Supervisor Shamann Walton this week warned that if two firms responsible for a Bayview public housing complex do not address their residents’ accusations of neglect, there is a long road ahead of public hearings — and, if necessary, their removal.
In a statement on Tuesday, Walton’s office wrote that he will hold city hearings “on the mismanagement at Alice Griffith … until meaningful progress is made and residents’ concerns are fully addressed.” His legislative aide added on Thursday: “We have had property managers removed in the past.”
At a city hearing on Monday, the two firms — the John Stewart Company, the manager of Alice Griffith, and McCormack Baron Salazar, the developer — were accused by tenants at the Alice Griffith apartments, in Bayview near Candlestick Point, of vermin infestations, filth, broken elevators and ignoring their complaints of all of the above.
“When buildings do not have working alarms, that’s essential, that’s life saving,” said one commenter, speaking alongside half a dozen tenants and supporters on Monday. “When people don’t have elevators to get up and down the stairs … that’s serious. Someone who’s in a wheelchair should not have to crawl up to their unit, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Tenants are ignored and have continuously been ignored,” he added to scattered applause. “If you cannot balance your budget, get out of the business.”
Supervisor Walton, in a subsequent press release, said the alleged neglect was a failure of “accountability and basic human decency.”
Oversight of the Alice Griffith Apartments was handed off from the city to developer McCormack Baron Salazar when the apartments began redevelopment in 2010. In 2019, John Stewart Company was brought on to manage the property.
The redevelopment of the property, and its new management, modernized the building, adding benches and a courtyard. In 2019, the John Stewart Company said it increased management, janitorial and maintenance staff, and hired Bayview Senior Services as the on-site services coordinator.
This, Walton says, was an attempt to improve conditions at the housing complex — which he believes has failed.
In a statement, McCormack Baron Salazar said that delays in maintenance and emergency repairs have been exacerbated by the pandemic and budget challenges due to high levels of unpaid or overdue rent payments. The company added that it is actively pursuing funding for repairs.
Jennifer Wood, the vice president of John Stewart Company, said at Monday’s hearing that the company has not displaced a single tenant due to non-payment and, since the pandemic, when many families financially suffered, the property “simply does not bring in enough cash to cover all of its daily needs.”
Wood added that the company has applied for an emergency loan with the city, which the city approved in February. She is waiting on the approval of one last lender to underwrite elevator repair and cleaning services.
“This admission confirms what residents have long suspected,” wrote Walton, in his press release on Tuesday. “That their needs have been deprioritized in favor of cost-saving measures.”
Marie Visto, a disabled resident who appeared at the public hearing on Monday, has lived at the Alice Griffith apartments since 2017, after the building was redeveloped. Visto, confined to her wheelchair, said the power went out in her apartment for three days — in March, the elevators were shut down for two weeks.
Visto said she has asked for accommodation requests multiple times, and been ignored. She claims she has one outstanding accommodation request that is five years old; another is three years old.
Visto alleges the management company contacted her for assistance only once, last month.
“They have promised over the years, saying we’re going to check on you, we’re going to call you, we’re going to help you,” she said. “They never followed through until the elevators shut down for two weeks in March. Prior to that, they have done nothing to contact me, or other residents in my building who are disabled.”
Another disabled resident who lives on the fourth floor of the building submitted a letter to be read aloud to the board committee. The resident wrote that he had to slide down the stairs to leave his apartment after the elevator shut down; he had been confined for nine days.
Others complained of overflowing trash receptacles, rats and cockroaches running rampant, and a slow response to maintenance requests. A video shown to the board showed dozens of trash bags piled on top of one another, spilling out onto the ground.
Walton said neglect at Alice Griffith goes far beyond a lack of cleaning services. “This is not just about broken elevators or missed maintenance requests,” he said. “The residents at Alice Griffith deserve to live in safe, clean and dignified housing, and I will not stop until that becomes a reality.”
The Alice Griffiths complex is not the first public housing complex where tenants have complained of neglect: Since 2023, Mission Local has detailed allegations of rent scams, poor maintenance, illegal squatting, and generally dilapidated conditions at the Potrero Annex-Terrace at the hands of the Eugene Burger Management Corporation.
The firm failed city scorecards, and was replaced by the city after Walton and other supervisors held numerous hearings.
Walton said he will hold regular meetings with the residents of Alice Griffith, and is expecting the John Stewart Company to address tenants’ needs — whether they receive city funding or not.
“We are expecting a plan from John Stewart and we’ll be conducting regular check-ins with residents to make sure things are improving at the site,” said Natalie Gee, a legislative aide to Supervisor Walton.
So, which city office/executive is responsible for overseeing the execution of the management company’s contract? Certainly it’s not Walton (though I’m glad he is calling the management company out). San Franciscans spend billions of our tax dollars building affordable housing only to have the units deteriorate. We hear about this over and over again. It makes me angry, especially when the city awards contracts to their pals (“no bid”) and doesn’t hold them accountable. I’m hoping that Mayor Lurie’s people do better than Breed’s.
Hmmm….you have a nice new building… 100% low income. Rent pays for maintenance and upkeep. Everyone there needs services.
People don’t pay rent. Sometimes they can’t, sometimes they won’t. But the city slaps on an eviction moratorium. And oh, makes evictions really hard (and expensive).
So now Walton is complaining about “gutting maintaince” …well who does he think pays for that? The tooth fairy? Well actually given Walton’s views, he probably does.
Whether it is transit or public housing, we have a long history in this country of not adequately financing maintenance , and then expecting it to self-finance these things with charges in users that we then don’t comply people to pay.
Something has to give. My view is 100% subsidized housing always fails. Mixed us works much better. Market requires the owners to do sufficient maintance.
It’s convenient to blame a management company, but in a project like Alice Griffith, part of the problem is the people who live there. As human beings, they are also responsible for their own well-being. But trash is dumped on the street, so wild animals move in, and you have raccoons and rats infesting the community. Instead of concentrating poverty and dysfunction in massive project housing developments, as Rober Moses did in New York City with – disastrousresults, why not create incentives to integrate low-income housing into every community? Diffuse the dysfunction.
Seems like the city keeps firing one calamitously incompetent property manager only to find that the next one is just as bad. In Potrero, Eugene Burger only took charge in 2022, and by early 2023 ML was reporting on their terrible mismanagement.
That suggests the root of the issue is elsewhere: there isn’t enough money allocated to these places to actually run them to even low standards of decency (like working elevators and fire alarms, and not full of mold and vermin). That’s a budget choice. The city, meaning us the voters acting through our elected officials, have decided we’ll have these apartments with low rents, but then we won’t make up what it would cost to properly run them. (Is there even a subsidy? If so it’s clearly not enough to make ends meet.)
Then we put out bids for property management firms to come and say ah yes, I will manage this property and collect the rents (and whatever subsidy the city is offering), and I’ll be sure to keep the elevators repaired, yes sirree. But the money doesn’t add up. We’re asking firms to make promises that can’t be kept. Any firm that says yes to that contract either doesn’t understand what they’re getting into, or doesn’t care about breaking promises — and either way, the promises aren’t going to be kept.
The bosses of such a firm are bad people, and it’s right for Walton to hold hearings about the terrible conditions. But it’s not going to solve the problem. As long as the management of these properties is (a) privatized, and (b) with a lowball budget, it’s hard to see how it stops being directed by bad people or producing terrible conditions for the residents.
I have a friend who lives in the Alice Griffith housing who has been trying for over two years to move to a larger unit. She has submitted proof of her income and other paperwork only to be told it was lost on multiple occasions. Additionally her requests for maintenance of appliances have been ignored to the point that she has purchased her own washer and dryer. Recently her unit and others were infested with bedbugs. As she wasn’t getting results from management I suggested she call the city environmental services. The city assigned an inspector to property who put the management on notice regarding the bedbugs and finally her unit thus far us free of bedbugs but only after a heat treatment was performed. This, after months of treating the unit with pesticides. The company hired to eradicate the problem could have done the heat treatment after the failed attempts but didn’t do so. It seems to me that the managers allowed this situation to continue and didn’t hold the company accountable. Easy money for the company they hired. My friend is not one to rock the boat and would have continued to struggle had I not suggested contacting the city environmental department. Most recently a representative of the management accused her of getting pregnant so she could get a larger unit with her section eight. She has never had section eight and has complied fully with management in paying rent along with the annual increases when they finally got around to doing their job instead of constantly “losing” her paperwork. I have copies of some of the correspondence she received including a scrawled note written on a napkin. As she had just had her baby by c-section she was unable to attend the meetings regarding the living conditions at the Alice Griffith Housing.
i note from the story that one of the buildings was ‘redeveloped in 2017’.
this reminds me of my time living in SOMA in a ‘redeveloped’ 4 story building with an elevator that was repeatedly out of service.
we also had tenats that had to crawl out of their apartments or stay cloistered inside for weeks.
it seems to me that we have a government willing to stack poor people in shoe boxes with little concern for the adequacy of the infrastructure.
i have yet to hear about elevator problems for residential buildings in north beach. perhaps some trolls have an answer.