Community Spotlight

by Emily Landes

For over a decade, the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection has funded the Code Enforcement Outreach Program, an entity that brings together landlord groups like SFAA and tenant groups like the Housing Rights Committee to work with tenants and landlords to address housing code violations before they create unsafe living environments.

Of all CEOP’s many successes–increasing landlord-tenant communication, appropriately maintaining apartments and SROs, and saving valuable DBI resources–there is one particularly impressive achievement sited by program coordinator Jamie Sanbonmatsu that may surprise you. In the 11 years that DBI has been working with community groups to address housing code violations, the rate of tuberculosis in the city has dropped substantially. In 1997, according to a UCSF report, the city had a case rate of 30 per 100,000 people–the highest TB rate for a metropolitan area in the country. But by 2005, the rate had dropped by nearly half: 16.6 per 100,000 people, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Sanbonmatsu admits that many components led to these promising new statistics, but he says that CEOP workers have made an important contribution by going into “these dank, dark places” and working effectively to create healthier living environments out of former germ breeding grounds. He says that CEOP’s ability to “resolve heated issues fairly quickly” has been a large part of this success.

The crux of the program is that it allows landlords and tenants to talk to their respective community groups to resolve code violation issues without the emotion that often accompanies landlord-tenant disputes, and without wasting the time of a housing inspector for what may end up being more of a personal beef than an actual code violation. “People get into stressful situations where the tension escalates and people go after each other,” Sanbonmatsu explains. “Our program is designed to reduce the tension and stress, open up the communication and have a meaningful dialogue between the parties to get to a solution without using up a lot of extra resources.”

Landlords who contact SFAA for help with code violations will speak with Government and Community Affairs Director Sean Pritchard, who says that, in his experience, most owners just want to be heard and will almost always do the right thing after he speaks with them or visits the unit in question.

He recalls one case where a woman complained to a tenant group that her apartment was in disrepair. The group contacted SFAA and advocates for both sides went to the unit to discuss possible solutions to the problem. Pritchard says that once everyone was there, looking at the peeling paint, cracking walls and unsealed windows, the owner immediately agreed to the needed repairs. “It wasn’t that the owner rebuilt the place and put in marble counters and tile floors, but she got a place that was healthy, as opposed to falling apart,” he clarifies. Afterwards, the tenant was so happy, she sent cookies to all those involved with the mediation.

It’s important for owners to understand that DBI is not out to get them; the agency just wants to create and maintain a minimum level of habitability. “It’s something basic that some people take for granted, but that not everybody has, and that’s all that we’re trying to provide,” Sanbonmatsu explains. Pritchard agrees that DBI just wants to make sure that all the occupants of the building are safe and adds that the agency provides an important public service. “How bad would it be if owners didn’t care and no one was there for oversight?” he proposes. “It would be ugly.”

Unfortunately, Sanbonmatsu has witnessed the very ugly situations that can occur when owners disregard building codes. He recalls a trip to visit a building in the Tenderloin that shocked him, despite all his years of citing violators. He had received a call about the conditions in the building from a tenant group and purposely went to the building in the early morning, before the landlord had arrived. He discovered that water was gushing out of the ceilings in many rooms, 12 radiators were missing, and basic sanitary conditions in bathrooms were entirely absent. “It was one of the worst places I’ve ever seen,” he says. In all, 100 violations were found that day.

It was one of the rare cases where the violations were so egregious that a CEOP mediation was not appropriate. “We had to let that owner know that we meant business right away,” Sanbonmatsu explains. “There were no extensions; it went straight to a hearing and then he realized, ‘Oh I need to deal with this.’ And he dealt with it. He fixed everything.”

Pritchard wants owners to know that they should always come to him before a situation becomes that drastic, regardless of if they are SFAA members or not. In fact, Pritchard says that a vast majority of CEOP cases come from buildings owned by non-SFAA members. But SFAA still remains committed to the program, even if it doesn’t directly help its members. One reason is that CEOP provides a great opportunity to open up lines of communications between the landlord and tenant communities. “We’re all friends: DBI, SFAA and the tenant groups,” he says. “We’re all in agreement that we need to help these people, even though we all work for our respective sides.”

This trust and friendship can yield great dividends down the line. For example, Pritchard often hears from owners that tenants complain about a maintenance issue, but then will not let the owner in to perform repairs. Thanks to the bonds formed through CEOP, he can call a tenant group and have one of its representatives try to reason with the tenant.

This connection to a community group is especially helpful if the tenant is not a native English speaker; these tenants often have an even greater distrust of government than most of the population, says Sanbonmatsu, which is why CEOP has reached out to Chinese and Russian groups in recent years.

Other than those new additions, the program really hasn’t changed much since it began over a decade ago. And Sanbonmatsu’s goals for the future are pretty simple: to continue assisting San Francisco’s landlords and tenants in resolving housing code problems. “A lot of people rely on this service and it’s important to keep it going,” he says.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine and Rental Housing. Copyright © 2007 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.