After years of alleged neglect, their Mission building caught fire. Will suing help them return? 

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Gloria Duarte, 65, had lived at 24th and Folsom for 33 years.

Those years weren’t always easy ones: The Victorian-style, six-unit building had numerous reported code violations — faulty smoke detectors, no heat, blocked fire exits, unsanitary conditions — and, last year, a resident in the building was reported to the police for wielding a machete in public. 

Months later, that same man got into a fight inside the building. Next, his curtains caught fire. 

Then, on May 3, 2025, another fire broke out in his apartment. Even though the fire did not spread to other units, smoke and water damage rendered the entire building uninhabitable. All four tenants, including Duarte, were displaced. 

Now, three of them are suing, hoping to prod the landlord of the building at 2782 Folsom St. into getting a move on with repairs. The tenants also want compensation for Duarte and the other tenants, for what they say are years of negligence that resulted in them being forced to leave their homes. 

“I’ve lost all my belongings because they never took care of us or the building,” said Duarte, who is living in a friend’s basement in the Bayview, in Spanish. Her son, who shared her apartment, is sleeping in his car. 

Duarte’s plight is not unique. Tenants attorneys and housing advocates say tenants displaced by fires in San Francisco often face difficulty moving back into their units. How many is unknown, because the city’s rent board does not keep data on the number of tenants who return home after a fire. 

Attorneys said few tenants displaced by fires, even fires that are the result of a landlord’s negligence, are ever able to move back.

“The problem is that the city doesn’t regulate after the fire,” said Rahman Popal, a tenants’ attorney who is representing Duarte and the other plaintiffs.

“There’s no penalty explicitly in any of these statutes that says, ‘If you don’t act diligently, if you use this as a reason to upgrade your units and essentially try to force your tenants out, you’re going to be penalized,’” Popal said.

Joseph Tobener, a tenants’ attorney at Tobener Ravenscroft, said he has seen tenants wait up to 10 years to return to their apartments after fires or major repairs. Negotiations between landlords and insurance companies, plus a slow permitting process, play a part in the delays, he said. 

Landlords also can reap significant financial benefits in delaying repairs, Tobener said. 

Tenants in rent-controlled apartments have the right to move back at their prior rents once renovations are completed. After fires, however, landlords often seize the opportunity to make more significant changes to the affected units, according to Tobener. Often these additions are unnecessary for a tenant to reoccupy.

That extends the construction timeline by months or years, he said, and landlords often hope tenants will just give up. Then, rent for new tenants goes up to market rates. 

The building at 2782 Folsom has had plenty of problems. 

According to city records, the building, which is owned by SF Mission Tierra LLC and lists Sheena L. Chang as its agent, had received nine orders of abatement (a final notification to correct a violation on a property) from the Department of Building Inspection since 2023. 

These include notices for unsanitary conditions, life safety hazards, dilapidated structural conditions, overflow of garbage, faulty smoke detectors, out-of-date fire extinguishers, and a blocked emergency exit. 

On Oct. 18, 2024, the property also received a notice of violation from the fire department for not having working smoke detectors. According to city records, at the time of the May 3 fire, three of the nine abatement orders had been resolved, not including the smoke detector violation.

The building’s owners and management did not reply to a request for comment.

“It’s been an awful treatment by the owners. They haven’t communicated or said anything to me,” said plaintiff Manuel Lobos, 67, in Spanish.

Lobos, a retired construction worker, lived at 2782 Folsom St. for 26 years. At the time of the fire, he had to escape the building on crutches. 

For now, he’s living with his mother and brother in the Excelsior, traveling to dialysis three times a week. He’s using crutches since a knee surgery, and awaits a determination on a potential surgery on his other knee.

“I miss the Mission,” said Lobos, who still hasn’t been able to retrieve most of his belongings, including his tools and his wheelchair. 

The tenants’ lawsuit argues that SF Mission Tierra was negligent in that it failed to adhere to the fire and building code, and the danger imposed by the machete-wielding neighbor.

The suit also alleges that after the fire, SF Mission Tierra removed tenants’ belongings from their apartments without prior notification, and tried to persuade tenants to take their security deposits back without informing them that this would nullify their right to return. 

None of the plaintiffs accepted the money. Tenants’ efforts to collect the rest of their belongings and to get information about repairs to the building have been unsuccessful.  

Popal, the attorney representing the tenants, said he’s seen this behavior from property owners many times before. City ordinances meant to pressure landlords into fixing up blighted buildings have had limited success. 

Popal also represented an older Latina woman who was displaced from her home at 1452 48th Ave. after a fire in 2021, alleging the landlord claimed issues with the insurance, asked the tenant’s son to transfer her to a senior home, and offered her an illegal unit in a garage instead of moving her back into her unit.

The case settled for $750,000 in November, the same sum that Duarte and her co-plaintiffs are seeking now.       

Sitting in the garage at his brother’s house, Lobos said he longed to return to his apartment, despite its many problems.

“I could just go across the street to the store and the panadería,” he said. “It was my neighborhood for so long, and I knew everyone.”