Telling tales
Let me tell you old story…
A visitor sits in a rabbi’s study —
you’ll have to enact the scene in your mind, complete with
theatrical shrugs and gestures. As I was saying, a visitor
sits in a rabbi’s study, watching the petitioners come and
go.
In walks Mrs. Smolensky, her wig askew —
remember, this is an old-fashioned story — tears coursing
down her cheeks. She pours out a tale of injustice,
describing the actions of her scoundrel husband and the pain
he has inflicted upon her.
The rabbi listens carefully, nodding
occasionally in sympathetic apprehension. At the end of her
recital, he looks straight at her and says, “You’re
right.”
Mrs. Smolensky leaves the office, calm and
consoled.
In walks Mr. Smolensky, his yarmulke
sliding toward one ear as he threatens to pull out the hair
around it. He pours out a tale of injustice, describing the
actions of his shrewish wife and the pain she has inflicted
upon him.
Again the rabbi listens and nods. As the
tirade comes to an end, he looks straight at the angry man
and says, “You’re right.”
Mr. Smolensky, too, leaves mollified.
The visitor turns to the rabbi and
observes, “That’s strange. You told her that she was
right, and you told him that he was right. They can’t both
be right.”
And the rabbi replies, “You’re right.”
Now
let me tell you another story…
A visitor sits on a park bench (perhaps
the last one in the city), enjoying the sunshine with a San
Francisco Citizen. One after another, petitioners approach.
The first, Sarosh Kumana, enters
gracefully, his dark eyes echoing the charcoal tones of his
suit and tie, his handsome face lit in a warm smile. He’s
a landlord, a fairly large one who banks rents from some 100
units in the city and would undoubtedly profit by selling
some of them.
Kumana cites a recent Chamber of Commerce
survey that says “a lack of home ownership is the biggest
problem in San Francisco today.” But he has found a
solution to that problem: he has founded an organization,
HomeOwnership for Tenants (HOT).
San Francisco resembles a third-world
city, Kumana says, because its home ownership rate is only
34 percent, far below the national average of 68 percent. He
calls upon the city and its government to perform their
patriotic duty, to “display the intelligence and
creativity necessary to achieve the goal of 68 percent
homeownership in San Francisco within ten years” by
removing the “imbalance between supply and demand” and
converting 17,000 households a year from tenancy to
ownership.
How? Simple, says Kumana. Get rid of the
200-unit cap on condo conversions and let the people follow
their dreams. In any apartment complex, whether two units or
two thousand, if 25 percent of the tenants (including
perhaps the building owner) vote to go condo, let the
process begin. Protect tenants who will not/cannot buy their
apartment by giving them lifetime leases.
A win-win situation, he insists. The
prices will not be prohibitive, he says, citing recent sales
of rental properties. Say a three-unit building sold for
$825,000. That’s the equivalent of selling each two-three
bedroom flat in it for $275,000. Or look at the sales of
buildings with four or more units over the past year and a
half: the average price per unit came out to a modest
$157,000, easily borrowable through Fannie Mae’s zero and
low down-payment programs.
But, according to Kumana, the plan
requires a complete commitment to work. Half-hearted
commitment won’t do. At a recent Commonwealth Club forum,
Tenderloin Housing Clinic director Randy Shaw proposed a
1,000-unit pilot program, to see if San Francisco’s
landlords would be able to restrain their profit-seeking
instincts and actually offer tenant safeguards.
Kumana declined. “A thousand units
represent a trivial number in San Francisco. They wouldn’t
offer any meaningful increase in home ownership.” Nothing
less than full support is required to bring about the
American dream.
The San Francisco Citizen nods. “You’re
right.”
Enter Chris Daly, lean and rosy-cheeked,
his height disguised by a shuffle, his plain white shirt
open at the neck under a nondescript gray suit jacket. Not
yet thirty, Daly has spend his adult life organizing tenants
in the Mission, the Tenderloin, and South of Market, some of
the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Before he gained the
respectability of a supervisor’s seat, he honed his street
smarts in eviction fights.
Daly praises the condo-conversion cap for
keeping tenants from joining the thousands of homeless
people already camping out on San Francisco streets. He
wants to expand the cap to include TICs —
tenancies-in-common — which have became an easy route
around the city-imposed limits. Undeterred by the knowledge
that voters rejected a similar proposal in last year’s
election, Daly has proposed an amendment to the city’s
Subdivision Code, with a hearing scheduled for Thursday, May
24.
Here’s the Daly plan, with its
complicating legalistic qualifying clauses smoothed out: if
“at least one tenant in a building containing two or three
units, or … at least two tenants from two separate units
in a building containing four, five, or six units” want to
buy their apartments as TICs, they can apply to be added to
the annual conversion lottery where 200 lucky unit-dwellers
are chosen.
The result: the preservation of “a
reasonable balance of ownership and rental housing within
the city and county of San Francisco” and the removal of
one of the biggest threats to tenants’ security.
The San Francisco Citizen nods. “You’re
right.”
Close on Daly’s heels comes rumpled,
pudgy, balding Jake McGoldrick, looking like the aging
college professor and labor negotiator that he is. This
seasoned warrior tackles tough topics as though he’s
Clarence Darrow, although his meandering oratorical style
would have turned the Cross of Gold speech into a Socratic
debate on the origins of the monetary system.
Like Daly, McGoldrick is a reformer, but
instead of the tenant-heavy bay side of town, he represents
the Richmond District, where homeownership is high — about
60 percent, compared to the citywide average of 34 percent.
He got his start crusading against the construction of
monster out-of-scale homes in the area, acquiring as a
result a reputation as a Sinophobe for protesting the large
dwellings sought by extended Chinese families.
McGoldrick is trying to arrange a marriage
between Kumana’s HOT and Daly’s TICs, coming up with his
own Hot Ticket in the form of yet another amendment to the
Subdivision Code. Like Kumana, he wants to lift the
conversion cap — well, a little anyway — in deference to
tenants who voted against Prop N. These people, he says, “want
to have the opportunity to own their own units, but they
have no desire to do so by displacing existing tenants.”
And so, like Kumana, he would provide lifetime lease
extensions for “nonpurchasing tenants” in converted
buildings, and in fact, without the frenzy of 17,000
conversions a year, units occupied by “nonpurchasing
tenants” might offer less temptation to unscrupulous
owners.
The mechanism is decidedly Son of HOT, but
the results are more likely to resemble their TIC mother. On
the one hand, like Daly, McGoldrick wants to add TICs to the
conversion lottery. On the other hand, he wants to double
the number of units in the pool. But on one foot — he’s
run out of hands — he wants to limit purchasers of the
additional 200 units to “tenants of median income or less.”
Nevertheless, on the other foot, the median income in San
Francisco is far above the slender means of Daly’s
potential evictees.
Madly waving every part of his body,
McGoldrick throws down the gauntlet: “If opponents of Daly’s
legislation truly are concerned with affordable home
ownership, they will sign on in support of my compromise
package.”
And the San Francisco Citizen nods. “You’re
right.”
The visitor is troubled. “How can they
all be right?”
Once again, the San Francisco Citizen
nods. “You’re right. In a different city, one with a
profusion of places to live, all these starry-eyed dreamers
might indeed be right. In a buyers’ market, many
arrangements are equally acceptable, since everyone —
whether a $500,000-a-year investment banker, or a
$70,000-a-year computer programmer, or an $8,000-a-year
retiree — can easily be accommodated.
“But here, where housing is in short
supply at all levels, the seller calls the shots. And
without government intervention, those shots are going to
hit a lot of innocent people.”
The visitor thinks a minute. “You mean
they’re all wrong?”
“Sure. They may be well-meaning dogs,
but they’re barking up the wrong tree. The only way to
solve a housing shortage is to build more housing.”
The San Francisco Citizen pauses, waving a
hand as if to erase an unspoken objection.
“You’re thinking of the live/work
debacle, where we rushed in and constructed frenetically,
only to have the building boom backfire.
“We don’t have to solve the problem
all at once, or by one approach. There’s still a need for
neighborhood planning commission s to chart a course; there’s
still the danger that seemingly random construction will
turn out to be skewed in favor of one specific group.
“But to solve the problem, we have to
acknowledge that there is one. If housing is the number one
concern of San Franciscans, why aren’t our elected
officials making it their first priority? Why haven’t they
declared outright war? Let the neighborhood groups
deliberate — and require them to come up with a plan
within a specified time period. But why should the folks in
City Hall sit and twiddle their thumbs while they wait for
the voters’ recommendations?
“If your house is on fire, you don’t
sit by idly until the entire Fire Department shows up at
your door; you get out your hose and start spraying. Is it
too much to ask that the city’s governors do the same? Buy
that aging but sound building in the Mission before a
developer does, and use it as low-income housing. Offer the
city’s superfluous property for land trust organizations
to build on. Peg condo conversions directly to new
construction. Let the city apply the same “creative
financing” it has perfected elsewhere to the housing
problem.
“What do you think?”
The visitor nods. “You’re right.”
Betsey Culp
