Last week, Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi and reporter Julian Mark discussed San Francisco’s oldest house and its hidden story of “eviction, displacement and misery.” Earlier that week, Eskenazi reported that the city’s “oldest house” was on the market. On further inspection, however, it was revealed that a long-time Mission family had been Ellis Acted out of that very house. In Eskenazi’s...
Maria Fuentes’ room is dark and the curtains are drawn. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the prone 94-year-old’s bed, and the stacked cardboard boxes holding the remaining possessions of a family uncertain where it will next turn. “No me gusta esta casa,” she tells me — I don’t like this house. Back in El Salvador, she continues, things were different....
The strange and terrible saga of Anne Kihagi, arguably this city’s cruelest landlord, reached an inflection point today. Judge Lynn O’Malley Taylor found her in contempt, and ordered her to report back to court March 8 with the $124,900 in rents she owes the city in hand, or be prepared to head to county jail for 10 days. Mission Local...
Two tenants who took notorious landlord Anne Kihagi to court over their eviction from an apartment on Hill Street have been awarded more than $3.5 million by a jury. Over the course of two and a half years, Dale Duncan and his wife Marta Mendoza pursued a civil suit against Kihagi. A nearly five-week jury trial concluded at the beginning...
Along with legislative solutions to curtail real estate speculation and luxury developments a tenant forum on Wednesday night stressed that community resistance and engagement are key to halting displacement. “There are speculators who come in with a lot of money to get us out,” said Alicia Sandoval, a counselor with the Housing Rights Committee referring to a 27 percent decrease...
A 77-year-old chronically ill woman living at 3309 Cesar Chavez Street is being evicted from the apartment she has lived in since 1969. While the tenant oscillates between the hospital and her apartment, lawyers argue over technicalities in a case that could leave her living on her daughter’s couch. The tenant, Ana Hernandez, suffers from a multiple respiratory conditions and...
According to reports from the San Francisco Chronicle, a landlord notorious for using both legal and illegal means to evict long-term tenants in properties she acquired in San Francisco and Los Angeles has been fined $2.4 million by a San Francisco judge: The judge’s tentative decision also voids pending evictions, including at 1135-1139 Guerrero St., where Kihagi is in the...
Renters want better protections from landlords who say they’re going to exercise their legal right to occupy a unit and then turn around and rent the unit to a new tenant at a higher cost. Owner move-in evictions are legal, but tenants say landlords often circumvent the restrictions in place that are supposed to keep them from being used to...
In the bruising tumult of San Francisco’s housing crisis, Paul Madonna’s On to the Next Dream is the absurdist balm to soothe your sore and weary soul. Madonna is an artist who for 12 years had a drawing and short essay series called All Over Coffee in the San Francisco Chronicle. You might more immediately recognize him by his detailed...
The new year marked the end of an era for the proprietors of Junko’s, a once clandestine thrift-store cabaret in the Mission and a two-decade stronghold of the city’s underground scavenging movement that unearthed everything from a letter from Ronald Reagan to a manuscript by Beat icon Neal Cassady. The owners, Derek Felten and Michael McQuate, made careers out of...
Tenants of 812 Guerrero St, owned by the estate of former Google department head Jack Halprin, won an appeal of the decision that had saved them from eviction. For now, at least, the collection of teachers and other residents will be able to stay. Halprin, who headed up the e-discovery department at Google, succumbed to cancer in July 2015. Soon after...
Progressive politicos, activists, and other movie-goers descended on the Roxie Theater on Friday night for what has become a San Francisco tradition in recent years: lamenting tech’s influence on the city, particularly its financial takeover of local politics. Supervisors David Campos and Aaron Peskin, State Senator Mark Leno, author and journalist David Talbot, and various aides, journalists, and local activists...
Two families are temporarily homeless after sheriff’s deputies enforced an eviction from their Folsom Street home of 13 years on Wednesday. Advocates from Causa Justa, who have been working closely with the Maldonado and Martinez families since they discovered they would be evicted from their shared apartment at 2899 Folsom St., told their story at a demonstration in front of landlord...
It is impossible to quantify the exchanges and relationships that have formed in the spaces that artist Todd Brown has created and curated in the Mission for nearly two decades. He’s been heavily involved in the Mission Arts & Performance Project, known as MAPP, which started in 2003 when Brown saw a need to connect local artists living within blocks from...
Members of a queer activist collective threatened with eviction gathered August 11 and sharply protested their co-founder’s attempt to sell his Bernal Heights home where they have lived for nearly a decade. Current residents of the Holly Park Collective, located at 150 Highland Ave. near Holly Park, accused their former housemate Adan Luevano of acting as a “pro-eviction” landlord motivated by...
