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The Mission's an interesting place to screen a movie about gentrification, filmed from the eyes of the gentrifier -- so there was certainly no shortage of things to think about at last night's showing of New Urban Cowboy for DocFest at the Roxie.
New Urban Cowboy is a documentary about Michael Arth, a kind of hippie-dippie former resident of Santa Barbara who moves to the small town of Deland, Florida, near Orlando, and more or less single-handedly beautifies a decrepit drug-laden area formerly known as "Cracktown" into "the Historic DeLand Garden District," in accordance with his philosophies on urban planning and home design.
Arth, though sweet, is kind of a weird dude, he seems extremely difficult to live with, and we must admit the house designs weren't really quite our cup of tea (they seemed kind of twee). But there's no denying that Arth did a great thing for the town of DeLand -- after he moved in and painstakingly bought and renovated what ultimately totaled around 20 plots of land in Cracktown, the crime rate in town dropped by 10 percent, property values skyrocketed, and civic pride bloomed.
But, as Arth himself admits, the drug dealers just moved to other parts of town and the homelessness problem near the neighborhood continued. We found ourselves wondering, despite ourselves, about what the rest of DeLand looked like, and not just the ye olde quainte historic village of the Garden District, and what their social services system looked like. Hey, you show a movie in San Francisco District 6, this is what we're going to think about!
New Urban Cowboy screens again this Saturday (10/6) at 5 p.m.
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I saw a rough cut of this film a while back and enjoyed it so I'm looking forward to seeing the final version....I don't think Mr. Arth ever presented himself as a curer of all social ills - fixing buildings is not a panacea for Every Single Problem Out There.
However, what I got from his story was that here was a guy who took on ALL the risk of converting a horrible part of town into something liveable. The fact is that the people living there were mostly drug users and dealers and criminals. Are they going to suddenly "change" just because the area has changed? No.
We can all take whacks at this guy for his quirks and the like, but in the end , the fact is he did SOMETHING while everyone else, including the former landowners and the city did NOTHING. And he did it without connected nonprofits or government money, and without a lot of what SF considers necessary to fix an area.
Now, perhaps there are ways that local government might have helped him fix the area AND keep it affordable for folks who want decent housing but don't have ton of money. They did not. That to me says a lot about Deland, and about San Francisco - people love to talk but no one just DOES.
http://www.njudahchronicles.com/2007/09/a_really_great_documentary_you.html