FoundSF

"I was there..."

by David Brigode

Originally written for my MPA at SF State in 1983, this is part one (of three) of my personal recollection of SF Tenant History from 1974-1983, and my role as a co-founder of the San Francisco Tenant’s Union and advocate for Tenant’s Rights and Rent Control.

Part One—The Early Days

In July of 1974 I wandered into the offices of the Tenants’ Action Group (TAG), two blocks from my house in the Haight. A woman named Betsy greeted me and explained what they did. There were guys talking to each other; the phone was ringing off the hook and nobody was answering it. Fatefully, I picked up the phone, and with my limited tenant-landlord knowledge, started phone counseling. The guys later told me they didn’t understand what I was doing. It seemed to me the way to organize tenants was to talk to them about their problems and offer solutions.

The “modern era” of city-wide tenant organizing against private sector landords, speculators, and developers commenced in the early ’70s. Tenant’s Action Group (TAG) was formed in the Haight Ashbury by predominantly white counter-culture young people, influenced by the anti-war movement and rising political awareness of the time. TAG was established in an office at 1310 Haight St, with telephone counseling, tenant union organizing, and publication of a tenant’s rights handbook. Organizing took place in the Haight, Fillmore, Mission, Tenderloin, and among SF State Gatorville housing populations. Early struggles to organize buildings were enthusiastic but lacking in long term impact, in most cases attributable to the absence of truly effective tenant protection legislation. However, ongoing struggles at 333 Hyde, 625 Ashbury, 10 Lyon, and 23rd and Diamond demonstrated collective strength through negotiating and bargaining by withholding rent.

The focus in this period was on maintenance and repair problems. Code compliance was one of the few tools available to renters at this time, and tenants began collective organizing to fight rent increases, which theoretically were prohibited if the property was not up to code. Tenants would freeze rats found in their homes to bring into court during unlawful detainer proceedings to convince the judge to stave off the rent increase.

Also, at this chaotic time in San Francisco history, a rumored threat by a group called the New World Liberation front (NWLF) against Bayview Federal Savings allegedly resulted in the rehabilitation of affordable rental housing in the Mission near the bank’s headquarters building rather than its destruction for a parking lot.

Spurred by the success of a Berkeley rent control drive in the “McGovern” primary of June 1972, TAG initiated a campaign to place a rent control measure on the Fall 1975 ballot. Funds were raised, organizational endorsements sought, and an ordinance was drafted. Circulators between the fall of 1974 and the spring of ’75 gathered a respectable 22,000 signatures. However, the law at that time required over 60,000, which was beyond the scope of the resources at that time, and the project was regretfully shelved.

TAG Breakup

The attempt to place a rent control initiative on the Nov. ’75 ballot exposed and harshened the pre-existing tensions within TAG. The organization had always been prone to leftist internal conflict. For example, at one point a rule was adopted requiring alternating male and female speakers at meetings when there were nine men and two women in the room. Chronic and repeated argumentation in 3- and 4-hour Sunday evening meetings was debilitating and draining. Policy issues became subordinated to personal concerns and cliques formed. It once took 45 minutes of vicious exchanges to decide on the order of the agenda for the evening’s meeting.

A major difference of opinion persisted between those who favored a focus on lobbying and electoral work (as espoused by TAG chair John Bremner) and others who favored grassroots-based tenant counseling and building organizing (articulated by SF State activist and Carpenter’s Union member Michael Canright). A proposal to shut down office counseling in order to focus on the rent control electoral campaign split the group.

Gentrification

Meanwhile, the situation for renters was becoming much more stressful. San Francisco in the mid ’70s witnessed a resurgence in livability in the City’s neighborhoods. Factors creating this situation were many.

• The OPEC oil embargo of 73-74 made long distance suburban commuting uneconomical and chancy at best.

• Homeownership opportunities in the suburbs were reduced by environmental and slow growth concerns.

• In the City, a new interest in the Victorian architecture focused investor attention on the previously neglected pre-1915 wooden central city housing stock (those that survived Redevelopment’s bulldozers).

• Accelerated construction of office towers in the Financial District heightened demand by the white-collar workers of these corporations for housing within the City.

Also, waves of new immigration were putting additional pressure on the fixed supply of rental units.

• The ’70s Gay Liberation movement attracted tens of thousands of lesbian and gay individuals to San Francisco to experience freedom often denied to them in their home towns.

• Asian peoples (with the borders opened up by new immigration legislation in 1965) from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Korea continued to come to California in ever increasing numbers, many landing in San Francisco first.

• Latinos fleeing repressive economic and political regimes in Central America, backed by U.S. corporate and military support, came to the Mission.

• Young whites came from all over the U.S. to San Francisco, beckoned by cultural and economic dynamism and opportunity.

However, the overwhelming engine motivating the gentrification of San Francisco’s neighborhoods was “Manhattanization”—the explosive increase in office buildings which had taken place in the Financial District. That office boom led to the destruction of housing for offices and related usages, either thru private demolition or publicly funded redevelopment. Other housing was converted to office space or commercial space adjacent to downtown, and along neighborhood shopping strips, while a number of low-cost Single-Room Occupany hotels were converted to tourist hotels. With the surge in value of existing housing, more and more apartments were slated to become condominiums, frequently displacing a renter, reducing the affordable stock, and generating immense unearned profit for the developer.

From 1965 to 1985 San Francisco office space grew from 29 million square feet to 69 million, adding115,000 new jobs. According to calculations by the SF Dept. of City Planning, this created additional demand for at least 27,000 new housing units in SF during a time when the actual number of units shrank. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to discover that rents and housing costs rose sharply.

In areas of classic Victorian architecture, good MUNI connections downtown, and a minority or working-class population, massive displacement resulted. The Duboce Tringle census district alone lost over 1,000 African Americans between 1970-1980. This writer personally observed a rent increase in the outer Richmond from $125 to $375 for an elderly widow who had occupied that unit for 52 years. Tenants at a building at Leavenworth and Washington who opposed an eviction and remodeling found their units broken into, vandalized by workmen, and personal possessions stolen. Rent increases of 50 and 75% or even higher were distressingly common. Renters were forced into competition with other renters, as, for example, the gay community in the “Greater Castro” impacted on blacks in the Duboce Triangle and Divisadero corridor, young whites in the Haight, and Latino families in the Mission.

Housing costs rose for homebuyers, too. In the Haight, a house on Frederick Street went from the low $30,000s to $270,000 in a year and a half. Tract homes in the Outer Sunset selling for $32,000 in 1971 sold uniformly for $90-105,000 in 1977. While in 1970 the average SF home cost $3,000 more than the national average, by 1980 it went for $53,000 more than the national average.

By the end of the 1970s, according to the most commonly defined measure of “affordability” (the number of renters paying more than 25% of their monthly income for rent), one third of all renter households in San Francisco required rent subsidy/Section 8 assistance. The Federally funded Section 8 subsidy met only a meager fraction of the need.

This environment attracted speculators and fast turnover profiteers (“flippers”) like vultures. Such investment combines and limited partnerships as Skyline Realty, Hawthorne-Stone, Herth, DLZ, Landmark, and a host of others acquired a notorious reputation for intimidation of renters, criminal neglect of property, large unjustified rent increases, wholesale evictions, and pure and simple greed. Tenants who fought to save their homes were threatened with or suffered retaliation. Many were forced into extended legal struggles and uncertainty and even suffered isolated instances of arson and physical attack.

The most prominent tenant’s struggle at this time was the 10-year defense of the International Hotel on Kearny St. next to Chinatown. Occupied by elderly Filipino men (Manong) and retired former merchant seamen, it was purchased by a corrupt Thai military official and was slated to be the site of an office high-rise. It became the symbol of tenant resistance, and after many delays and political double-crosses, units of the SFPD tactical squad and mounted patrols clubbed their way thru 3,000 demonstrators in the pre-dawn hours of August 4, 1977, and forcibly evicted the old people. The site remained an empty hole for many years.

The violent eviction was postponed until the day after a failed special election to recall George Moscone, and Sheriff Richard Hongisto. Many supporters of those two men were on the barricades. The fire department used ladder units to land police on top of the four-story roof. Some of the crowd members were members of the People’s Temple of the politically potent Reverend Jim Jones, who all perished in Guyana the following year. I was clubbed by the SFPD tac squad, who were using their nightsticks. The fire department used ladder units to land police on top of the four-story roof. Ironically, 30 years later the site was dedicated as an 8-story affordable housing project for the elderly, with an I-Hotel Museum on the ground floor.

continue to part two