Supervisor Vallie Brown Evicted Tenants 25 Years Ago
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/vallie-brown-tenant-evictions
Vallie Brown, the District 5 supervisor in the midst of a heated election, has said
she knows what it’s like to get evicted. It was often the reason why
she and her artist friends hopped from one SoMa warehouse to the other
for nearly a decade. Public records show that Brown has experience on
both sides of the equation.
Brown, along with three other friends, entered a Tenancy in Common
(TIC) with the purchase of 148-152 Fillmore Street, between Waller and
Germania streets, for $275,000 in 1994. TICs allow for joint ownership
of a property, with each party owning a certain percentage depending on
how much stake they put into it, and a more accessible way to owning a
home in San Francisco. Brown credits her ability to afford to live in
San Francisco to the collective of her friends and the further addition
of low-paying tenants.
“When people talk about social housing, we kind of lived that,” Brown tells SF Weekly. “You share everything. Really, it was the only way we were able to stay here.”
The sale of the four-unit building from its previous owners to Brown
and her friends was finalized in April 1994. That same month, an
eviction notice would be served to the existing tenants. The evictions
were contested by three tenants, according to Rent Board documents
reviewed by SF Weekly. A few more people lived in the same building at the time of the sale but did not contest the eviction.
Brown says they needed more income from the tenants to pay for
building renovations to address problems like mold, and that she tried
to work with the tenants so that they could stay. When they couldn’t
settle on a rent amount, she and her co-owners moved to evict them.
Two former tenants reached by SF Weekly said they didn’t
remember efforts to help them. All three tenants lost their wrongful
eviction case and by the fall of that year, they all vacated the
building.
But Brown thinks the ultimate problem was the lack of assistance from
the city or nonprofits to help make the house livable for a
cooperative, while keeping rent affordable for previous tenants. The
house simply had too many repairs and they sought capital — or at least,
consistent rent payments — to make those improvements, she says.
“It should have been condemned,” Brown says. “Tenants felt, for
paying rent, the place was too much of a wreck. We wanted to keep people
there and we didn’t have help. That’s been my biggest disappointment
with the city — that unless you fit in a box, we don’t help.”
Brown says after months of living together they simply couldn’t agree
on rent to keep the existing tenants in the building. The San Francisco
Community Land Trust facilitates affordable, joint ownership but wasn’t
established until 2001.
Planning Department records confirm that extensive renovations were
made including a new roof, staircases and upgraded plumbing and
electrical systems. Bathrooms were remodeled and walls and beams were
added in the garage over 20 years of Brown’s ownership. Most of the
building permits obtained for the property were for 2001 and 2010, long
after the tenants were evicted.
Brown eventually ended up with full ownership of the building as her
co-owners pulled out. She sold the building for $2.6 million in 2014
after the death of her partner, ending her one and only run as landlord.
“The entire time I was a landlord, I rented to folks that worked in
nonprofits, artists, etc and I never pushed the rents high,” Brown said.
“My attitude was as a landlord, I would rather have people I liked and
connected with living around me than getting the highest amount of
rent.”
A former tenant, Wandolyn Dessman, who still lives in San Francisco,
said in an email that they don’t remember an offer to stay or much else.
Neither Brown’s co-owners or former legal counsel responded to requests
for comment. Brown and her fellow owners received legal advice to file
an owner move-in eviction to protect their landlord rights and preserve
tenants’ credit, the supervisor said.
Owner move-in evictions, which require at least a year of residency,
are problematic in tenant rights circles. In 1998, the San Francisco
Tenants Union, which first drew attention to Brown’s eviction, put
forward a ballot measure approved by voters that limited such evictions
to one per building after recognizing it as an issue.
You can read the source documents for this article on our website at: www.sftu.org/vallie-brown-eviction/