Has a bingo card filled with real estate phrases appeared on your block? The phrases are real listing excerpts, and they all come from listings in the 94110 zip code.
“The epitome of San Francisco living” reads one of them. Another, “Ethnic cafés and hip night spots.” Then there are the more brusque examples: “Motion sensor, alarm system, video intercom” or “As-is! Bring your developer!”
The bingo card is the project of graphic designer Kelly Niland, who has worked with a variety of businesses and organizations in the Mission and lived in the neighborhood for some 19 years. She’s also the creator of last year’s Mission-themed take on LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down.”
Niland perused home listings in the area for the month of February to find the quotes used on the board and found, again and again, remarkably out of touch descriptions.
“Every day in February I was typing 94110,” Niland said of her process. “I just read them, just combed them.They’re just insane, getting more so with time. I think there’s a trend out there: Failed MFA creative writing students trying to make a living or something.”
Niland said she has watched the neighborhood change dramatically, with the cost of living rising dramatically but the quality of life stagnating – a fact obscured in the embellished language of the real estate listings she came across.
“It was like a bloodletting, like sucking a snake bite out of a vein,” she said. “Of course the irony of all this is all the wording in these ads. It couldn’t be further from a cultural mecca for a lot of people who live here now.”
Niland has been posting newsprint copies of the bingo sheet around the neighborhood, but is also printing a few batches on sturdier, decorative paperboard and selling them at local businesses.
While she said she’d “much rather have people come across them in their lives, getting on to the shuttle or getting on to the BART,” prints can be found at Campfire Gallery, Aggregate Supply, and Industrious Life as early as Wednesday.