San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How a nun from S.F. become champion of housing for poor
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It was a great day for Sunday in the park, so I made my way almost to the top of Bernal Hill. There were kids up there, and families, and dogs in the bright sunshine. The city and the bay spread out below, like one of those television shots in living color: beautiful San Francisco.
The next day I had an errand to run, so I took a shortcut from 29th and Mission streets along Tiffany Avenue.
Most people have never heard of Tiffany Avenue; it’s at the foot of Bernal Hill, a pleasant street only one block long, lined with stucco houses of 1939 vintage. It’s nice, but nothing special. According to the Zillow real estate website, homes on Tiffany are worth $1.1 million for a condo to $2.3 million for top-of-the-line Tiffany.
Up at the northern end that Monday, where Tiffany runs into Valencia Street, two people, a man and a woman, had set up a camp on the sidewalk in the shade of trees. It looked like they were there to stay. They had a big tent or awning, some kind of sleeping area and enough stuff to fill a pickup truck: a bike, plastic bags, stuff, clutter.
Three people with yellow vests and clipboards, obviously some kind of city outreach team, were talking to the lady of the camp. When I came back after my errand, the city people were gone, but the camp was still there. The man and woman were talking to each other. I didn’t listen. I did what most San Franciscans would do. I walked on by. None of my business.
I was on Tiffany a couple of days later and the couple and their camp were gone. But a day after that a new man had built a cardboard shack on the milliondollar street. A tale of two cities.
That same week there was an article in The Chronicle about a celebration at the new Sister Lillian Murphy Community, a 152-unit low-cost housing development in Mission Bay. The piece, written by my colleague J.K. Dineen, described the handsome new building with a lush second-story courtyard in a neighborhood of expensive apartments
The lobby of the Sister Lillian Murphy Community housing complex contains a memoriam to its namesake, who raised millions of dollars to house the poor.
and condos.
But the community is different: The tenants are poor. Some of them had been homeless, some lived in old residential hotels or with relatives. The building is owned by Mercy Housing, a nonprofit managed by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. It’s named for Sister Lillian Murphy, who for 27 years was CEO of Mercy Housing. On her watch Mercy Housing turned from a small nonprofit that owned a few units in Idaho and other places into a housing operation with 30,000 units with around 50,000 residents. She raised millions of dollars to support Mercy Housing.
Political leaders in every city talk a lot about affordable housing. But Lillian Murphy did it. If she were CEO of a large for-profit corporation she would have commanded a big salary and been on the cover of Fortune magazine. But Sister Lillian was a nun who took the vow of poverty.
Dineen quoted former Mercy Housing CEO Jane Graf: “Lillian was a force of nature … a woman of great stature and strong conviction.” Graf described Mercy Housing’s mission: “We didn’t do this to build buildings or amass a real estate portfolio. It was to change the trajectory of people’s lives that were living in cyclical poverty.”
I asked Sister Pauline Borghello, who grew up with Lillian Murphy and was her friend for years, what drove her. “She was always there for that
other person. Amazing, isn’t it?” Sister Pauline said. She described Lillian’s work as her ministry. “A ministry is what you are called to do, to respond to the needs of the people of God.”
It’s a San Francisco story, really. It’s the city that also has the drugs and despair of the Tenderloin and the street people who wrecked and looted a small bike shop on Market Street. Dineen, the reporter, wrote both about Sister Lillian and the bike shop in the same week. Two sides of the same city.
Lillian Murphy was born and raised in the Mission District. San Francisco was a small city then and still is. Lillian went to St. Peter’s Catholic School at 24th and Alabama streets. I went there, too, but at a different time. I didn’t know Lillian Murphy, but my younger sister, Alyce, was one of her pals.
Lillian was drawn to the life of the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the school. She liked what they did in the community. She wanted to help others, but not by herself — working together was better. She wanted to be a teacher, but was assigned to work in the accounting department of St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. Other hospital administrative jobs followed and she earned a master’s degree in public health at UC Berkeley.
She knew nothing about the housing industry when she was asked to replace Sister Mary Terese Tracy, who was retiring as CEO of
Mercy Housing.
That was in 1987. Mercy Housing’s staff consisted of six nuns and 20 employees. It was so small that for years she kept the checkbooks for every Mercy Housing property in her purse.
When she retired, Mercy Housing was one of the largest nonprofit housing organizations in the country. There were a couple of reasons for her success: She was an excellent administrator and a master at human resources: “She saw the potential in people,” Sister Pauline said. “She felt you should surround yourself with good people. She had good judgment.”
Sister Lillian was good at what she did. “We want to be known for compassionate competence,” she once said.
Sister Lillian Murphy retired as CEO in 2014 at age 73. She died after a brief illness in the summer of 2019. “People think of not-for-profit housing as a charity,” she once said. “It’s not charity, it’s justice.” The Sister Lillian Murphy complex is at 691 China Basin St., not far from the ballpark. It’s part of her legacy.