Reality Bytes: Bravo TV’s “Million Dollar Listing” Comes to San Francisco, Skewering the Tech Rich
When you first move to San Francisco you notice how different the initial conversations are here. On the east coast, locals quickly size you up by asking where you went to college or what you do for a living.
But out here, within minutes of encountering a complete stranger, you’ll be peppered with questions about where you live. What neighborhood? How long? House or apartment? Own or rent? Rent control? Oh, how much?
We’re obsessed with housing. And for good reason — it’s expensive and there’s not enough. San Francisco has the highest housing costs in the United States, whether you’re renting or trying to buy. The median home price in the city just hit $1.15 million, up 21.4% from a year ago.
Notice I said trying to buy. Part of the reason it’s so costly is because the number of homes for sale is relatively small and has actually dropped from a year ago, making the few places up for grabs all the more rare and coveted. Add to this the fact that San Francisco has always had limited housing stock (we’re surrounded by water on three sides), has been maddeningly slow to build new housing, and an influx of wealth from both China and the booming local tech sector has created a mob of buyers flush with cash.
Against this frenzied background comes the new television show “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco,” the latest edition to the Bravo cable network’s stable of reality TV shows (premiering July 8). Bravo might be best known for its “Real Housewives” franchise, but the channel practically invented bourgie TV porn, first with fashion porn (“Project Runway”), then food porn (“Top Chef”) and now real estate porn — the “Million Dollar Listing” series has featured Los Angeles and New York for years. See all the things you could never get to wear, eat or own. Drool, baby, drool!
Count me among the droolers. Just like everyone else, I too became obsessed with real estate after moving to San Francisco. More than once I’ve been a lookie-loo at a Sunday open house I could never afford. I would even tell out-of-town visitors to put an open house on their touring schedule, since they’re jaws would surely drop when they saw how much homes cost here. San Francisco’s version of the Wailing Wall is the vast window of listing posters at Coldwell Banker on Market near Castro where eyes well up when residents see the prices and curse themselves for not buying years ago.
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I’ve eagerly watched both the New York and L.A. versions of “Million Dollar Listing.” The producers play up the colorful characters and personal conflicts, but I’m on the edge of my seat for the moments when they show the properties, getting light headed over plumbing fixtures and custom kitchens, and taking careful note of the size and then calculating the price per square foot. And after living in San Francisco for nearly 20 years, I’m probably among only a handful of viewers who see the Beverly Hills palaces and Manhattan penthouses and marvel at how inexpensive they are, uh, compared to San Francisco.
So I was excited when I heard the show was finally coming here, but also a little bewildered. After all, nearly everything is a million dollar listing in San Francisco. How interesting can a one-bedroom condo in SoMa be? A fixer in Bernal Heights? A rock doesn’t get you much more than an actual rock here.
I got to see an advance screening of the first episode, and similar to the other editions the cast consists of three preternaturally ambitious local real estate brokers, all telegenic men. Casting for this series seems to follow the fuck-marry-or-kill game, and the same goes for the San Francisco version. Andrew Greenwell is the machiavellian gay guy with the hot boyfriend, and Duboce Triangle native Justin Fichelson is the charming oddball. The casts of the other versions also include these archetypical characters.
But the San Francisco edition has something the other cities’ versions don’t, a character that seems to have some depth and substance. That’s Roh Habibi, an immigrant from the wars in Afghanistan who was once a Marina party boy and is now a practicing orthodox Muslim with a wife and newborn. Diminutive in stature, he reminded me of Ike Shehadeh, the beloved San Francisco sandwich shop king of Ike’s Place fame who was once homeless and overcame remarkable odds to succeed. There’s nothing like hardscrabble beginnings to help build character, and it will be interesting to see how far Bravo is willing to let the grit of Habibi’s life and story unfold. That will be a challenge, since this isn’t a documentary, and the franchise is inherently about selling fantasy and escape…and nothing kills a reality TV porn boner faster in than a dose of, well, a bummer reality.
That said, there are signs that “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco” will have a bit more profundity than its sister shows. While focused on techie buyers and the higher end of the spectrum, properties selling for $3 million and up, the premiere episode also alluded to the harsh reality of the city’s current housing crisis. Yes, it’s compelling in a rubbernecking-a-car-crash way to see how mind-boggling expensive it has become to find a home here, but the harsh truth is that working class and middle class folks are priced out of city these days. If not for the fact that a dwindling majority of the rental units are covered by rent control that restricts rent hikes on existing tenants, many of our friends and people we encounter every day could not afford to live here.
People concerned about this affordable housing crisis might be inclined to scorn “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco” because of its focus on the wealthy that are gobbling up every available square foot of shelter these days. But the producers seem to be making their own judgments: home sellers and buyers in the premiere are consistently portrayed as unattractive pustules of arrogance and avarice — the type of people no one in San Francisco would want to know. Their egos are dwarfed only by their idiocy: one man seems to want to purchase a place because the bed is comfortable (it’s part of the staging), and a woman appears to demand that a nearby tree be removed, unable to comprehend that it’s on a different property that belongs to someone else.
These might be editing tricks (read those release forms before you sign), because it’s hard to believe people are that inane. But skewering the rich and privileged has been a form of entertainment dating back thousands of years before Molière, and it has long been a favorite pastime here in this left leaning city. Perhaps San Francisco finally has a reality TV show that many people can enjoy, for many different reasons.
