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Boom: The Sound of Eviction
By turns humorous and scathing, Boom delves into the ironies and contradictions of the “New Economy,” and delivers a potent social critique that is ambitious in its scope, while remaining close to the human scale. The film moves easily between dot-com party crashing at one end of the economic spectrum, and painful moments with evicted families at the other. Boom features interviews with dot-com workers, real estate developers, and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, as well as those who challenged the new economic order through community organizing, electoral politics, and direct action. In one scene, long-time residents talk about how hard it is to find a place to live. In another, a young professional standing in a coffee shop talks about the new condos and awesome night life.
Sound familiar?
This film provokes conversation on the current, much larger, Bay Area housing crisis (compared with the dot-com crisis of the late 90’s), and ethnic/economic cleansing of the past decade. How could this have happened again? Why is it way worse this time? Why didn’t SF City Hall and Sacramento respond to the first crisis by tightening eviction laws and protections for long-time residents? Why isn’t Willie Brown in prison?
(Okay, joking maybe).
Keep in mind that this is happening all over the US, all over the world in fact one of the symptoms (or strategies) of global capitalism. It’s just more acute in The Bay Area because of the huge influx of tech workers, unwitting but overpaid pawns in the chess games being played by Google, Apple, Facebook and the like, for domination of their sectors of the economy and perhaps society as well.