One might think that enough had been said about San Francisco’s peculiarities as an increasingly uninhabitable city. It paints an ugly picture of the possibilities faced by other cities.

Amongst all this, there is a bright spot. The rent control ordinance has some strange loopholes that, for once, benefit the tenant.

An illegal unit is one created without the required permits — so it doesn’t have a certificate of occupancy. Lacking the paperwork, the landlord cannot prove that the unit was created after the magic date of June 13, 1979, and voila! — the tenant is on rent control.

Also, the landlord can’t evict a person for illegal use of the property, because the landlord did something illicit by renting it out in the first place. Curbed.com says:

In a bizarre twist of red tape, you can sometimes be better protected living in an illegal unit than in a market-rate one built after 1979.

Still, even those tenants protected by the Rent Ordinance can be evicted for 16 “just cause” reasons, which include the breach of terms, non-payment of rent, and other offenses that are only fair.

On the other hand, evicted tenants are awarded relocation payments for many reasons, and there are some good humane rules on the books. After mid-June of 1979, there is no such thing as rent control, and tenants can be evicted for “almost any reason.”

San Francisco Tenants Union is a formidable source of information, including news about the exciting Ellis Eviction Mapping Project, which describes itself thusly:

We strive to make the often obscured mechanisms of material, cultural, and affective displacement palpable. We see the eviction epidemic as endemic to a political economy built to privilege corporate interests of real estate and tech, and seek to contribute to a living archive that deconstructs corporate collusion.

Vacancy Tax

Some politicians are in favor of enacting a vacancy tax, attempting to force landlords to place empty units on the market, which would in theory increase the availability of short-term rentals by 8% or possibly as much as 12%. Although, like everything else, they would probably find a way to get around it and avoid paying the penalties.

Joe Eskenazi reported that San Francisco’s chief housing inspector, Rosemary Bosque, “confirmed there is no tool, no law — no means — to compel private property owners to rent out their rooms rather than leave them vacant.” Apparently this is not a problem outside the U.S., but Americans take their property rights very seriously.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin wants a vacancy tax. Here are some examples of the criticism via online commentary:

They made it very unattractive to rent and now when people choose to keep units vacant rather than rent under idiotic rent regulations, they want to tax vacancies.

This is a blatantly unconstitutional taking of property.

If you live in my property, and I want it back and can’t get it back, you are taking the property without just compensation.

There is a very strong feeling that investors are “just parking capital in the city’s housing stock” and leaving places empty for sinister reasons, like plain old greed. Apparently, it is more cost-effective to hold onto a building, with everything brand-new, in hopes that inflation will bring a huge reward when it eventually sells.

Many people believe that the whole scam is simply more dirty capitalist maneuvering. Because it does a great societal ill, by filling up the absolutely limited resource of square land footage with empty structures, some see a need to end this kind of speculation, and see a vacancy tax as the best way to discourage it.

Reactions?

Source: “San Francisco rent laws your landlord probably doesn’t want you to know,” Curbed.com, 04/17/17
Source: “San Francisco Tenants Union,” SFTU.org, current
Source: “How to Fill All the Empty SRO Rooms,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Source: “SF to explore taxing property owners who keep buildings, units vacant,” SFExaminer.com, 03/31/18
Photo credit: Nicolas Raymond (freestock.ca dare to share beauty) on Visualhunt/CC BY

The San Francisco housing shortage is a nightmare stew of complicated ingredients including but not limited to geographical limitations, rent control, a shrinking SRO pool, the disastrous Airbnb model, short-term rental exceptions, OMI evictions, landlords whose get-rich strategies are incomprehensible to the average sane person, and even the occasional predatory con-artist tenant.

Joe Eskenazi, who writes about these matters for the SF Public Press, accuses landlords of keeping rooms and buildings empty for years, while waiting for the price to go up. But Randy Shaw, whose job involves protecting and/or housing impoverished SRO residents, takes the opposite view, and insists that:

Virtually every owner of a currently vacant SRO I know wants to lease it out for city homeless programs… I cannot think of a single SRO owner who thinks that a good profit strategy is keeping units off the market.

Three years back, Shaw noted that the average cost to build a new housing unit in San Francisco was $690,000. In other words, one million U.S. dollars would not even build two places for human beings to legally live. (A tent, while considerably cheaper is, alas, not legal.)

Shaw explains the city’s three key strategies to address the housing crisis. One is Small Site Acquisition, which authorizes the city to buy buildings from owners who want to get out of the landlord business. The average price for one of those was $450,000 — almost half a million, for those who haven’t had their coffee yet.

And then, there is master leasing

Since 1998, the city has funded nonprofit groups to “master lease” single room occupancy buildings, to house those who would otherwise be homeless. Apparently, the price of buildings abruptly went up. Shaw wrote:

These rising prices mean the city must pay a lot more to expand its master leasing program. Most longterm owners interested in leasing have already done so. New opportunities involve owners whose recent purchases leave them with high mortgage costs and the need to charge higher rents for nonprofit leases.

Six months ago, Eskenazi explained how the city can’t afford the master-lease gambit unless the hotel contains at least 70 rooms, which “leaves about 90 percent of the city’s 404 private SROs out of the running.” He reported that although the city controls more than 40 SRO buildings with around 4000 occupied units, among the remaining such buildings in private hands, one out of seven rooms is usually vacant.

Both sides accuse the other of not mentioning things they should have mentioned, and mentioning things they should not have. Shaw cites the example of the Bristol Hotel, whose owner wanted the city to lease it for step-up housing, but the city didn’t think that was the best use of taxpayer dollars.

Shaw is a great proponent of this intermediary stage, where the hotel has no desk clerks, social workers or counselors:

This involves getting longterm tenants in supportive housing into apartments, thus freeing up vacancies in existing master leased hotels… Based on what we have found, there are fewer real SRO vacancies today than perhaps ever before. This is largely due to the dramatic number of master leased hotels.

For those who graduate from the misleadingly-named “permanent supportive housing” program, Eskenazi agrees that step-up hotels are a good idea. But that model only works with tenants who can get along without supervision, whereas the city’s funding priorities are with the hardcore homeless, who by definition need a lot of human intervention.

A number of Shaw’s anti-homelessness activist colleagues don’t see his point either. They are bewildered at his claim that he “cannot think of a single SRO owner who thinks that a good profit strategy is keeping units off the market.”

They can. They can provide documentation, as can the city. Eskenazi says:

There are activists and organizers, in fact, who track SRO vacancy rates and denote “red flag” hotels, where the high percentage of unoccupied rooms denote a good likelihood of conversion — legal or otherwise — to a tourist hotel. SRO properties for sale explicitly note the number of vacant rooms, as — intuitively — the building gains value when it has fewer longtime tenants paying 1979 rents and more opportunities to charge new tenants 2018 rents.

Why would it make sense to hold rooms vacant? Eskenazi keeps on trying to get to the bottom of it. Take the Bel-Air Hotel, for instance, which he wrote about last fall. Out of 59 residential rooms, 28 were vacant. The owner, Roger Patel, had come very close to signing up with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, in a move that would have filled all his rooms, with the government paying as much as $800 per month each. But the deal did not go through. According to sources in the know, the owner backed out when he learned how much it would cost to bring the building into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Apparently, building owners invent reasons to not rent out the rooms that are supposed to be for ordinary people. Then they whine about the vacancy rate, so they are allowed to convert those rooms into mini-palaces for wealthy tourists. There is a lot more to it, including the Five Sisters project debacle, which Eskenazi explains in great detail for anyone interested in going deeper.

The city can punish stubborn landlords by limiting the number of tourist rooms they can rent out during the peak season. But the Department of Building Inspection gets 1,000 violation complaints per month, and supposedly can’t keep track of them all.

Reactions?

Source: “SF’s Mythical ‘vacant’ SROs,” BeyondChron.org, 02/27/18
Source: “Sticker Shock for SF Housing Solutions,” BeyondChron.org, 04/28/18
Source: “How to Fill All the Empty SRO Rooms,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Photo on Visualhunt

House the Homeless has been using San Francisco as a mirror to reflect many aspects of urban life that exist now, or soon will, in other American cities. We looked at the single-room occupancy scene, the short-term rental rules, Airbnb, “owner move in” evictions,  autocratic landlords, Ponzi-like schemes of ever-expanding acquisition, and the 12,000 yearly complaints received by the Department of Building Inspection.

Like some other cities, San Francisco has a rent-control ordinance. It restricts annual increases, but applies only to apartments built before 1979. Landlords hate it because they say they are not getting “fair market rate.”

However, there is a mystery. Rent control ceases to apply when the existing tenant (and there are fewer every day) moves out. When that happens, the landlord can name his or her price. Yet apparently, some of the same landlords leave these properties empty and unrented.

The public speaks

Thoughts gleaned from the comments sections of several news articles do not clear up the confusion. The anti-rent-control hardliners hold that in a totally fair system, one month’s notice to the tenants should be the only rule. Outside of that, owners should be able to raise the rent at any time, to any stratospheric amount, for any reason, mainly just because they can.

Rent control is blamed by anonymous newspaper readers for “blight, vacancy, poverty, crime, foreclosure, dependency, displacement, and economic stagnation.” But then somebody else comes along and says that rent control is not even a factor, because it does not apply to new buildings, and yet new buildings sit empty too.

If a unit is vacant, large maintenance bills can be put off, so it looks like less money is going out, and makes the picture more attractive to a potential buyer. Okay, fine. Someone needs to sell a building, they do what they gotta do, especially if it means leaving huge infrastructure expenses for the next sucker. But in a new building, what large maintenance expense would there be?

And yes, renters take advantage of the system. In a 2014 newspaper, a landlord told of a woman who had held onto a rent-controlled 4-bedroom apartment for almost 20 years, paying him approximately $1,000 per month and subletting rooms for $900 per month. In other words, making a killing off property that he owns.

On a related topic, people argue back and forth about the tax implications of allowing property to lie fallow when it could be bringing in revenue. It has something to do, maybe, with a deduction that depends on exactly when the owner began to rent the property.

More rules, and nobody happy

In the tourist season, May 1 through September 30 (which is almost half the year!) single room occupancy landlords are legally allowed to rent 25% of their allotted “residential” rooms to tourists. If they are nicer rooms, perhaps it makes more sense for landlords to just leave them unoccupied the rest of the time, rather than let local, relatively poor people scuff up the floors.

A letter by Susan Dyer Reynolds to MarinaTimes.com exposes yet another side of the problem, that of the owner-occupier, who actually lives in the building but prefers to leave a unit or some units empty. Why would this happen? The writer cites an entertainment film called Pacific Heights, in which Michael Keaton portrays an evil con-artist tenant who rents an apartment with the intention of making the owners so miserable that they will eventually be driven to attack him, so he can sue them and wind up owning their house.

Reynolds happened to see this movie while “in the midst of dealing with a squatter who made Michael Keaton’s character look like a model citizen,” and went on to say that she would rather pay a fine for keeping the place vacant than be caught up in another such “expensive, time-consuming and dangerous situation.”

In the Mission District, a 156-room hotel has been empty since 2012. Apparently, the owner wants to be prepared for a surprise offer. What if a buyer comes along, eager to pay a gazillion dollars — but only on condition that no pesky tenants are infesting the place? Even if just two-thirds of the rooms were occupied, still that would be 100 people to be somehow gotten rid of, which is a giant pain in the posterior.

Worse yet, if they have leases, the owner would have to wait until the longest lease ran out, and by then the prospective buyer might have lost interest. All landlords of course feel that the law is tilted unfairly in favor of tenants, while all tenants believe the law treats landlords with kid gloves.

*****

Earlier this month House the Homeless launched a petition on Change.org calling for more benches in the city of Austin, TX, to help people living with homelessness get off the sidewalks. House the Homeless President Richard R. Troxell hopes the petition will find support in other cities across the U.S.

Reactions?

Source: “Why some San Francisco landlords don’t want to rent,” MarinaTimes.com, August 2017
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Photo on Visualhunt

San Francisco is one of the cities that the rest of the nation looks to for an example, whether good or bad. If the affordable housing crisis were a science problem, the city would be one big petri dish. Single room occupancy units and the depredations of Airbnb are only two of the many factors in play.

At the beginning of this year, the Office of Short-Term Rentals (STR) put a crimp in Airbnb’s style by requiring licenses. In his newspaper column, activist Randy Shaw praised landlords for complying so quickly and cooperatively, and then went on to suggest reasons that might have prompted this excellent behavior. Maybe SRO rents had risen so high that landlords were content to get along without the illegal Airbnb income.

If true, that would only be good for landlords, and bad for long-term residents. But it’s also unlikely, because people who own buildings always want to wring every possible cent out of them.

Faces clean and shoes tied

Because the hotel industry made no secret of its intention to challenge the new law in court, there is another theory. Knowing that a judge will be scrutinizing their case, the landlords temporarily cleaned up their act, to avoid being perceived as a bunch of dodgy scofflaws. Overall, the most likely reason for the improved behavior is that Internet advertising is out there for everyone to see, and getting caught is guaranteed.

As always, there are unintended consequences. Efforts to guarantee more rights for SRO renters have prompted a surly response from some landlords. They say, in effect, “You want people who stay more than a month to be treated like tenants? Fine. How about we require first and last month’s rent and a security deposit, to move in? Oh, and we’ll start doing background checks.” As Shaw wrote, “If the marketplace supports such additional upfront payments, then such changes are fine by me.”

It is hard to understand how an anti-homelessness activist can so blithely dismiss the threat. First and last month’s rent, plus deposit, is an enormous amount of money that is for many people an overwhelming barrier — yes, even if they are employed!

A long look through a jaundiced eye

Another rule that was meant to be helpful states that a building owner who removes a “residential” tenant from a room, in order to convert it to tourist use, is required to find another room for that displaced residential tenant at the same rent as before. Joe Eskenazi says this “creates incentives to leave residential rooms empty.”

Over a period of months, he produced a series of pieces for the San Francisco Public Press exploring various aspects of the local housing crisis, including the mysteries of why landlords act like they do. He says that some keep rooms empty for months or years:

[…] driving up the value of a building that may eventually be transformed into a high-rent, shared-living space for the city’s transcendent new residents. Other owners are holding those rooms empty, perhaps in search of an even bigger payout down the road when they sell their buildings.

 

This still does not explain why it is more profitable for an owner to keep a place unoccupied rather than collect rent. There does not seem to be a tax advantage, as far as the federal government is concerned.

Many people are under the impression that vacant property can be “written off as a loss” but apparently this is not the case. Landlords will ask outrageous rent, and stubbornly let a property remain empty rather than accept a smaller amount of rent. Eventually, “the market” will catch up, and meanwhile, they don’t have to pay to maintain the empty place, which can sit suspended in time like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, until a prince comes along.

In a fancy city like San Francisco, a lot of homes and apartments are owned by people from other states and even other countries, who are interested in the investment value of real estate, but only from the angle of reselling it for a huge profit, not at all in the hassle of renting it out. Of course landlords blame the measures that were taken to protect tenants, such as rent control, affordable housing mandates, anti-eviction laws, and anti-new development laws.

So, you’re a landlord

Say, you’re a landlord who cleverly gets rid of a bunch of old, low-paying tenants and acquires a batch of new, high paying tenants, or even leaves a building empty — then what? Eskenazi wrote about the scourge of the Mission District, Anna Kihagi, who has been called rapacious, abusive, predatory, and (by tenants) names that cannot be repeated here:

For years, Kihagi and her family members […] bought up building after building in this city and, particularly, the Mission. Harassment of tenants, especially long-standing rent-controlled tenants, many of whom are elderly and disabled, followed thereafter, as did evictions and new, market-rate rentals… Kihagi brings in swollen — and now provably illegal — income from buildings to inflate her income stream and then borrow against it to buy new buildings and repeat the process.

As Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith described it, “The paper value of the building skyrockets, so there’s more to borrow against to make the next down payments on the next buildings.” If the city’s prosecution of Kihagi for illegal eviction of rent-controlled tenants is successful, the increased value of those buildings might help pay off cheated renters and other creditors.

Also, if the city wins, it can reset the rents to previous levels. But even if the greedy landlord’s grand plan fails in that sense, it will still have succeeded in uprooting a great many people and lowering the quality of their lives.

Join the Protest on Tax Day, April 17

This year, the U.S. Tax Day falls on Tuesday, April 17. Once again, we will be leading “Tax Day Action!” protests at the nation’s Post Offices demanding a living wage. We invite you and your community to join us at the Post Office this April 17. Send in photos of your event!

Source: “New SRO Law’s Surprising Success,” BeyondChron.org, 04/25/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Source: “SF goes after city’s cruelest landlord, snatching away her rent payments,” MissionLocal.org, 02/05/18
Photo on Visualhunt

San Francisco, like Los Angeles, is important for its “bellwether” quality. Both West Coast cities tend to manifest societal problems before the rest of the country, and sometimes they come up with solutions that the rest of America can look to for an example.

What problems beset San Francisco and contribute to a housing shortage so severe that rent costs as much as 45% of income? How does San Francisco rank as the hottest real estate investment city, to the point where financial advisors audaciously guarantee “no bubble and no crash possible”?

Longtime activist Randy Shaw addressed “Owner Move In” (OMI) evictions, which flourished in the early 2000s, and which he called an invitation to fraud:

An OMI notice is served. The tenant retains a private attorney who negotiates a large buyout of his client’s tenancy. Under the terms of the buyout, the tenant gives up the right to sue for the owner’s failure to move in…

It was perfectly okay to ditch a tenant if the landlord wanted to live in the unit himself — but the eviction process could be lengthy and expensive. Landlords figured out it would be cheaper and easier to make a lump-sum payoff up front. A lucky few tenants welcomed the windfall payments and cheerfully walked off into their futures.

Of course for tenants as a class, the whole OMI eviction scam negatively affected the rental market scene citywide. Landlords were chucking tenants out of far more rentals than they could possibly live in themselves, but nobody was keeping an eye out for this, and the exception was widely abused. Over the years, various ordinances strengthened enforcement so there would be fewer OMI evictions.

But why?

The whole game has an Alice Through the Looking-Glass quality, for reasons we examine over the next couple of posts. In a sane world, landlords would want their properties occupied by paying tenants.

So, why boot them out? To get higher-paying tenants, of course. Or — and this is the crazy part — to leave the place empty, which seems to be the strong second choice. But first it helps to examine the many factors that have worked together to bring San Francisco to such a pass, because if we don’t take note of the worst examples and how they got that way, we are doomed to repeat the same losing scenarios in city after city.

The OMI situation had to do with apartments, which are treated differently than SRO (single room occupancy) units. Shaw believes that it is good for the city to have its SROs occupied by committed long-term tenants. Of course, if more apartments were available for local residents, rather than tourists, that would presumably free up some SRO units for people who currently have nowhere at all to live.

The apartment squeeze comes from the other direction, too. Because the cost of houses, condos, lofts, etc. has risen so precipitously, fewer people can afford to buy homes and are renting apartments instead. So the pressure comes from both ways — from tenants trying to move up into more desirable rentals, and from former homeowners who have been forced to downsize.

Complicated rules and inadequate oversight

The San Francisco situation became ugly for many reasons, not least the invention of Airbnb to broker short-term rentals to business travelers, tourists, and people sticking a toe in the water before deciding to move there.

Unfortunately, Airbnb “explicitly violated this city’s housing laws” from Day One, and “aided and abetted in the cannibalization of affordable residential stock,” in the words of Joe Eskenazi, who has written extensively on the topic. Property owners were supposedly allowed to book Airbnb visitors full-time, only if they themselves lived on the premises full-time. For example, renting out a room above a garage, while the family stayed in residence; or renting out a house if its owner family went on vacation.

Tourist-only rentals were supposed to be limited to 90 days per year. The idea was, if a long-term tenant moved out, the landlord could have three months to go nuts and grab as much Airbnb gelt as possible, before obediently signing a lease with the next long-term tenant.

But who cares about a little thing like a rule? Consequently, speculators bought up properties and milked multiple Airbnb cash cows at all times. For regular people, the apartment market dried up.

Single room occupancy

The original Conversion Ordinance included complicated rules for SRO buildings, about what percentages of their rooms can be used for what purposes, at what times of year, and for how long. Of course, owners had been playing fast and loose with the rules for years anyway, says Eskenazi…

[…] by renting out residential rooms on a weekly basis — which, obviously, catered to tourists — and shuffling around residents approaching the 32-day threshold that establishes tenancy rights in a practice called “musical rooms.” The loophole was finally closed early this year. “Long story short: You have to treat residential units like residential units,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin…

 

Owners of these places thought they could have it both ways — receiving, as Adam Brinklow phrases it, “legal breaks and considerations because they provide cheap housing to residents who otherwise might be homeless,” and also cashing in on the Airbnb bonanza. A year ago, in order to favor impoverished local residents over wealthy strangers, the law strengthened the 32-day rule. Landlords resented this bitterly, and some felt so strongly about it, they promised retaliation, like the one who threatened to stop working with a non-profit called Homeless Prenatal.

In January the Office of Short-Term Rentals geared up, and began issuing licenses to short-term rental hosts who proved they were law-abiding. Thousands of illegal listings by Airbnb and similar outfits immediately vanished from the web.

Reactions?

Source: “The US Real Estate Forecast 2018 to 2020,” DanaDavisProperties.com, 2018
Source: “The Truth about Owner Move-In Evictions,” BeyondChron.org, 04/05/17
Source: “San Francisco lawmakers pass SRO rental cap,” sf.curbed.com, 02/01/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” 10/23/17
Photo on Visualhunt

The concept of single room occupancy (SRO) dwellings has a long and varied history in the United States. More than 10 years ago, Los Angeles County’s homeless population had already reached “epidemic proportions” and the city was trying to transform the 50-square-block area inhabited by people who are very poor, and people who are experiencing homelessness.

At the time, wrote C. Reagan, “Of the around 65 SROs on Skid Row, 70% are owned by non-for-profit organizations that maintain the rent-control of the units.”

Activists wanted more SROs, but with an agenda. They believed it was important to maintain Skid Row as the poverty colony, rather than send the area’s indigent residents out to other parts of the city.

To support this point of view, they made the altruistic argument that shelters, food distribution centers, shower facilities, detox programs, and other amenities were already located conveniently within that radius. Developers, on the other hand, wanted to knock things down and build lofts for young professionals.

In New York City, businessman George McDonald created a non-profit organization and ran for various political offices. Much of his activism was based on recognizing affordable single-occupancy housing units as an essential component in ending the cycle of poverty, incarceration, homelessness, and recidivism that ensnares so many people.

He opposed the conversion of SRO buildings into fancy apartments. Carol Tannenhauser wrote:

SROs had historically served as “first rung” housing for low-income people. He succeeded in having one such building turned over to a non-profit for use as permanent housing for homeless and low-income adults. Later, as President of The Doe Fund, he would personally oversee the development of a supportive SRO for homeless persons with AIDS and the first newly constructed SRO in New York City specifically for formerly homeless working adults.

The history of SROs in San Francisco is fraught with dissension. Last year, an attempt was made to introduce legislation that would prevent SRO owners from renting space for less than 32 days. Landlords can’t charge permanent, indigent residents as much as they make off tourists, but on the other hand they get some breaks and privileges. But such a law, although it would prevent some short-term very lucrative tourist rentals, can’t prevent owners from converting buildings into college-style dorms for young professionals who can pay astronomical rents.

Of course there were other voices in the debate, such as that of hotel owner spokesperson Larry Kamer, described by journalist Sara Gaiser:

Extending the minimum stay, he said, would effectively turn SRO units into apartments and bring them under rent control laws. The change would require tenants to come up with first and last month’s rent and a security deposit before moving in.

No one seems to mention whether it would be mandatory for landlords to charge last month’s rent and security deposit. Presumably, landlords would have the power to make things easier by waiving those two charges. The reporter also quoted Housing Rights Committee spokesperson Tommi Mecca, who said that SRO units already fall under the rent control laws and added that “It’s totally to the tenant’s advantage […] to stay long enough to gain those rights.”

Six months ago, writer Joe Eskenazi investigated the labyrinthine details of San Francisco’s SRO situation. According to the Department of Building Inspection,

[…] as of early September, 1,827 residential rooms were known to be sitting vacant in the city’s 404 privately owned single-room occupancy hotels. That is around 14 percent of the 13,190 residential rooms available for rental in private SRO hotels — around one out of every seven.

 

Of course, despite the nominally mandatory nature of the reporting requirement, property owners ignore the law. “Submitted information” is far from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Private SRO owners told the reporter there might be as many as 4,000 rooms deliberately kept empty, for reasons that make sense to them and are permissible under the rules.

In some buildings, a single room goes for $1,750 per month and the residents are young professionals. In one SRO building, a single room costs $4,500 per month. Eskenazi writes of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing:

A decade ago, $400 or $500 a month could get you an SRO room. Now the average monthly rent across all hotels is $816, city data show… The department currently offers hoteliers rental rates of around $650 or $700 — sometimes even $800 — per room per month… Through a master-leasing program, the city has taken over 44 SROs during the past two decades and contracted nonprofits to run them. Some 4,000 units are filled with residents who could otherwise be homeless.

But landlords complain that it is too expensive to do the upgrades necessary to qualify for government money, and especially too costly to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Building Inspection has some power, but in wading through the 12,000 complaint violations it receives every year, it has to concentrate on the big issues, like lack of heat, water, or electricity for tenants who are already in place.

Some problems can never be solved because, although the American respect for private property rights is a beautiful thing, it often conflicts with the greater good. As Eskenazi says:

And, on top of all that, Rosemary Bosque, the city’s chief housing inspector, confirmed there is no tool, no law — no means — to compel private property owners to rent out their rooms rather than leave them vacant.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless on Skid Row: Is it a Lost Cause?,” Broowaha.com, 09/30/06
Source: “Ready Willing and Able — Help the Homeless,” Blogspot.com, 01/22/08
Source: “San Francisco lawmakers pass SRO rental cap,” Curbed.com, 02/01/17
Source: “SRO owners sue city over short-term rentals,” SFBay.ca, 05/08/17
Source: “No Vacancy for the Homeless,” SFPublicPress.org, 10/23/17
Photo credit: bfishadow on Visualhunt/CC BY

In in 1989, in Austin, Texas, Richard R. Troxell, President of House the Homeless (HtH), started Legal Aid for the Homeless. His specialty is helping disabled people apply for the benefits to which they are entitled, because otherwise they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off the streets. According to the latest HtH Annual Survey, more than half of Austin’s unhoused people are disabled to the point of being unable to work, so obviously, the need is enormous.

The application process often consumes a year, or even 18 months. If the effort succeeds, the Supplemental Security Income check is $735 a month — or a bit more than half the national minimum wage — which is in itself laughably, tragically inadequate.

With an income like that, the only kind of housing a person can possibly afford is subsidized. To be eligible for subsidized housing, a person must have some kind of income, and for a staggering number of Americans, this is the only kind they can get. Richard says:

I know who was the last family member that ever spoke to them and what year and what month that was. I know every demeaning job they ever worked at, or were abused at, or were robbed by the employer. I push them to try to participate in applying over and over again for housing that does not exist on pathways that we can now show are broken. Along the way, they quietly hate me. I push them very hard. All odds are are against our success.

In Austin, the housing crunch is especially brutal because of upcoming renovations that will affect people who live beneath bridges and overpasses. Many business and government figures had been under the impression that they had only to notify an agency that someone needed a place to live and poof! like magic, it would be done. What a misapprehension that was!

House the Homeless and other agencies are urging contractors to make use of the contingency funds attached to each infrastructure project to create transitional housing, and give the community time to catch up with the need.

A very real threat to mobile home parks

Austin’s affordable housing picture has become even more grim for a specific demographic. The residents of mobile home parks face not only code changes, but a consciousness on the part of speculators and developers that the urban land they occupy is a cash cow waiting to be milked.

These business people are unlikely to regard new, improved mobile home parks as a legitimate real estate sector. They want to build pricey condominiums and townhouses, and once they have decided to go that way, the process is rarely stoppable.

For renters, this is bad enough, because they will never find apartments as inexpensive. For people who own their mobile homes, the prospect of displacement is a nightmare. In the unlikely event that they find a new place to set up, the cost of moving such a structure is at least $5,000 — even more, in many cases, than the apartment-dweller’s moving expense of first and last months’ rent, plus security/cleaning deposit, plus truck rental.

The human element

Mobile home parks are often more than neighborhoods — they are villages, where relationships have grown and flourished over the years. When people are forced to relocate, their mutual babysitting and ride-sharing networks are shattered, friendships are fractured, and children are traumatized by school changes.

Some trailer parks still have RVs parked in them, where people actually live, and the likelihood of their being able to find a different spot to park is almost nonexistent. Altogether, changes in this ecological niche could potentially affect thousands of low-income residents.

According to researcher Gabriel Amaro, quoted in the article linked above, “Mobile home parks are the last bastion for affordability in Austin.” But very little importance is attached to their survival or continuing viability as an acceptable way to meet housing needs. Far-reaching adjustments are in the works, as the city overhauls its housing blueprint via a program called CodeNEXT.

Not just in Austin

These same problems exist in cities all over America, where housing costs eat up an increasingly large portion of family incomes, and every day more and more people face the specter of homelessness. Some complacent members of the housed population imagine the poor as privileged beings who have endless amounts of leisure time, so they should not mind jumping through a lot of procedural hoops. It gives them something to do and saves them from the threat of boredom, right?

In reality, this easy assumption could not be farther from the truth. For a mother of three who has just received an eviction notice, every phone call, every appointment, every official requirement is a monumental challenge. This fragile family might have the tremendous luck to be assigned a shelter room right away, but now there are even more necessary meetings.

Who is willing to watch the children, and can they be trusted? What if somebody is sick? How does she, or how do they, travel to the appointment? Does she have to carry food for the kids, and how will they behave while she has that all-important talk with the person at the counter or behind the desk? When they leave the office, will the ex-husband violate the restraining order and confront her?

A single person faces his or her own set of obstacles. Which of their belongings do they have to carry along, so they won’t be stolen? Is there any chance of getting a shower appointment the day before an important meeting?

What about their so-called criminal record, consisting of class C misdemeanor tickets for violating “Quality of Life Ordinances” that were enacted out of consideration for everyone’s quality of life but theirs? Even the federal Department of Justice gets it:

Needlessly pushing homeless individuals into the criminal justice system does nothing to break the cycle of poverty or prevent homelessness in the future. Instead, it imposes further burdens on scarce judicial and correctional resources, and it can have long-lasting and devastating effects on individuals’ lives.

In the homeless community, discouragement is widespread. Negative experiences pile up unrelentingly. It is easy to slip into hopeless apathy, the sensation that there is no point to anything. All over America, people in need feel like all they ever get are empty promises.

On the other side of that equation, even the staunchest advocates, the best and most highly motivated helpers, suffer from burnout. Eventually, their souls are scorched by the knowledge that they are unwillingly and unavoidably part of the monstrous fabric of lies.

A dedicated social worker can help people retrieve lost documents or fill out forms until the cows come home, as the old saying goes. But if the government has no money, or insists on spending what it has in useless ways, all the caring and trying amount to nothing.

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Source: “Justice Department Files Brief to Address the Criminalization of Homelessness,” Justice.gov, 08/06/15
Source: “Mobile home parks at risk of redevelopment,” MyStatesman.com, 02/06/18
Photo credit: PJ Nelson on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Recently, House the Homeless outlined the thoughts of a man who has spent 20 years working in organizations to aid people experiencing homelessness in Seattle. Today, we look at someone who has spent almost that long as a professional writer whose main topic is the unique homeless situation in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Back in 2005, the National Coalition for the Homeless named Las Vegas one of the five most inhospitable and punitive cities, citing with overcrowded shelters and a closed Crisis Intervention Center, frequent “sweeps,” and a vengeful mayor who encouraged law enforcement personnel to criminalize homelessness with an iron fist. For some reason, the local homeless community is atypically youth-heavy. This is worrisome because people who grow up in dire situations may be even less prepared than other kids to find a path to a happy and productive life.

Or perhaps not. Matthew O’Brien provides examples of industrious, ambitious people he has met in the tunnels. Beneath Las Vegas are about 250 miles of flood channels, inhabited in some sections by courageous survivors who deal with barriers and setbacks that safely housed “solid citizens” can’t even imagine. He says:

Call the homeless what you will, but don’t call them lazy. They’re the toughest, most industrious people I’ve met.

O’Brien wrote a book about them, and founded Shine a Light, which collaborates with other organizations to help people get back up onto the earth’s surface. As of mid-2017, he estimated that probably only 300 people remained underground. Progress had been made among the tunnel residents, and many military veterans had been helped.

For most of the city’s homeless, however, the situation had not improved. Today, many people live in vehicles, abandoned buildings, motels, and tents.

Out of sight, out of mind

Most people experiencing homelessness aspire to stay “under the radar,” and especially to not attract police attention. This is one of the problems with the official census, for which O’Brien has volunteered, and about which he repeats some often-heard truths:

It’s conducted in the middle of the night during the week in January, which discourages volunteers. Those who do show are tasked with covering a large tract of land in a short period of time. Also, at night in January, the homeless are burrowed in and less visible to the volunteers or perhaps temporarily off the streets… While the jargon-filled, 200-page-plus census suggests otherwise, my eyes are telling me the numbers are surging.

Most recently, the county’s official total was 6,200, which O’Brien believes to be a woeful underestimate. He puts the number much closer to 10,000.

What about mental illness? Other cities are different, but according to someone who has every reason to know Las Vegas seems to contain only a small percentage of mentally ill homeless people. But addicts, that’s a different matter. O’Brien concedes that the great majority of homeless people in Las Vegas are hooked on something. The local substances of choice are crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Just as a point of interest, he says:

Many of these addicts have told me that gambling is the worst addiction of all, because of the false hope it creates and it’s available 24/7. This, however, does not mean the addiction caused them to become homeless. Oftentimes, the drug, alcohol or gambling is used to drown out a traumatic event or as an escape from their present predicament.

Like anywhere else, Las Vegas is made up of people who got messed up by the city, and people who were already messed up when they arrived. It became a rich and famous place by selling popular commodities: liquor, gambling, hard drugs, and sex. Not surprisingly, many of the local homeless people are, one way or another, victims of that very tolerance.

Also like anywhere else, a lot of righteous citizens still refuse to understand is that addiction is a disease as much as diabetes or multiple sclerosis. But compassion does not pick and choose:

Eventually, they’ll hit rock bottom, and we should be there for them when they’re ready to make a change.

Because of the addiction problem, O’Brien advises against donating cash to individuals. His personal solution is to buy a meal for the needy person, or donate a prepaid card for a fast-food outlet. His habit is to keep bottled water, snacks, shampoo, deodorant, underwear, and socks in his car, and in his backpack when he goes on tunnel expeditions.

But even more important are the friendly greeting, the handshake, the encouraging word. O’Brien says of the tunnel-dwellers:

They’re uniquely appreciative, and I’ve seen “small” acts such as these lift their spirits and boost their confidence. They can even inspire them to make a change.

More recently, O’Brien announced that he would be “moving to Central America to teach and write.” He has another book in the works, which will tell the stories of some former tunnel dwellers who have achieved more conventional existences..

Important!

Infrastructure renovation in the U.S. threatens as many as 100,000 people who live beneath bridges, overpasses, and other elements of the built environment. Before the work begins, we want to see them relocated to safe temporary housing, and we ask the agencies involved to use their allotted contingency funds for that purpose.

Please call the White House, your elected representatives, and HUD boss Ben Carson to urge that this be done.

No offense to the life-saving help given by shelters, soup kitchens, storage lockers and mail services, but what the bridge people need is exactly what the Las Vegas people need — permanent housing, bolstered by supportive services. People need help to deal with bureaucracies, handle their money, solve their health problems. They need rehab programs and job training programs. The infrastructure renovation plan could provide the impetus for real change.

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Source: “What I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Writing About the Homeless in Las Vegas,” DTLV.com, 05/17/17
Source: “Man who shined light on Las Vegas’ tunnel dwellers moving on,” ReviewJournal.com, 07/28/17
Photo on Visualhunt