Two Bay Area Memelords Take on Gentrification in a New Doc

Over the past four years, Mario Riveira (@mario0o0o0o0o0o) has built a massive Instagram following by sticking a mic in people’s faces. His man-on-the-street interviews offer more than just top-tier people watching. Whether leaning into relatable topics (“What’s your favorite struggle meal?”) or stirring up debate (“What’s the snobbiest city in the Bay Area?”), Riveira gets honest takes from San Franciscans we often don’t hear from in the news media: unhoused people, kids in shiesty masks doing wheelies, retail workers on Market Street.

Riveira didn’t necessarily set out to cover social issues when he launched his page during pandemic shutdowns. But after talking to hundreds of people, he says one thing is clear: “The average person [in the Bay Area] is struggling, you know, if they’re not living with a ton of family members, or if they don’t have a tech job or work for PG&E.”

Riveira, who grew up in the working class suburbs of East Contra Costa County, has seen a lot of change during his 12 years in San Francisco. In the past couple years, he noticed new luxury apartment towers pop up on Treasure Island, a community with many low-income Black and brown residents. So Riveira went there with his camera and asked locals what they thought.

For the project, he teamed up with another popular content creator, Abraham Woodliff, who regularly skewers billionaires and politicians on his Instagram page, @realbayareamemes. The page was born out of resentment as he watched rents creep to unattainable levels not just in San Francisco, but in the Bay’s outer boroughs like Vallejo and Martinez.

As Riveira and Woodliff shot their content on Treasure Island, the two friends decided to continue the conversation about class inequality and gentrification in San Francisco and Oakland. What was supposed to be a 15-minute video grew into an hour-long documentary called The City of Sensitive Frauds, which gets its premiere March 19 at Chinatown’s Great Star Theater. (The screening is sold out, but Riveira and Woodliff will announce an East Bay premiere in the coming weeks.)

The documentary’s title points to what Riveira and Woodliff see as a blatant contradiction of the Bay Area. Politicians often appeal to liberal values of inclusivity and diversity. Yet, through policy, they’ve created economic conditions that force families to live hand-to-mouth, and the homelessness crisis is mounting. People of color, LGBTQ+ people, young people and artists have moved out of San Francisco in droves, leaving a cultural vacuum (a dramatic voiceover in the trailer describes it as “a city ravaged by greedy nerds”).

“‘We’re for every community, bring everybody here — but only if you’re rich.’ They don’t say that part, but that’s the reality of it,” Woodliff elaborates in our interview.

In the film, Riveira and Woodliff go to the Fillmore District, once nicknamed the Harlem of the West, to meet up with rapper and community advocate Gunna Goes Global. “San Francisco is on the verge of being the first city to successfully remove Black people. Legally,” he declares bluntly. Indeed, the city’s Black population has fallen under 6%, according to the latest census estimates from 2023.

“What San Francisco does is they’ll gentrify the fuck out of a neighborhood, and then they create a museum to the people who got kicked out,” says Woodliff in the trailer as the camera cuts to the Fillmore’s murals of Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie.

The City of Sensitive Frauds points fingers at companies like Veritas, a corporate landlord on the list of the Bay Area’s “worst evictors,” and looks towards possible solutions. As part of that effort, Riveira and Woodliff interview former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, a Democratic Socialist and tenants’ rights attorney who pushed for renter protections and a law that entitles tenants to legal representation during eviction proceedings.

“There are absolutely solutions,” Preston tells KQED. “One is to try to remove as much housing from the private market as possible, and to have acquisitions of housing to create either nonprofit housing or community land trusts, or other forms of housing that provide long-term stability for people to stop eviction and to have stronger rent control.”

The City of Sensitive Frauds arrives as conversations about class solidarity are bubbling up in person and online, especially as Silicon Valley’s tech elite align themselves with the Trump White House. How can working class people resist? Riveira and Woodliff want to do more than raise awareness. They say people should make their voices heard where the powerful can’t ignore them.

“Go to Nancy Pelosi’s house and march right in front of her house,” Riveira says. “Go to Mark Benioff’s house and march in front of his house. Go to Daniel Lurie’s house and march in front of his house. Bring the pitchforks.”