tickle Head — telegraphing with zero subtlety that whimsy lies ahead. A series of events involving a Tickle Head-based TSA agent, a bag of cocaine, and a harried young doctor (Taylor Kitsch) trying to avoid jail time signals hope for the hamlet, and de facto town leader Murray (Brendan Gleeson) snaps into action. The seduction of “Dr. Paul,” who agrees to one month of service not knowing the town is desperate to keep him, is part Northern Exposure culture clash, part Jenga-like stack of lies, as the townspeople pretend to love cricket (Paul’s a fanatic) and act like his favorite lamb dish is the specialty at the local café. The wonderfully wry Gleeson is the best thing about this deeply predictable tale, which errs too often on the side of cute (little old ladies at the switchboard listening in on Paul’s phone-sex with his girlfriend!) rather than clever, as when an unsightly structure in the center of town is explained away with a fake “World Heritage House” plaque. Still, the scenery is lovely, and “cute” doesn’t necessarily mean “not entertaining.” (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Clay, Piedmont. (Eddy)

Ivory Tower The latest “issue doc” to come down the pipeline is this very timely and incisive look at the cost of higher education from director Andrew Rossi (2011’s Page One: Inside the New York Times). Rossi is a Yale and Harvard Law grad, and he begins his film in the hallowed halls of the latter to frame the question: In the era of skyrocketing tuition, and with the student loan debt hovering at a trillion bucks, is college still worth it? The answer is left open-ended, though with the very strong suggestion that nontraditional education (including community colleges, online learning, and the Silicon Valley-spawned “uncollege” movement) is certainly something worth exploring, particularly for the non-wealthy. Along the way, we do see some positive tales (a kid from the mean streets of Cleveland gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard; students at rural Deep Springs College follow philosophy discussions with farm work; African American women at Spelman College thrive in an empowering environment), but there’s a fair amount of cynicism here, too, with a hard look at how certain state schools are wooing deep-pocketed out-of-staters with fancy athletic stadiums, luxurious amenities, and a willingness to embrace, however unofficially, their hard-partying reputations. Segments following a student protest at New York’s Cooper Union, a formerly free school forced to consider collecting tuition after a string of financial troubles, echo Frederick Wiseman’s epic At Berkeley (2013), a thematically similar if stylistically very different work. (1:37) California. (Eddy)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. For an interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:14) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy)

Obvious Child We first encounter the protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s funny, original film — a Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething named Donna (Jenny Slate), who works at a lefty secondhand bookstore and makes regular (if unpaid) appearances at a local comedy night — onstage mining such underdiscussed topics as the effects of vaginal discharge on your garden-variety pair of underwear. This proves a natural segue to other hefty nuggets of embarrassment gold concerning her love life, to the dismay of boyfriend Ryan (Paul Briganti), auditing from the back of the club. He pretty much deserves it, however, for what he’s about to do, which is break up with her in a nasty, well-populated unisex bathroom, taking time to repeatedly glance at the texts coming through on his phone from Donna’s good friend, with whom he’s sleeping. So when Donna, mid-drowning of sorrows, meets a nice-looking fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) at the bar, his post-fraternity-presidency aesthetic seems unlikely to deter her from a one-night stand. The ensuing trashed make-out dance-off in Max’s apartment to the Paul Simon song of the title is both comic and adorable. The fractured recap of the evening’s condom-free horizontal events that occurs inside Donna’s brain three weeks later, as she hunkers down with her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), in the bookstore’s bathroom after peeing on a stick, is equally hilarious — and unwanted-pregnancy jokes aren’t that easy to pull off. Robespierre’s treatment of this extended windup and of Donna’s decision to have an abortion is a witty, warmhearted retort to 2007’s Knocked Up, a couple generations’ worth of Hollywood rom-com writers, and an entertainment industry that continues to perform its sweaty contortions of storytelling in the gutless cause of avoiding the A-word. (1:15) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ping Pong Summer Eighties teen flicks of the My Bodyguard (1980), smart-dweebs-beat-the-bullies ilk are paid homage in Michael Tully’s deadpan satire, which is closer in spirit to the Comedy of Lameness school whose patron saint is Napoleon Dynamite. Radley (Marcello Conte) is an average teen so excited to be spending the summer of 1985 in Ocean City, Md. with his family that he renames himself “Rad Miracle.” He acquires a new best friend in Teddy (Myles Massey), who as the whitest black kid imaginable might make even Rad look cool by comparison. However, they are both dismayed to discover the local center for video gaming and everything else they like is ruled by bigger, older, cuter, and snottier douchebag Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sidekick. Only kicking Lyle’s ass at ping pong — with some help from a local weirdo (a miscast Susan Sarandon, apparently here because she’s an off screen ping pong enthusiast) — can save Rad’s wounded dignity, and the summer in general. A big step up from Tully’s odd but pointless prior Septien (2011), this has all the right stuff (including a soundtrack packed with the likes of the Fat Boys, Mary Jane Girls, New Edition, Whodini, and Night Ranger) to hilariously parody the era’s inanities. But it’s just mildly amusing — a droll attitude with lots of period detail but not much bite. (1:32) Roxie. (Harvey)

The Rover Future days have never seemed quite so bleak as they are depicted in the wild, wild Aussie west of The Rover — rendered by Animal Kingdom (2010) director David Michod, who co-wrote The Rover with Joel Edgerton. Let’s just say we’re probably not going to see any primo Burner ensembles inspired by this post-apocalyptic yarn: Michod ventures to a plausible future only a decade out, after a global economic collapse, and breaks down the brooding road trip to its hard-boiled bones, setting it in a beauteous, lawless, and unceasingly violent outback. A heist gone wrong leads a small gang of robbers to steal the car belonging to monosyllabic, ruthless mystery man Eric (Guy Pearce). The latter wants his boxy little sedan back, badly, and, in the cat and mouse game that ensues, seems willing to die for the trouble. Meanwhile, one of the gang of thieves — the slow, dreamy Rey (Robert Pattinson), who has been left to die of a gunshot wound in the dirt — turns out to be more of a survivor than anyone imagined when he tracks down the tracker hunting for his brother and cohorts. Michod seems most interested in examining and turning over the ties that bind, in a mean time, an eminently absurdist moment, when everything else has fallen away in the face of sheer survival. Cineastes, however, will appreciate the elemental, existential pleasures of this dog-eat-dog Down Under out-Western, not the least of which include the performances. Pearce’s rework of the Man With No Name exudes intention in the very forward thrust of his stance, and Pattinson breaks his cool — and the confines of typecasting — as a blubbering, babbling, thin-skinned man-child. Clad in the mystic expanses of the South Australia desert, which tip a hat to John Ford Westerns as well as scorched-earth-of-the-mind movies such as El Topo (1970) and Paris, Texas (1984), The Rover is taken to the level of tone poem by the shuddering, moaning cellos of Antony Partos’s impressive, atonal electroacoustic score. (1:42) Metreon, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Signal Sharing its title with a 2007 film — also a thriller about a mysterious transmission that wreaks havoc in the lives of its protagonists — this offbeat feature from co-writer and director William Eubank belies its creator’s deep affection for, and knowledge of, the sci-fi genre. Number one thing The Signal is not is predictable, but its twists feel organic even as the story takes one hairpin turn after another. MIT buddies Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp) are driving Nic’s girlfriend, Haley (Olivia Cooke), cross-country to California. Complicating the drama of the young couple’s imminent separation is Nic’s deteriorating physical condition (it’s never explained, but the former runner apparently has MS or some other neurological disease). The road trip turns dark when the trio (who also happen to be hackers) realize an Internet troll they’ve tangled with in the past is stalking them. After a brief detour into found-footage horror — fooled ya, Eubank seems to be saying; this ain’t that kind of movie at all! — the kids find themselves embroiled in ever-more-terrifying realities. To give away more would ruin the fun of being shocked for yourself, but think Twilight Zone meets Area 51 meets a certain futuristic trilogy starring Laurence Fishburne, who turns up here to play a very important role in Nic and company’s waking nightmare. (1:37) Metreon. (Eddy) *

 

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