Nathaniel Popkin

“Man, I love this city. I love it and I hate it,” says Mica, the lead character in Barry Jenkins’ mellifluous Medicine for Melancholy, which screened Sunday and Monday at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Mica, played by standup comic Wyatt Cenac, is San Francisco born and raised; his bitter ambivalence comes from wanting to assert an African-American identity in a rich, non-black city wracked by gentrification.

Indeed, the tension of gentrification underlies so much of contemporary San Francisco that the filmmaker Jenkins includes a long, otherwise superfluous take of a discussion among housing activists worried about the city finally losing its bohemian soul if rent control is abolished. One of them predicts that 300,000 people would be displaced if the California legislature takes away the city’s authority to regulate rent. Jenkins said afterward that in the last dozen years it’s become increasingly difficult for even professionals to afford to live in San Francisco.

Gentrification, of course, isn’t just SF ennui. An article in last week’s Onion imagines the logical consequence of the super-rich colonizing urban neighborhoods, what they ingeniously call aristocratization. The spoof newspaper quotes a Brookings Institute housing expert: “‘When you have a bejeweled, buckle-shoed duke willing to pay 11 or 12 times the asking price for a block of renovated brownstones — and usually up front with satchels of solid gold guineas — hardworking white-collar people who only make a few hundred thousand dollars a year simply cannot compete. “

An imagined victim of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, aristocratization says, “It’s just a terrible shame. There was this great little shop right across the street from my duplex apartment where I bought my baby daughter a Ramones onesie a couple of years ago, just after she was born. That whole block is an opera house now.”

Things don’t change quite as suddenly in Philadelphia, but after a decade of booming real estate, gentrification has certain activists worried. “There’s not a protected class for neighborhoods,” says Pat DeCarlo, who heads up the powerful Norris Square Civic Association in Kensington. Her hope is to preserve the historic Puerto Rican — and poor — essence of Norris Square while limiting the effect of outsiders, particularly artists. “Artists make things beautiful,” says DeCarlo, noting that yuppies often follow. One neighborhood artist tells me, “We artists are the heralds of gentrification and it saddens me for I have seen it many times: A neighborhood gets better for newcomers and then more expensive for old residents, finally pushing the latter into exodus.”

But singling out a particular group is a risky community development strategy that has already alienated some neighbors. It’s also an attempt to solve what may be the wrong problem. Jesse Gardner, a painter and landscape architect and veteran Northern Liberties activist, says that one of Philadelphia’s weaknesses is that, by and large, the region’s wealthy don’t live here. The rich take ownership, raise money and have the clout to demand better services. We therefore need more, not less, of them, says Gardner, making a careful calculation; otherwise, we’ll never have the resources to fix things up.

To my Philadelphia eyes, the San Francisco in Jenkins’ film is luminous; it undulates, throbs. It is open. The irony is that it’s too expensive for the filmmaker, who lives there on the generosity of the parents of his cinematographer, James Laxton. For Jenkins, the city is likely to remain forever at arm’s length, a geometry we in Philadelphia haven’t been forced to confront.