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Community Group Champions Poor Tenants

This building, at 665 Clay Street, was recently acquired by the Chinatown Community Development Center. The tenants in this building were the first to overturn Ellis Act evictions.

Agency fights Ellis Act evictions, promotes fire safety

By Neela Banerjee

Holding out a bowl of New Year’s candies, 72-year-old So Sum Tam explained happily how she had lived in her one-room apartment in Chinatown for over 20 years.

“I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go,” Tam said. Her rent is $306 a month.

Tam is one of the residents of 665 Clay Street, one of two buildings that the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) recently acquired with help from the city. She is also one of the hundreds CCDC saved from Ellis Act eviction.

So Sum Tam, 72, is one of the residents at 665 Clay. She has lived there in her one-room apartment for over 20 years.

In the midst of San Francisco’s worst housing crisis, the CCDC celebrated a number of victories last week that they say has everything to do with comprehensive organizing efforts. Now, CCDC continues aggressively to reach out to tenants with their Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Collaborative program, which empowers tenants and educates them about fire safety and prevention.

The Chinatown Community Development Center formed in 1997 after a merger between the Chinatown Resource Center and their sister organization, the Chinese Community Housing Corporation. Both of these groups had been in San Francisco neighborhoods since 1977, and now working together, they continue to lead the effort to preserve Chinatown.

Gordon Chin

“Six-six-five Clay symbolizes the importance of affordable housing in Chinatown and in this city,” CCDC Executive Director Gordon Chin said at a press conference last week, held in the building, which is now undergoing seismic retrofitting and other improvements.

The struggle began in October 1999, when the tenants of 665 Clay received Ellis Act eviction notices. The tenants came to the CCDC for housing counseling and help with their rent board cases. This led to a series of demonstrations and protests during which the tenants, many of them seniors, took to the streets to bring attention to their impending eviction.

“We worked with the tenants to protest, and for some of them, it was the first time they had ever gotten involved in a process like that,” CCDC program director Norman Fong said. “But we still wondered what the real solution was. I mean, there were thousands of Ellis Act evictions every year and none of them ever got turned around.”

But after months of protests and “community peer pressure,” the building’s owner agreed to negotiate with CCDC and settle on a price.

“We won. Basically, we convinced the owner not to evict the tenants,” Fong said.

The need to save affordable housing from the hands of developers is crucial, according to Fong. Development patterns in other cities show that once SROs are demolished or sold, no affordable housing ever replaces it.

“Forget it. No one is going to build $100-a-month apartments,” Fong said. “It just doesn’t happen. That is why it is so important to save the existing housing.”

A few months ago, the CCDC came together with the city’s Redevelopment Agency to save Notre Dame Apartments. Located on the corner of Broadway and Van Ness, the building is an affordable-housing complex serving an elderly Chinese and Russian population with over 200 units. Residents at this complex were informed in the middle of last year that their rent would double, because subsidies from the state Department of Housing and Urban Development were set to run out.

“We had been working with residents at Notre Dame for many, many years,” Fong explained. “And they really worked hard to keep their home, and it was another important victory.”

Fong and CCDC Planning Director Wai-Ching Kwan both believe that these victories have to do with the organizing of tenants more than anything else.

“What we learned is that the organizing is really effective,” Fong said. “We are persistent with the tenants until finally something breaks; someone calls us and then we can negotiate.”

Fong said that before 1987, the organizing had come from the top down through the various community organizations that worked on housing issues and tenants rights. Then, organizers worked with tenants to build a Community Tenants Association (CTA) which has been the manpower behind many of the demonstrations and protests.

Chinatown residents are trained how to use a fire extinguisher and the basic ways to deal with fire emergencies. Photos by Neela Banerjee.

This organizing continues to grow and expand, especially with CCDC’s newest program to organize tenants in their own space.

“The whole idea really got moving about three years ago,” Kwan explained.

After a serious fire in a Mission SRO, which left many residents displaced and basically homeless, there began organizing around the issue of fire safety.

“When there is a fire, there is nothing to protect the tenants. They lose everything and fire safety in some of these buildings in awful,” Kwan said.

Although the fire department has no official figures, Kwan and Fong said that the number of fires in Chinatown and in SROs in general is a huge problem. With over 120 buildings, Chinatown has the most SROs in the city.

“Fires get started from people cooking in their rooms, and often from restaurant fires on the ground floor,” Fong said.

The CCDC and CTA came together with the Chinese Progressive Association, and developed a program that would go into the SROs and provide education around fire safety. The program was proposed to the Board of Supervisors, and received funding in the spring of 2000, for one year.

“What is really special about this program is that it goes into the buildings and reaches out to people in their own homes,” Kwan said. “This is where the people are, especially for some of the seniors who are not very mobile.”

The program works closely with the Fire Department to organize fire safety sessions in each building.

“Tenants will go door-to-door in the building to inform people about a training session, and then we will bring chairs and food and make sure everyone is there on the actual day,” Kwan explained.

Safety sessions contain very basic tips and rules, such as staying low to the ground in a fire and how to use a fire extinguisher.

“It is amazing because there are things these people just do not know,” Kwan said. “Like, if you dial 911 and say ‘Chinese’ that you will be transferred to someone who can speak Chinese. And that is something that is really new and wonderful for these tenants.”

Fong said that some of the tenants were moved to tears because they previously had had no idea what to do in case of an emergency.

“We have an isolated community in these buildings,” Fong said. “The resources of this city don’t get to this grassroots level.”

The SRO program also aims to train one or two building coordinators in each building. This person will be trained to respond to emergencies, whether they be a fire or earthquake, and will help educate other building residents as well. The building coordinator receives a $200 honorarium for each program year.

“The vision is that in five years or so, there will be one or two people in each building that will be the contact person,” Kwan said. “They will receive more extensive training and know the fire escape routes, and also know who the vulnerable people in the building are – they will know who needs more help.”

So far, the SRO Collaborative program has managed to hit 36 buildings in Chinatown and has reached over 1,000 tenants. But funding runs out at the end of June, and with so many people left to educate, Kwan and Fong are worried. They are planning to meet with each supervisor and push for funding renewal.

“On one level, I assume that Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin will be sympathetic, since they ran on a progressive slate, but you never know,” Fong said. “ We are going to have to test the waters.”