Tenants of a 28-unit apartment complex in the Inner Sunset left their home in a flurry when a fire broke out in 2023 in a hardware store next door and spread to their 100-year-old building.
It has stood empty since then, despite efforts from tenants and city officials to move renovations along. Then, in June, the building was quietly sold to a new owner. The handful of tenants who retain the right to return to their old units were not notified about the sale until Mission Local reached out.
“I am totally in the dark,” said Chandanie Botejue, a retiree who lived at the apartment complex for 15 years. “Maybe they think we are so inconsequential. They can do this deal and we are kind of pesky and can be tossed aside.”
By law, property owners are legally bound to notify tenants in writing about the sale of the building and their rights. The new owner is required to do the same within 30 days of the sale.
Notice keeps tenants abreast of a building’s progress after a fire because once repairs are completed, landlords have 30 days to alert tenants that they can return, according to the rent board. The law is triggered by the landlord telling tenants that repairs are finished — when this communication doesn’t occur, nothing goes into effect.
Uli Zinnkann, an 18-year tenant at the building who raised her son there, organized other tenants in the building soon after the fire. Except for one email a few days after the 2023 fire, she has never heard from the owners.
The old landlord, Socrates Mamakos, died in 2025 and his son inherited the property and sold it for $6.65 million in June to a company named Cogs and Dogs Development LLC.
During two recent visits to the site, the graffiti-covered plywood gate was open and construction was underway. A construction worker said a crew of about eight people have been working on the building for four months. The plan is to finish by February 2027, he said.
The building has no active permits, according to the Department of Building Inspection. In 2024, the department referred the case to the city attorney’s office to move the repairs forward, without success. The department has not had any interaction with the new owner, its spokesperson Patrick Hannan said.
Mike Farrah, a legislative aide at Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s office who has worked with tenants on the case, said the office is now working to meet with the new owner and inform them to meet with existing tenants.
Handful of tenants retained the right to return
Some tenants moved on soon after the fire — leaving the neighborhood and finding somewhere else to live — but a handful never claimed their deposit from the landlord, holding on to the “right to return.”
That right does not go away with the change of ownership, according to Molly Goldberg, the spokesperson of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition. She said it was unclear if the owner knows about the tenants and their rights.
Hayle Meyerhoff, a lead organizer at the Housing Rights Committee, agreed. New owners, she said, “inherit the tenants, inherit the problems, inherit the leases.”
The building’s current owner, Cogs and Dogs Development LLC, based in Brisbane, has purchased seven properties across the city since last November, including another building on 12th Avenue in the Sunset.
There, the owner raised rent on all three commercial tenants at the building, nearly doubling the rate at the artists’ studio Tight Quarters.
“The buyer plans to fully rehabilitate all 28 units,” wrote Eymon Binesh, senior managing director at the real estate brokerage firm Marcus & Millichap, after the sale. “With strong rent growth and significant upside from the vacancies, we remain bullish on the San Francisco multifamily market.”
Kathrine Loh and Maarten Deschaumes, who are the registered managers of the company, declined to comment for this story.
Putting off repairs, Meyerhoff said, is often a strategy for displacing long-term rent-controlled tenants. She expects it to happen more with market rates for housing soaring.
Long repair timelines, Meyerhoff said, “requires tenants to be really engaged to force [the landlord] to continue doing repairs, which is ultimately a responsibility that shouldn’t fall on tenants.”
Zinnkann, who has an office on Irving Street and moved to another apartment nearby, organized tenant meetings at her office for a while. Tenants went to the tenants union and worked with an attorney briefly. But as the process dragged on, people moved on with their lives.
“We lost momentum. That’s really what it was. It was just so much work,” Zinnkann said. “People just couldn’t do that when you start a new life in a new apartment. It was just impossible.”
Botejue, who now pays nearly double her previous rent at an apartment on 18th Street in the Mission, has never felt at home there.
“I miss the old neighborhood enormously. It’s a long time to be in one place. Now, things may happen too late for me,” Botejue said. “It was such a trauma. I don’t think some of us will ever get over what happened.”
The building was old and barebones, but for many, it was home.
“The kitchen is so grungy. The floors are filthy and the walls need paint. The bathroom is so decrepit. It’s just bare minimum,” said Botejue, who retains the right to return. “But we would move back in a heartbeat.”
For some, it was too late. Thomas Koester, 77 at the time, had lived at the apartment with his two cats on a fixed income for over 30 years. He moved to an emergency shelter and then to an SRO hotel, Farrah said.
“He got really, really sick. He was the one who probably suffered the most,” Zinnkann said. “He was pushed around from one to another living situation.”
Koester died in October 2024, a year after the fire.
For the remaining tenants, they are still “hanging on for hope.”
“They can completely ignore us, because we are so small in numbers,” Botejue said. “On the other hand, because we are so small in numbers, maybe they’ll accommodate us.”
This is an example where city laws could help. A burned building should be replaced in the footprint of original within 2 years. The tenants should have right of first refusal and their rent should be subsidized to the rent they were paying at the previous place. Failure to comply should end in eminent domain. This is the kind of displacement that really infuriates me.
Jessica, such a law would be totally unfair on property owners who often have no control over the timetable for rebuilding. They cannot control how long insurance companies take to pay up. Nor any control over how long the City takes to grants the various permits needed. They are also dependent upon contractors and materials being available.
A full rebuild of a multi-unit building from a fire typically takes five to seven years.
This is only a problem since, over the course of 5+ decades, San Francisco has consistently and increasingly failed to allow the creation of sufficient housing relative to demand.
This has resulted in a chronic and continuing shortage with the inevitably-associated escalating costs due the fundamental realities of supply and demand — which too many to this day refuse to acknowledge.
This is what happens when you insist on denying economic reality.
The decay of fairness, law and order continues apace under the conservative “moderate” Democrats bought and sold by big tech. . .
My family has some property in the city where a tenant caused a fire and all 3 apartments were destroyed. Getting contractors to line up the right days and schedules was a real pain. It cost three times more than expected. We had to choose between making them really nice where we could rent them for more, or simply replace the 1980’s kitchen equipment with 1980’s kitchen equipment. The “right to return” sounds great, but it is really hard (especially when the guy who burned down everything is going to get a brand new 2bdrm place for $650/month.) when you’re trying to calculate it all out. So, I’m pretty sure these people who sold the place were pretty much drained from the get-go, and finally had to get rid of the place to someone else for a song. Those types of people are probably doing a lot of the work behind closed doors with unlicensed contractors and no permits. So…. it’s a tough spot to be in. In our case, in 15yrs or so, the rent controlled people moved out and it is in the black now, but it’s a hard deal. Insurance companies, btw, are NOT very helpful.
— anyway. The most frustrating thing is to see the obvious problem of the owners not being able to get it put back together and people either saying to make that illegal OR to get rid of the right to return and rent control entirely. The city could fix this by putting the construction of buildings where there are displaced people on some kind of prioirty list with the building and planning departments + perhaps some kind of way to reward contractors who are willing to adjust schedules for this sort of things. It’s important to get people back in their homes and its important not to leave burned out hulks in our neighborhoods (like that big building in North Beach) for years and years. Fines really don’t help the process, especially when you’re basically “house-poor” and your contractors have you over a barrel, and that just makes things take longer, leaving people displaced longer.