A watershed moment in city’s housing wars
There were thousands of marchers on the streets facing hundreds of riot police. The late-night hour neared for the eviction of scores of elderly men from a rundown rooming house on the edge of Chinatown. The saga of the International Hotel ended with the sheriff swinging a sledgehammer to smash through locked doors and the aged tenants filing out. Protestors chanted while horse-mounted cops pushed back the crowd.
The I Hotel evictions 40 years ago this week are a nearly forgotten chapter in San Francisco’s unending housing wars. Nothing since then has matched it for fury, anguish and cultural shock value. Anyone in the city could see the anxiety that lay ahead for a booming, ambitious city bearing down on its underclass.
The hotel was eventually torn down and rebuilt, serving as a below-market single-room quarters with 104 units. The scarred turf reclaimed a measure of its past, and a small museum and community center at the corner of Kearny and Jackson even includes a mock-up of a cabin-size room from the old building.
Since the evictions, a combative housing movement has strengthened to the point where a wholesale eviction of more than 100 poor tenants is unimaginable. But the damage of uprooting a tiny community and over a hundred lives remains.
San Francisco is a different place four decades later. Back then, the housing pressure was localized. The I-Hotel, which dated back to the Gold Rush, was a low-rent spot populated mostly by older Filipino men, typically kitchen hands, seasonal workers and pensioners who had ended up in a tiny ethnic enclave known as Manilatown.
But the location
put it in the shadow of the Financial District. Real estate investors bought it for a parking lot and then considered offices. Community groups jumped in, finding lawyers who arranged truces and then fought off evictions until Aug. 4. 1977. Among them was a combative young attorney, Ed Lee, now the city’s serene mayor.
The fight came with odd features. The crowd numbers were bulked with buses full of followers of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple leader who died a year later with more than 900 church members in Guyana. Sheriff Richard Hongisto, who swung the door-busting mallet, had served five days in his own jail for refusing to carry out an earlier eviction order. A gush of federal and nonprofit money that built the present hotel never materialized until afterward.
San Francisco has moved on. Terms such as Manhattanization and gentrification are realities, not projections. High-rise condos sit just a block away. Still, the I Hotel marked a line by coalescing so many forces into a single dot on the city map.
Tougher zoning and land controls enacted afterward have stopped the spread of downtown pressure. The look and feel of Chinatown is largely preserved. Property rights don’t settle every argument as they did four decades ago.
These results didn’t occur until after the I Hotel was emptied and its tribe of tenants dispersed. The story of their lives and the building’s finale deserves remembering in a fast-changing and forgetful city.