by Marvin Ramírez
Miriam Zamora, from San Peter Housing Committee, asks for support for Prop. M, surrounded by tenants who have been harassed or evicted. (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)
The city of San Francisco is known as the city of the Golden Gate, for the beautiful architecture of his Victorian-style houses. One of his districts, the Mission, is known for having the best climate of the city, his restaurants with food from many parts of the world and comfortable prices, especially Latin American, and the best transportation system. Two BART stations are a part of the serviceability the district offers to its residents and visitors.
Nevertheless, the value of property, in contrast to other cities nearby that have seen their prices go down due to the current economic crisis, in San Francisco remains one of the most expensive cities to live in in the U.S.
Those who have been able to buy properties have faced a disagreeable law that is bad for new housing owners, the San Francisco rent control ordinance, which not only prohibits increasing the rent more than 7 percent per year, but also, if the property was built before 1979, does not allow proprietors to evict tenants unless the proprietor moves in to it. Many buy properties as investment, to rent it and allow the property to pay for itself, or to obtain an extra income.
The situation is chaotic, as proprietors get trapped in mortgages so big that sometimes they choke them, while tenants cannot go away to live somewhere else due to a lack of sufficient affordable housing in San Francisco.
The couple Manuel Corado and María Alvarado are victims of these circumstances.
They have lived for several years in their small apartment on Capp Street, next to 24th Street, and pay very little rent compared to current market price.
Now they claim that the landlord wants to throw them out so she can increase the rent, and for it she is making a hell our of their life.
On Sept. 27, Corado and Alvarado joined San Peter Housing Committee in an act of condemnation against harassment of tenants by landlords, and to gather support for Proposition M, which they say, will help stop these cases of abuse against tenants, many of them undocumented and Latinos. The case was reported to the police, but the tenants complain that they ignore them in the majority of cases.
When the tenants called the police, the one the police handcuffed was Corado, the husband, after Sánchez-Guzman accused him of attacking her, which Corado denied. He was later released.
In another case of tenant harassment, a Hispanic man who was serving as apartment manager for an apartment building on 21st Street, harassed Florinda Boch and her husband for several months. It didn’t stop until finally the harasser was caught by the police on Sept. 18, when he was on the verge of attacking the husband.
“He said to me that he was going to mark my face for the rest of my life. He owed the owner two months rent, so he wanted that we pay him (the rent), so he could use the money to pay for his debt. But the owner told us not to give him the money. That angered him,” said Boch to El Reportero.
“He was given 60 days notice to leave, and then he took it against us and threatened us with death,” added Boch.
In San Francisco, approximately 65.5 percent of housing are rental units, and there are approximately 750,000 people.
