San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Managing chaos in the Tenderloin
S.F.’s understaffed single-roomoccupancy hotels can’t meet the needs of all their high-risk tenants
Seven years ago, Fallon Victoria was assigned to manage the Pierre Hotel, a nonprofit single-room occupancy hotel run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. The Pierre, like other Tenderloin SRO hotels, was blighted, dilapidated and had its share of challenging tenants. But Victoria already had a decade of experience working the front desk at SRO hotels across the Tenderloin.
She believed she was ready for anything.
Each day at the Pierre, one of the tenants — a grandmother — passed Victoria’s office to chat. Victoria noticed that the woman didn’t appear to speak to her with the same personality every time. If Victoria was lucky, she’d meet the grandmother’s calm personality. That one referred to Victoria as “ma’am” or “Ms. Fallon.” Otherwise, she had to face the grandmother’s violent personality. “F— you n—,” the woman’s racist personality spewed. “I’ll kill you mother—ers.”
It took months for Victoria to become accustomed to the woman’s seemingly ever-changing personality. She learned to quickly assess which version of the woman was in front of her and only to engage when she was amicable. In these moments, Victoria would mainly stick to complimenting her fashion sense.
But even when the woman was in a good mood, she could still be a nuisance to her neighbors. “She’d be singing Michael Jackson, and I could hear her from the first floor,” Victoria told me. Neighbors complained, but Victoria was hesitant to discipline her. “We’re supportive housing. Our job is to support her and (other tenants) ... They should try to understand (their struggles).”
But even Victoria’s diplomacy had limits. Months later, the woman’s oldest daughter and 3-year-old grandchild visited the Pierre. The daughter left her child with the grandmother and, Victoria later learned, had given them money for snacks.
The next time Victoria saw them, the woman was dragging her grandchild to the hotel elevator. The toddler looked shaken and scared. Victoria recognized the woman’s paranoia — she behaved this way when she was on meth.
Victoria and one of the Pierre’s case managers carefully approached the grandmother, shuffled her into her room and took the child aside — giving her french fries and coloring worksheets to keep her occupied. At the end of the day, when the mother returned, Victoria warned her not to leave the child with the grandmother again.
Heartbroken, Victoria knew that the grandmother’s case was becoming unmanageable. If the grandmother were to stay at the Pierre, Victoria would need more help to deal with her.
But the Pierre’s two case managers and their supervisor were already overwhelmed with the hotel’s 85 tenants. Their caseloads were more than double the city’s recommendation — a 1-to-15 case manager to tenant ratio — and the Pierre can’t afford to hire more staff.
Victoria’s commitment to her hotel is unusual, she acknowledges. She doesn’t mind being the hotel’s de facto police, caretaker and drug addiction counselor. But she knows she can’t do this forever. Her staff is struggling to stay above water, especially when most are barely paid above minimum wage.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s budget aims to remedy this by allocating $67 million for permanent supportive housing throughout the next two fiscal years with $5 million allocated to building repairs. The rest will be used to provide modest raises for employees and to attract more caseworkers.
SRO staff say that isn’t enough. In recent years, many workers have left for other jobs with better working conditions and pay. Those who remain have taken on more responsibilities to compensate for the attrition. They want pay increases to reflect this. But their requests have been stonewalled by the city. Last month, they went on strike.
This fiscal year, the city awarded $33.2 million to the Pierre’s owner, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. This may sound significant, but in reality, it’s a paltry when spread across its 24 hotels.
The city knows the high level of services high-risk tenants need to thrive. In 1998, it established Direct Access to Housing, a supportive housing program that equips its SRO hotels with nearby or on-site nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists to help high-risk tenants establish residential stability. The idea is that if tenants like the grandmother can get the health care they need, they will be able to better manage their outbursts and health issues — lowering their risk of eviction for misbehavior or selfendangerment.
The program appeared to be effective. According to a 2004 report from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, residents who entered the program had a 58% reduction in emergency department use and only 6% of tenants were evicted. But this was a small program — it provided services to only 483 units.
Eventually, Direct Access to Housing was consolidated into the city’s permanent supportive housing program under the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. And although the department today boasts an inventory of over 11,000 units across its various subprograms, it’s clear it is stretched to its limits. According to the most recent estimate from department, it has 879 vacancies for the city’s estimated population of nearly 4,000 homeless people dealing with drug abuse and mental illness.
Even if all of the vacant units were filled by high-risk tenants, the remaining population would have little choice but to be placed in poorly resourced supportive housing like the Pierre.
Recently, Camlo Looper, the senior associate director of property management at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, showed me a unit at the Pierre that illustrated what can happen when high-risk tenants don’t get the help they need: a smashed television lay on the floor alongside piles of trash and gaping holes in the unit’s walls. And although the tenant was evicted months ago, the rodent and pest attracting mayhem still linger. Looper said that they couldn’t repair the unit until after the tenant was evicted — some tenants, like the one who had lived in this unit, decline inspections and repairs despite repeated requests. Neighboring units have become collateral damage as the mice migrate into them. Repairing the damage will easily erode the hotel’s measly repair budget.
As for the room’s former tenant, she is missing. Victoria believes she may be on the streets or dead.
Perhaps the Tenderloin Housing Clinic has taken on more than it can handle. In 2015, a blind resident fell to his death through an empty elevator shaft at the organization’s Hartland Hotel. Alerts about the death trap from tenants and from inspectors at the Department of Occupational Health and Safety fell on deaf ears. Although the elevator shaft was eventually fixed, similar, unresolved claims of disrepair at other clinic-owned housing are still being raised by tenants.
At the Pierre, Victoria is trying her best to keep the hotel afloat. Years ago, a rumor spread among clinic managers that the Pierre was a relatively easy hotel to care for, but as the city keeps referring high-risk tenants to the hotel, things have become more challenging. Victoria has been offered more lucrative and less stressful jobs. She’s declined them all; she can’t abandon her tenants. Still, her departure is inevitable.
If the city and Tenderloin Housing Clinic don’t start preparing for this day now, the Pierre will fall.