The San Francisco Department of Building Inspections released a report today showing that the majority of housing code violations reported in the Mission District between 2014 and 2015 were corrected.
Between July 2014 and June 2015, 215 notices were issued that cited some 1,564 code violations were in the building inspection district that covers the Mission District and parts of Potrero Hill and the Dogpatch. The majority of the violations were in the Mission District, and more than 1,300 — or 82 percent — of them were abated by the landlord. Some 18 percent of the cases where violations were issued remain active.
Fees, penalties or liens were issued for about 26 percent of the violations noted. While District Supervisor Campos said this represented progress, the report deals only with those complaints made. In many instances tenants – out of fear of having their rent raised or reluctant to complain because of their immigration status – do not complain. That was the case in many of the buildings owned by Hawk Lou, the owner of the building on 22nd and Mission Streets, that went up in flames in January, 2013.
Compiled in collaboration with Causa Justa, a tenant advocacy nonprofit, the report highlights the building inspection department’s successes in holding landlords accountable to tenants, but also in assisting landlords in navigating the city’s complex housing regulations and permitting processes.
The documented violations range from deficient fire alarms and smoke detectors to quality of life problems like mold and water leaks. Common complaints were for heat or hot water, water damage, and peeling paint. Others are more minute, like missing covers for light switches or uneven, uncleanable surfaces.
At a hearing on building safety and fires Wednesday, the inspection department’s James Sanbonmatsu presented images of temporary fixes tenants had come up with in the absence of repairs. In one case, a tenant used a golf club to hold a window shut. In another, the tenant used a can opener to replace a missing door lock.
For tenants, reporting code violations can help prove a deficiency in their apartment that might get them a rent reduction at the Rent Board. After petitioning the board and going through either a mediation or an arbitration process, tenants can get their rents reduced proportionally to the impact of the problem. Robert Collins, the acting executive director of the Rent Board, said he couldn’t name specific figures for specific maintenance issues, but that curious tenants can look up cases similar to theirs at the Rent Board offices.
“You’re trying to show how you’re impacted,” Collins said. “For example you going without heat in July, that is significantly different than you going without heat in January.”
Landlords can be prickly when approached about their building’s deficiencies, Sanbonmatsu said, though reactions vary and inspectors are trained to deal with them professionally.
“We have a wide range of reactions some are very professional and some are shouting. Our inspectors take a lot of verbal abuse,” he said. “We have a lot of ways of getting that point across to stay level headed and work in a respectful way with everybody we talk to.”
The report area covers the Mission District and parts of Potrero Hill. Most of the violation incidents are concentrated in the southwestern areas of the Mission. Sanbonmatsu attributed this to the higher concentration of homeowners. These areas are also more densely populated.
Supervisor David Campos had not yet read the report, which was released Thursday morning, but said that the 82 percent compliance figure boded well.
“I can tell from my experience that the DBI has been very responsive to our concerns,” he said.
But he wondered about the 18 percent of notices that had yet to be addressed by landlords.
“We have to know how serious those were, and if they were pretty serious, why weren’t they addressed?” he said. “But it seems like it’s moving in the right direction.”
Sanbonmatsu said no one type of violation was specifically prevalent among the open cases. Many of the outstanding notices involved notices issued for multiple violations in which the landlord had repaired many of the problems, but not all of them.
“We have a lot of those where they’ve made all the corrections but they haven’t paid the fine or we have nine out of 10 things corrected,” he said.
Many of them, he added, are pending litigation from the city attorney – when landlords cannot be brought to task with fines or liens, the department refers these cases to the City Attorney’s office to sue the offending landlord.
Despite the high compliance rate, some tenants say the process is still complicated.
Jaime Duran, a tenant in a rent-controlled unit at 755 Capitol Ave. in Ingleside, asked his landlord to fix some broken windows and electrical issues in late 2015 after she tried to raise his rent by $750. He got advice from Causa Justa and decided to fight both the rent increase and the shoddy maintenance at once.
“When we told her to fix it, we were fighting for the rent so, we thought, ‘Yeah we’re gonna fight for everything,’” he said.
A city inspection gave the landlord a month to fix windows in the unit, which Duran said were broken and posed a security hazard. The landlord complied and the fixes were made, but Duran said the inspection process is broken. The unit has electrical issues and his lease is being violated, he said, and the city said different issues require multiple inspectors.
“The repair problem was fine, [but] the others I couldn’t solve, for time, and because I had to call different people,” he said. “Someone from the city should come in and seen the causes and advise on all the problems at once. It would save a lot of time and money.”
Campos, for his part, agreed, saying the three departments responsible for code violations — the Department of Building Inspection, the Department of Public Health, and the Fire Department — should coordinate their responses to violations.
“It should be a one stop shop,” he said. “I would think that that one call would be enough. We want to make it as simple as possible for people.”
Smells like there’s something rotten in the house of ‘smoke and mirrors’ considering the recent rash of ‘incidents’ in the Mission. Are there any per square mile ‘statistics’ comparing the number of these ‘suspicious’ events here with other ares of the city. Just asking.
Are the David Campos years at City Hall over yet? He’s been a disaster of a Supervisor and I pity the displace folks who turn to him for assistance. Always a dollar short and a day late. The Mission needs an effective fighter and that isn’t Campos.
Maybe Mission Local can find out what happened to his plan to mail every voter a mail-in ballot. A good idea that went nowhere, which can be said about practically everything he says.