How problem tenants are making S.F.’s affordable housing an unlivable nightmare
San Francisco relinquished its public housing in 2015. Tenants at this building think the city just wanted to pawn off their aging building.
Two years ago, a blaze ravaged the sixth floor of 1880 Pine Street, an affordable independent living facility for seniors and the disabled. The fire sent a plume of smoke and noxious fumes into Joseph Kim’s unit. By then, Kim had lived in the building for nearly a decade. He always knew the paint could be a dormant source of danger. Years earlier, management had given him a pamphlet warning him of the dangers of disturbed lead paint in old buildings like his. It didn’t take long for the smoke and fumes to immobilize him.
Firefighters were able to break down his door and carry an incapacitated Kim to safety. But even in his weakened state, Kim was angry. Days before, he heard his neighbor mutter that the building was bewitched by demons that needed to be cleansed with fire. Kim had alerted management but saw no action taken.
According to the San Francisco Fire Department incident report, the fire had started in that neighbor’s unit. It didn’t surprise Kim. The man’s destructive impulses were always there, Kim explained. He’d seen the man run throughout the hallway naked, punching tenants or threatening them with a pipe. On one of these naked tirades, Kim says the man punched an 89-year-old grandmother. Even then, he was allowed to stay.
Later that night, Kim returned to a charred sixth-floor hallway. Management deemed his unit habitable, so he reluctantly went to bed.
According to Kim, it took months for the damages to be repaired. During that time, the sixth-floor tenants — most of whom were elderly — were stranded. Their homes had become a construction zone.
A decade ago, the city would’ve been responsible for repairing the damages at 1880 Pine. Under San Francisco’s Housing Authority, the city managed public housing like this building. But that changed in 2015 when the city agreed to partner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration Program. Under RAD, the city relinquished its public housing to nonprofits, retaining ownership of the land as leverage to keep housing affordable. That year, Mercy Housing California, a nonprofit that specializes in affordable housing management, began managing 1880 Pine.
Mercy Housing California is a regional office of the Denver-based Mercy Housing — a national nonprofit that develops and manages affordable housing for a variety of low-income populations including families, seniors and people with special needs. As part of its services, Mercy Housing helps its over 42,000 current residents “navigate the unique challenges they may face — including mental health struggles, the residual trauma of experiencing homelessness, or circumstantial obstacles to achieving their goals in a way that meets their needs and draws on their strengths,” Rosalyn Sternberg, Mercy Housing California’s communications manager told me.
Kim was optimistic about Mercy when it took over the building. The nonprofit’s representatives scheduled meetings with tenants, including Kim, to learn about their concerns and requests for improvements. According to Michael Zornes, the president of 1880 Pine's tenants' association, Mercy’s team promised universal upgrades of appliances, furniture, and flooring but he said those promises were delivered on sparingly.
After the fire, Kim lost all hope in management.
For its part, Mercy sees the night of the fire differently from Kim.
“There was immediate communication with tenants, air purifiers were distributed, and skilled vendors were brought to the scene,” Sternberg told me.
One thing Mercy and 1880 Pine’s sixth-floor tenants do agree on was that Kim’s neighbor, who lived in the unit in which the fire started, was the only person relocated to a nearby hotel. His was the only unit deemed uninhabitable.
Violent and destructive tenants like Kim’s neighbor appear to be tolerated by management, six tenants told me in a round-table discussion. Months ago, a different tenant sprayed fire extinguisher foam on one resident and, in a separate incident, tased another. She was jailed, but still returned to 1880 Pine, where tenants say she continued assaulting people and smashed a window.
Management reps say that although residents like Kim may not think they are addressing resident complaints, they actually are — but oftentimes these discussions happen in private.
Tenants like Kim’s neighbor may be legacy tenants from the Housing Authority era, Doug Shoemaker, president of Mercy Housing California explained. In such cases, a tenant may have been well-behaved when they first moved in but then could have fallen victim to the city’s worsening drug and mental health crisis, which coincided with Mercy’s tenure.
If not for Mercy, tenants like Kim’s neighbor would be homeless, so Mercy is trying to rehabilitate them. When a schizophrenic resident refused to take their medication, a healthcare team worked with management to ensure that the tenant adhered to their treatment. In other instances, management has referred tenants in need of similar support to healthcare providers.
But 1880 Pine is an independent living facility; it’s not the place to rehabilitate tenants with violent and destructive tendencies.
“We’re talking about dangerous men and women who have wielded fists, a pipe … who’ve beaten the elderly, the disabled, who’ve set devastating fires,” Kim emphasized.
Weeks after our interview, Zornes emailed to inform me that the tenant who had tased another resident had been evicted.
“She was told she was no longer allowed inside the building,” he wrote. But he also questioned if eviction was the best solution.
“Why must these residents be evicted?” Zornes probed. “Why can’t they be re-housed in living situations better suited for their needs?”
He’s right. Mercy itself has 13 supportive housing properties in the city. These properties are equipped with specialized care services like case managers and neighboring adult health centers to help formerly homeless residents thrive. But tenants like the one Mercy evicted cannot readily access that housing. The city’s supportive housing system accepts prospective tenants through its referral process — a process that favors people who have experienced homelessness the longest.
If a tenant at 1880 Pine is at risk of homelessness from frequent keeping-the-peace infractions, wouldn’t it be better to transfer them directly to supportive housing where they can get the help they need?
Instead, the evicted tenant will likely end up back on the street. And if the claims made in a recent lawsuit against the city from the Coalition on the Homeless are true, if they make it into a homeless encampment, they’ll probably lose that, too.
Although Kim’s studio apartment has long since been fixed from the fire, the cold San Francisco nights are still miserable. For the past year, he has reluctantly used his heating system, which has been producing too much or not enough heat — if it even works.
“The utter lack of heat made me shiver so badly my teeth clattered and I could not sleep at all,” he wrote me in an email this past August.
Kim alerted management, but, he says, they haven’t come up with a permanent solution.
A day after he sent me the email, Kim filed a joint complaint with other tenants experiencing similar issues to the city’s Department of Building Inspection. Nine days later, DBI closed the case. Kim never received an explanation as to why.
Some tenants at 1880 Pine suspect RAD was a way for the city to pawn off management of a portfolio of aging properties that were bound to need extensive updates and repairs. Now, nonprofits like Mercy are expected to clean up the mess.
Both Shoemaker and Sternberg point out that the city is still providing financial support. The year Mercy took over alone, the nonprofit received nearly $1.5 million in government contributions to pay for “a variety of services at Sunnydale HOPE SF,” an ambitious project by the city and Mercy to rehabilitate 1,700 homes in Sunnydale, “as well as pass-through funding to pay for case management in some of [Mercy’s] supportive housing properties,” Sternberg wrote in an email.
Even so, Zornes is unsatisfied. “Truthfully, I wish we were still under the management of the Housing Authority. Our building was cleaner, and the environment was less ‘tense’ than it is now.”
It’s difficult to guess how the building would have fared under the city. But since the fire, life at 1880 Pine continues to be hard for Kim. Fire alarms have blared a few times each week he told me. Most cases have been false alarms started by some disruptive tenants. Now, an upper-floor tenant refuses to evacuate — he suspects every alarm is a hoax. This philosophy is dangerous, though it hasn’t failed him yet. If things don’t change, the next fire and an untimely death may be inevitable.
Coming soon: There’s a chasm in California’s mental health system. He just became homeless because of it.
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Why doesn’t the city have separate facilities for the mentally I’ll and for the drug addicted? It isn’t fair or productive to mix these people in one building or area. In the meanwhile our Mayor is at every gala and opening, partying and catering to the bicycle coalition. Take care of the SF citizens who need assistance!