When Falaofuta Satele, a 30-year resident of Alice Griffith Apartments in Bayview, learned of San Francisco’s settlement with the landlords of her building on Wednesday morning, she was shocked — then disappointed.
“This is nothing,” said Satele, of the $9 million dollar bill affordable housing owner McCormack Baron Salazar will be forced to pay in penalties for code violations and property improvements. Tenants have for years complained of substandard housing, and Mission Local has documented conditions at the deteriorating complex for over a year.
As part of the deal, the owner will get a $2.5 million dollar loan from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to invest money into the property for pest control and urgent repairs. “These people have been suffering — they need to rebuild this whole place,” Satele said.
On Wednesday, the city attorney and the mayor’s office announced the settlement and filed an injunction against the owner of the redeveloped, former public housing complex, that requires the landlord to pay back the loan and settlement in full.
City Attorney David Chiu said that while the office considered filing a lawsuit against the building’s owner, that path could have taken years.
Instead, after months of negotiations, the parties agreed to settle. “It’s the fastest path to getting meaningful investment in this property,” said Chiu.
But residents are considering a lawsuit of their own. Many felt let down after years of living in rat-infested buildings with inoperable elevators. In the building’s community room, the ceiling caved in and collapsed on an elderly tenant. Still, tenants received no direct compensation.
“Why aren’t you paying the residents?” said one tenant who asked to not be named when she learned of the settlement agreement. “I’m glad they got the settlement, but that’s not enough,” added Satele.
“I think it’s a great thing,” said Jerronda Jones, a resident at Alice Griffith. “But the point is, we are forgotten,” she said. She questioned whether repairs would be made. “Are you really going to do it?”
Alice Griffith Apartments was redeveloped as part of San Francisco’s HOPE SF initiative, a public-private partnership between San Francisco and private investors. In 2017, ownership of the deeply subsidized housing complex was transferred from the city to McCormack Baron Salazar, a private developer.
City leaders hoped the complex, which had systemic issues including high crime, pests, and a lack of hot water for years, would dramatically improve after redevelopment. It did not. Resident testimony and public data revealed that in many ways, housing conditions worsened.
Moreover, even after the city, the mayor’s office and the public health department made threats of fines, the project’s owner and the managers, the John Stewart Company, failed to make improvements.
Isaac Santiago, an advocate with the Housing Rights Committee, also has concerns about the settlement. Santiago has helped tenants at Alice Griffith file complaints to the Department of Building Inspection for the past year.
He’s done the same at Plaza East, a former public housing complex in the Western Addition also formerly owned by McCormack Baron Salazar and managed by the John Stewart Company. Santiago helped residents at Plaza East secure $10 million in property improvements from the Housing Authority in 2024, the results of which, he said, were “shoddy.”
“Instead of actually using the funds to make Plaza East a better place, it was small fixes here and there,” said Santiago, who alleged that the John Stewart Company painted over mold and failed to fix bigger issues, like plumbing. “The city gets all this funding and what do the residents get?” he asked.
Satele, for her part, doesn’t want money. “We just want you to fix this place so we can live here,” she said.
