Comment 1 for bug 1401629

Do I understand correctly that you are running under Gentoo?

Files is primarily intended to be installed on Debian based systems and when installed the binary is /usr/bin/pantheon-files. Alternatively, if compiled from source without installing, the binary is in XXX/build/pantheon-files, where XXX is the root of the source tree.

You appear to be running from ~/elementary/pantheon-files/install/bin/pantheon-files and none of the expected default directories were found (~/Downloads etc) so this may be causing the problem.