When Tamika Spikes moved from the single-room-occupancy hotel where she lived with her young daughter into a two-bedroom apartment at Alice Griffith earlier this year, she felt lucky. Her window offered sweeping views of the bay and Candlestick Park, and her daughter got a room of her own — her first.
But just weeks later, a rotten smell permeated her home and the hallways of the building’s fifth floor, causing Spikes and her five-year-old, who uses an inhaler, to gag and struggle to breathe. Spikes recognized the smell: It was the same odor that had lingered in her SRO after a neighbor died from an overdose, years ago. This time, she said, she told maintenance staff she “smelled death.”
It’s rats, she was told.
Several days later, a maintenance worker unlocked the apartment across the hall. Dwayne Gaines, 62, lay dead in his bed. The coroner’s report stated that his body had been decomposing for over a week.
Spikes is one of hundreds of tenants at Alice Griffith, a 338-unit subsidized housing complex in Bayview-Hunters Point, where tenants are living among a rodent infestation that has become so severe, the smell of rat carcasses could be confused with that of a dead body.
The story of Alice Griffith Apartments offers a case study in how redeveloped, formerly public housing can deteriorate even as city officials, public agencies, and the media are watching.
Many San Francisco leaders were not only observing the housing complex, they had issued demands, threats and deadlines for its owner, McCormack Baron Salazar, and the management company it hired, the John Stewart Company. The mayor led a walk-through; a supervisor held a public hearing.
Yet, in just under a decade and despite sizable financial investment, the housing complex has fallen into squalor, and the residents have lost out to the rats.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. An estimated $230 million in public and private financing was spent on erecting the apartments. The funds included a coveted $30.5 million federal grant that required the buildings to be redeveloped into high quality, mixed-income housing.
Yet it didn’t take long before vermin infested the Alice Griffith, burrowing into its walls, taking over office space, and feasting on trash and food debris heaped on its garage floors.
“This is the ghetto,” said Jasmine, a tenant who declined to give her last name for fear of retaliation from her property manager.
McCormack Baron Salazar disputed the following characterization of its complex, which is based on interviews with over a dozen tenants, five years of city inspections, and on the record statements from a pest control and former maintenance worker.
“McCormack Baron Salazar (MBS) and the John Stewart Company are proud to be part of the community housing development at Alice Griffith and our top priority is always the safety, wellbeing, and comfort of our residents,” said the two companies in a joint statement.
But the tenants Mission Local spoke to feel betrayed. Jasmine looked out onto the swaths of empty land surrounding the complex encircled by a chain metal fence where her prior home once stood. “I’ve moved to a new place,” she said. “I thought it would be different.”
Hope lost
Alice Griffith Apartments, along with over 30 other formerly public housing complexes, were at the forefront of a national movement in the 2000s to transfer public housing into private hands. The program aimed to transform the dilapidated, city-run buildings into thriving, mixed-income communities.
The four largest, most distressed complexes in San Francisco, including Alice Griffith Apartments, were redeveloped under the HOPE SF initiative, an ambitious public-private partnership launched in 2006 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. It was funded in part by Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the San Francisco Foundation, and meant to redevelop public housing and improve quality of life for thousands of its residents.
At Alice Griffith, originally built in 1962 to house families working at the nearby Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, McCormack Baron Salazar was chosen in 2010 to take ownership of the four new residential buildings to be erected on Arelious Walker Drive, down the hill from the rapidly decaying public housing development. New tenants began moving in during 2017. By 2019, most of the 338 units were occupied.
At the grand opening, public officials made exuberant promises. “We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past,” said then-Mayor London Breed, who grew up in public housing in the Western Addition and understood its importance to low-income families. “We have to do right for this community.”
The rebuild, said Pelosi at the ceremony, was “a dream come true.”
But the dream soon gave way to squalor.
“We were so excited to come here,” said Falaofuta Satele, of the redeveloped apartments. Satele, who moved to Alice Griffith in 1996, was involved along with other residents in the planning process for the new apartments. But the new complex soon disappointed.
The upkeep of the apartments, a rodent infestation, and an allegedly unresponsive property manager is not what anyone expected. “I feel for the residents,” she said. “They trusted me.”
Adrienne Vandercourt has lived at Alice Griffith since she was a child in 1966, and like Satele moved to the new apartments. She calls living there “stressful” — not what it is supposed to be.
Everyone was watching
Mission Local reviewed five years of public health data, revealing that the department cited more than 50 public health violations, the first as early as August 2020 for garbage rooms overflowing with trash due to broken garbage chutes. Additional violations showed up in re-inspections. Over the course of five years, the Department of Public Health repeatedly observed rodent and cockroach infestations, bed bugs, dog and pigeon feces, and piles of unattended garbage at the property.
Approximately 43 percent of public health complaints submitted in the past five years concerned rodent infestations in the building’s garages, walls, and apartment complexes.
Multiple complainants allege that though officials at Alice Griffith are aware of habitability issues at the complex, efforts to fix them were minimal.
“There are mice in the walls,” wrote an investigator taking the complaint. “The customer noticed the mice about two weeks ago. They are all over the unit. Property management is aware and never got exterminators,” read the complaint submitted in October 2025. “Apartment and building infested with mice and rats, building not being properly cleaned,” read another from December 2024.
One complaint, first submitted in March 2023 was not addressed for over three years, records show.
In March 2023, an investigator arrived at Alice Griffith to find that the complex’s garbage room was covered in filth — a broken garage door left the building open to the public, giving pests access to the building’s first floor. The tenant who filed the complaint, noted the investigator, was attempting to treat a cockroach infestation on their own.
In her notes, Adrienne Blaylock, an investigator for the Department of Public Health, wrote that she referred the tenant to Open Door Legal, a free legal aid service, for help.
In July 2023, Blaylock returned. There were “no changes,” she noted. She mailed a second notice of violation to the property’s manager.
The next year, in April 2024, Blaylock emailed the property’s manager again, asking for an update on any improvements made to the property. No response came, according to Blaylock.
In June 2024, Blaylock returned. She noted again that nothing had changed. “Garbage room is filthy and unsanitary, has pigeon feces, food debris, and sticky floors,” she wrote. “All areas of garbage room is covered in filth.”
The next month, the Department of Public Health called for a hearing. The property, read the director’s hearing order, was a “public health nuisance.” The John Stewart Company failed to show up at the hearing.
The city ordered the company to make necessary changes within 30 days. Specifically, it was to fix garage doors that were stuck open, clean trash rooms overflowing with debris, and hire pest control services. Failure to do this, company officials were told in writing, could result in a $500 fine per month. At most, ongoing code violations can lead to a $1,000 fine per day.
No records indicate that these fines were ever levied.
The next year, the building’s owner, McCormack Baron Salazar, informed the city it did not have the money to address “immediate habitability issues.” It needed $500,000 from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to address critical repairs, staffing — and to pay $130,000 owed to vendors, read the request.
In February 2025, the mayor’s office granted the loan.
Two months later, little had changed, according to residents. District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton summoned the building’s owner and property manager to another hearing on April 7 2025. At the meeting, Walton alleged the neglect was a failure of “accountability and basic human decency.”
Jennifer Wood, the vice president of the John Stewart Company, testified during Walton’s hearing that the company had difficulty paying for critical services and repairs because rent receipts dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s more, because the complex was failing inspections, the San Francisco Housing Authority was withholding thousands of dollars in federal rental subsidies from the company.
Anne Stanley, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said that after Walton’s hearing, the city’s “existing efforts” to help the property “intensified,” and that it added additional monitoring, inspections, and funding. These actions, said Stanley, made for “noticeable improvement.”
Nonetheless, in early May and June 2025, Mission Local reported on a complex falling apart and found that Alice Griffith had failed over 100 inspections in one year.
In June 2025, Mayor Daniel Lurie began visiting Alice Griffith. According to residents, Lurie walked through the property with his staff and into the garage. The property management firm was warned of his visit, residents said, and hours before had cleaned the apartment’s common areas and cut overgrown shrubbery.
Soon after the mayor left, they said, the apartments slipped back into filth.
In July 2025, officials from the San Francisco Police Department, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Building Inspection, the City Attorney’s Office, and the San Francisco Planning Department arrived at Alice Grifith.
They discovered that the public health department’s demands, made one year prior, were never met. What’s more, there were more code violations than before. Investigators found fresh rodent droppings beside a nest, garbage chutes that didn’t work, and piles of garbage and food waste. The Department of Public Health again demanded corrective actions be taken — this time by September 2025.
The mayor returned in August 2025. Lurie and his staff quietly walked through the complex as tenants showed him plastic sheets fastened to the ceiling to prevent water leaking into the kitchen and bathrooms covered in a thick film of black mold.
A spokesperson for McCormack Baron Salazar and the John Stewart Company said that it hired a pest control company to exterminate the rodent infestation in 2024, and again in 2025, but “their efforts were unsuccessful.” McCormack Baron Salazar declined to share invoices of this work.
A pest control worker who was granted anonymity fearing job retaliation recalled driving past Alice Griffith Apartments in 2025 to get to another job site. “They tried to flag us down,” said the worker, referring to tenants at Alice Griffith. “They complained about the pests.”
Despite warnings, infestation worsens
One block away from where Gaines’ body was found, a rat infestation had become so severe that some residents had taken to using a back exit to enter their apartments.
Walter Ennon, a former janitor at Alice Griffith who lives at the building, said he first started noticing rats near weekly last year. “It started being so bad,” said Ennon. “It starts from the garbage.”
In the storage room of the 2500 building, broken garbage chutes have caused trash to pile inside the room, attracting pests. In photos of the room submitted to the Department of Public Health in 2025, food debris stains the room’s walls and ceilings — rodent droppings can be seen in the corner.
Ennon said he warned property management that they would soon have a severe rat infestation if they didn’t hire pest control soon. “Y’all are fixing to have a rat problem here,” Ennon said he told staff. “They would never say nothing,” said Ennon.
Soon, said Ennon, the infestation spiraled out of control.
“The rats was crawling on people’s cars, eating their wires up. I was so scared of them I wouldn’t even go in the garage. That’s how bad it was,” said Ennon.
Kwa’wayne Defils, a security guard at Alice Griffith, usually keeps an office in the same building. In April of this year, Defils and his staff hovered in the back of a tenants’ meeting, nodding as tenants yelled out a barrage of complaints.
Defils and his coworkers haven’t used their office in months. “It’s infested with rats,” he said. “We can’t use it.”
Other tenants stuff shirts under doors to keep mice and rats from entering their units and the building’s community room, they told Mission Local. One tenant said she found a rat inside her infant’s room.
When she reported it, she alleged, a staff member “laughed in her face.”
‘It’s the worst I’ve ever seen‘
In March 2026, McCormack Baron Salazar hired the pest control firm Pestec. In May, one of its pest control workers lined the building’s hallways at Alice Griffith with a long row of rat traps, preparing to patch holes the rodents had burrowed into the building’s walls and ceilings.
The building’s filth, said the pest control worker, helped attract the rodents. “This could have been prevented for years with the proper maintenance,” he said.
Without the cooperation of the management company to keep public areas like the building’s garage, trash and storage rooms clean, the pest control worker said, infestations will likely continue.
“My entire life I grew up in really bad neighborhoods, drug-addict neighborhoods,” said the worker, standing outside the unit carefully evading broken glass in piles on the pavement.
“I want these people to get help,” he said. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. There are children living here. It’s not safe.”
In a July statement, the John Stewart Company and McCormack Baron Salazar said that during a “recent walkthrough” a pest control worker told the company that a live rodent hadn’t been seen in “over three weeks.”
But that was not the case for tenants. Only days after the property’s owner said the rodents had been exterminated, one tenant said she was startled by a rat “the size of a cat.” Another said she saw a rodent as recently as July 20th.
When Mission Local returned to the building on July 21, an intense smell emanated from the 2500 building’s first floor. Debris lay in piles in the building’s trash room. A child walking with her father hurried through the floor to get to her unit, covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve.
The building’s garage remained stuck ajar.
Stanley, the housing office spokesperson, was circumspect. While there had been earlier improvements after the April 2025 hearings, “additional actions by the owner and property manager are still needed,” Stanley said in July.
When asked how the housing complex met the conditions of a federal grant mandating the buildings be redeveloped into “high quality” housing despite persistent public health violations, Stanley wrote that the city and the Housing Authority “remain committed to fulfilling” the goals of the grant.
The owner of the building, wrote Stanley, is responsible for “ensuring livable conditions in the existing homes.”
Despite filth, referrals and approvals kept coming
And that is just one of the Catch-22s that allows housing conditions at Alice Griffith to deteriorate.
At his April hearing, Walton threatened the John Stewart Company and the complex’s owner McCormack Baron Salazar with more hearings and possible removal, but at present, neither seem imminent.
In a statement, Stanley said that since the privatization of the complex the city no longer has the authority to intervene in “day to day operations,” including the hiring or firing of the property managers.
The office’s power is limited to asset management, meaning the office can monitor the owner’s finances and agree to lend money to the company, as it did in early 2025 when it offered a $500,000 stabilization loan that included money for repairs and pest control.
The biggest cudgel, Stanely said, is the ability of city departments and the city attorney’s office to intervene through court proceedings as they might for any privately-held property.
In a joint statement to Mission Local, McCormack Baron Salazar, the owner of the building, and the John Stewart Company, stated the companies invested “significant funds” in pest control, janitorial services, and trash collection onsite over the past three years.
“We share the community’s hope for the stabilized and sustainable future of Alice Griffith and are working together with residents and other partners to ensure Alice Griffith is a safe, affordable, and welcoming home for everyone,” wrote the two companies in a joint statement
Over the past three years, McCormack Baron Salazar reported that it has spent upwards of $611,500 on pest control, maintenance services, and janitorial costs. The company declined to share its receipts with Mission Local. Despite any money McCormack may have spent, code violations and habitability concerns continued to escalate.
The John Stewart Company is one of eight companies that own or manage 37 complexes removed from the San Francisco Housing Authority. It manages over 280 complexes across California and 41 in San Francisco. McCormack Baron Salazar is tied to five properties in San Francisco and 165 across the country.
Despite the limits of what the city and federal government can do, Pelosi said that her office will be monitoring the situation.
“The conditions described are deeply concerning and disappointing as we see their hopes and opportunities diminished. Sadly, the impression given from the charges is that this is a longstanding problem,” said Pelosi, in a statement.
“Residents deserve and need prompt action from the property management to address these serious issues with the urgency they require,” she said.
In a statement, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote that it is local housing authorities’ responsibility to hold property managers accountable.
“The work doesn’t end when the ribbon is cut,” said Newsom. “It depends on property managers doing their jobs every day and local housing authorities holding them accountable when they don’t.”
Each year, despite ongoing habitability concerns, the San Francisco Housing Authority reported to the city that Alice Griffith Apartments met HOPE SF’s principles and the conditions of a $30.5 million dollar federal subsidy. Rats and innumerable code violations failed to deter the Housing Authority from filling up empty units. From 2023 to June 2026, it referred 83 low-income residents to Alice Griffith according to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.
Spikes and her daughter were among those referred.
Infestation allowed for tenants’ body to decompose for days
On Tuesday afternoon on March 31, Jamie Moore received a panicked phone call from her teenage granddaughter, who had left to celebrate her grandfather Dwayne Gaines’ birthday.
“She just said, ‘Papa’s dead,’ and I was like what?” recalled Moore who lived a mile away. “You hear it and you don’t know what to think … You don’t know what to do.”
Moore, who shared multiple children with Gaines, rushed to the apartment where he had lived for the last 11 years, according to Moore. When she arrived, emergency vehicles were parked beside his building.
Emergency personnel would not let anyone inside.
At 2:22 p.m. on March 31, call logs from the Department of Emergency Response indicate a call was placed to 911. Minutes later, the San Francisco Fire Department arrived responding to reports of a “foul smell.” Once Gaines’ body was found, the medical examiner’s office reported he had reached an “advanced state of decomposition.”
Moore didn’t receive Gaines’ remains for nearly a month because of the medical examiner’s office’s difficulty identifying a body so decomposed.
The medical examiner’s office’s report stated that the building’s maintenance worker didn’t conduct a wellness check until over a week after tenants first complained.
“The building maintenance unlocked the home with a spare key and found Gaines deceased,” read the report. “Maintenance staff,” the report continued, “conducted a welfare check after other tenants complained about a foul odor for over a week.”
Spikes recalled standing by her doorway as the maintenance worker entered Gaines’ apartment. “The smell was overwhelming,” said Spikes. The property’s manager, said Spikes, gagged and covered her face in her hands.
By late July, Gaines’ apartment has still not been cleaned. A medical examiners’ seal remains stuck to the doorframe. “I can still smell it lingering,” said Spikes.
Ronda York, Gaines’ neighbor, is one of three tenants who said they reported the smell to maintenance staff and the building’s manager days before his body was found. York said that when maintenance told her she was smelling a dead rat, she insisted it was a body.
“I went ballistic,” she said, when she learned Gaines’ body had been found. “All you had to do was knock on the door.”
Two other neighbors, including Spikes and one neighbor who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, each said they each reported the smell to the building’s staff days before a wellness check was conducted.
All said they received the same response — that rodents were to blame for the smell.
York alleged that it wasn’t until she threatened to call the health and the fire departments that a maintenance worker, who lived on the same floor, opened Gaines’ unit.
Both the building’s property manager and the maintenance worker who allegedly responded to tenants’ complaints declined to comment to Mission Local.
In a statement emailed in April, the John Stewart Company denied that the tenants reported the smell before a call was made to 911.
“That is not true,” Vice President Jennifer Wood wrote in a statement, when informed of the allegations that the tenants reported the smell at least one week before a wellness check was performed. “We were notified of an odor in the unit, and checked the unit the same day. Authorities were called and conducted an investigation.”
But in a subsequent statement, the John Stewart Company stated instead that on Wednesday, March 25, a “foul odor, attributed to a rat” was reported to staff late in the night. “No odor was detected … outside any residents’ doors.”
The spokesperson maintained that even after Gaines’ door was unlocked by a maintenance worker on March 31, “there was no odor emanating from the unit.”
Gaines was a well-known figure at the apartment complex and at City Hall. He often appeared at public comment for Board of Supervisors meetings in a sweatshirt emblazoned with the name of his own advocacy group, “The Bayview-Hunters Point Coordinating Council.”
During Walton’s public hearing in April 2025, Gaines waited for his turn at the podium. “This is death,” said Gaines into the microphone. “They lied to us … They need to tear it down and build it back up.”
“He complained for years about living conditions that were below par,” said Gaines’ close friend, Kevin Williams. “Elevators not working with rats the size of cats, bed bugs. He would send me pictures of garbage, debris that was beyond belief. He said nothing would happen when he complained.”
Fred Blackwell, the CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, which partners with HOPE SF, said he was “devastated” to hear of Gaines’ death.
“That a resident’s life could be lost under these circumstances at Alice Griffith, where longstanding housing challenges continue to affect residents’ quality of life despite years of commitment and hard work from so many, is heartbreaking and unacceptable,” said Blackwell.
“Residents deserve safe, healthy communities, and the urgency of that work has never been clearer.”
In late spring, Spikes stood in her apartment, with her daughter dancing in circles showing off pictures she had painted. She had recently decorated her room in fluffy pink carpeting and Hello Kitty pillows.
Gaines, she said, was one of her first visitors. He would frequently knock on her door, asking if she needed anything. When the knocks on her door ceased, she wondered where he had gone.
Her daughter took an immediate liking to him. Spikes has still not told her of his death.
“I don’t want her to know,” she said.
