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The Saratoga: Challenge Accepted
By Robert Shurell
In San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the corner of Larkin and Post streets has long served to reinforce the struggling area’s reputation for vice. The people you see frequenting the corner are those who are struggling through life. The personal history of each of these people has brought them to this beautiful city, and dropped them without a parachute. When the people in a neighborhood have nothing to lose, the neighborhood itself takes on that characteristic. The buildings become glum, and owners feel less of a need to make repairs or invest in upkeep. When a building does not receive the service of a minimal maintenance and upkeep plan, it will rapidly deteriorate and become a liability, rather than an equitable asset.
The building at 1008 Larkin St., at that once-unsavory corner I have just described, was for many years the catalyst of neighborhood degeneration. When CitiApartments purchased the building from its embattled owner, it was in an advanced state of deterioration. The building was suffering in three ways: its physical state of neglect, an active lack of respect from the inhabitants, and an unfortunate location that allowed a community of vagrants to surround it. Built in 1908, the building has 54 units on four residential stories over ground-floor retail space and a basement. The structural frame is riveted steel and the envelope is a light-colored brick veneer. It is a good thing the original builders used such durable materials because the roof had compromised them from the inside via major leaks. The windows were also original to the building, but without a good painting routine they were allowed to rot away, and several panes of glass were broken. The leaks in the roof had allowed water to migrate freely inside the wall cavity, where mold grew and pests flourished. These types of problems, caused by a lack of routine maintenance, reduced the owner’s ability to demand high quality residents, and the difference between the mean streets outside and the interior of the building became vague.
The lock on the front gate stopped working, and nobody fixed it. This is a good indicator of the state of the building when CitiApartments gained ownership. Most residents, even in a safe neighborhood, understand that they live in a large, dense metropolitan area in which any type of person may be walking by on the sidewalk at any hour of the day. If they noticed their front gate wasn’t locking properly, either they would fix it or put an urgent request in to the property manager for repairs. The gate at 1008 Larkin St. was allowed to swing freely (which allowed any number of nonrent-paying invitees to move in and make themselves comfortable, and several transient noninvitees to find niches here and there, along with certain others who found opportunity to set up their illegal sales businesses in this relatively “safe” place, which allowed uncontrolled access to anonymous purchasers). The sort of residents you may imagine haunting the halls began a campaign of willful building abuse, periodically culminating in the act of dropping dead in their rooms, with highlights (or lowlights) along the way. For example, some tenants proliferated a bedbug infestation and, as the building lacked a garbage chute, tossed their garbage into the light well, where it piled up over the years to a waist-high pile across the 40-foot-long by 10-foot-wide area. Imagine the odor! Imagine the creatures!
Oftentimes, before a building gets to this state of affairs, the neighborhood bands together and puts an end to the problem. It is the least that concerned neighbors can do. It also says something profound about the neighborhood when this decline is allowed to continue unchecked. In this case, the neighborhood was actually contributing to the problems, and vice-versa. One bad building can bring down the entire block, and the entire block can bring down the one good building. This brings us to the change of ownership that took place last spring, when CitiApartments took over. The team of David Raynal, Jim Naylor and Jon Stone implemented a systematic plan to reposition this sore on the hide of Larkin Street as one of the best properties in the neighborhood, and the SFAA Trophy Award winner for Repositioned Property of the Year.
This team went in like U.S. Marines with orders to “secure the envelope.” That meant not only replacing the roof to stop the water intrusion, and replacing every window in the building, but also booting out the nonresidents and installing a lock on the front door (which, as you can probably imagine, was a source of deep concern and suspicion for many of the inhabitants, who directed repeated sabotage attempts at the new lock). It meant taking back the neighborhood by installing floodlights to illuminate the sidewalk at night, lighting the shadowy areas where unsavory characters like to hang out. It meant repainting the marquee sign fastened to the corner of the building just above the retail shop (which ironically read, “Drugs,” with an arrow pointing to the corner) to announce and reclaim the building’s historic name: The Saratoga. It also meant working with the San Francisco Police Department to ensure prompt response time to calls from the property, reinforcing to all viewing the scene that illegal behavior would not be tolerated.
Once the envelope was secured, the repositioning team turned their attention to the horrors inside. It had done its due diligence prior to purchase, and had a plan: CitiApartments hired a security guard to roam the halls; it replaced the electrical system and the plumbing system; and it looked for “solution multipliers,” wherein a single fix solves many problems, such as cutting a garbage chute up through the building, and installing a mailbox for each resident. The former allowed the residents to dispose of their garbage easily and cleanly. The latter provided a modern amenity that the building, originally a hotel with no need for mailboxes, had been missing for 95 years. They both allowed the residents to begin feeling that they were part of a community, that they were being taken care of, and that they should have pride in their home. They could check their own mailboxes, rather than sorting through a bin with everyone else’s mail mixed up in it. They didn’t have to hike down five stories to toss a bag of garbage when the elevator was broken. They were living like people again, in a safe, clean and affordable home.
CitiApartments has a philosophy of providing safe, clean and affordable homes for all types of people. Through the years, they have analyzed the question: how does a good building go bad? Although a single answer will never apply to every building in every neighborhood, three common themes occur over and over: owner, resident and community. If any one element of this interconnected triangle starts to slip, the other elements will have a reaction, and can either pull together to bring that slipping element back into equilibrium, or slip themselves, and inevitably bring the whole triangle down. The Saratoga demonstrated that to reposition a property all three elements must be considered. Cosmetic changes do not play a very consequential role in the bigger scheme of taking a struggling property back; people will gladly live in a simple, plain little place as long as it is safe, clean and affordable.
How does CitiApartments do it? Is it because it provides residents with a “sense of pride” in their buildings? Is it because the staff knows the nuts and bolts of each building and works to ensure that through cyclical maintenance the building’s critical systems function smoothly? Sure. It is all of these, but there is an umbrella that encompasses them all: management. The constant vigilance that CitiApartments’ management bestows on properties provides assurance that they will not go astray. The “sense of pride” is not just for the residents of the building, but for the people who give those residents the tools they need to feel that way. It is not a surprise that CitiApartments won not only the prize for Best Repositioned Property for The Saratoga, but also Property Management Firm of the Year. These qualities are not separate.
Management of properties is a dynamic venture, requiring intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a building, the nature of its residents, the atmosphere of the community and the general trends in real estate. It requires input and opinions from many sources, including legal counsel, resident management, maintenance personnel and residents—each weighing in on the same problem to decipher the best solution. CitiApartments tries to keep a “fresh set of eyes” on its properties by requiring managers to pass buildings from one management portfolio to another periodically. This keeps managers from growing stale on a property because there are always fresh challenges to confront and solve, by virtue of a new person bringing their individual expertise and vision to the job. Working together in an environment of open communication, not just between themselves, but also with the residents in the buildings they manage, allows them insight into the nature of successes and failures in the buildings, which is where true learning occurs. It is these simple understandings that provide Citi-Apartments with the means to reposition properties like The Saratoga so successfully time and time again.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Shurell is a licensed architect with Stantec Architecture, a firm specializing in architecture that serves the needs of our communities in the fields of education, healthcare, transportation, and civic and cultural facilities. Feel free to contact him with questions or comments at robert.shurell@stantec.com. Copyright © 2008 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.