SF Apartment : July 2017

THE NEWS

Building a better city

Reducing Harm on the Streets

The city plans to expand existing services and resources and to develop new strategies to help citizens with behavioral and mental health issues and to keep individuals from using drugs on public sidewalks. The Harm Reduction Center will expand its hours and a new 24-hour resource and medical center will open. Additionally, there are plans for the city’s first navigation center for individuals experiencing mental health issues and addiction to open this year, with hopes of ending the relentless cycle in jails and hospitals.

Homelessness

Beds at navigation centers across the city will increase by 150%, with the intention of moving people from encampments into safe living situations. According to the Mayor’s Office, navigation centers provide individuals with access to intensive case management, critical service connection to healthcare, entitlement benefits, and drug treatment programs. Over 70% of residents who stay in navigation centers successfully transition into permanent housing, safe temporary placements, or are reunited with family members.

Funding will also be designated for family, youth, LGBT, and veteran homelessness programs. The plan includes more than $4 million to expand San Francisco’s homeless-childcare program for children under the age of five, and $2 million for new shelter beds for families experiencing homelessness. The Mayor has a goal of ending chronic veteran homeless by the end of this year and chronic family homelessness by the end of 2019.

Neighborhood Quality of Life

The budget includes historic investment for infrastructure, including streets, roads, parks, community centers and sidewalks. In particular, $90 million will go toward repairing potholes and repaving. Another $84 million will go toward the Recreation and Park Department, an 81% increase since 2015—expanding on San Francisco’s achievement of becoming the first American city to have every resident living within a 10-minute walk of an open space. These initiatives should create up to 4,400 jobs.

There are also plans to expand the Mayor’s Fix-It initiative, which focuses on quality of life concerns in neighborhood corridors such as graffiti, overgrown trees, dirty roads, poor lighting, and cracked sidewalks. The city has also dedicated funds to enable the San Francisco Police Department to meet community policing goals and reduce neighborhood crimes.

Trinity’s Venus Open to the Public

Venus, San Francisco’s tallest statue reaching nine stories at 92 feet, can be viewed in Piazza Angelo at Trinity apartments on Eighth and Mission Streets. Piazza Angelo, named for Trinity SF’s founder, Angelo Sangiacomo, who passed away in 2015 at age 91, is a one-acre privately owned space in the center of the 1,900-unit, four-building apartment complex. The public art space is open to visitors from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day.

Angelo first purchased the site close to forty years ago, and after nine years of construction, Trinity Properties celebrated the opening of Piazza Angelo and the unveiling of Venus in a private ceremony in May. The event was attended by the Sangiacomo family; Mayor Ed Lee; former mayor Willie Brown; Venus’s artist, Lawrence Argent; the space’s designing architect, Bernardo Fort-Brescia; and more than 300 friends. During the event, Frankie Avalon performed his 1959 song “Venus” and Argent gave tours of the space, which also houses more than a dozen of his other sculptures.

The space also features a 25-foot carved Carrara marble communal table; seven-foot illuminated glass bollards with Romanesque statues weighing close to six tons each; bronze gates patterned to replicate the street map of ancient Genoa; a nine-foot white marble dove; and a mosaic path through the piazza, connecting Market Street to Mission Street.

Soft-Story Retrofit Reminder

The September deadlines for the Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit program are quickly approaching. Please do not delay. Take the next step to ensure your property, and your tenants, are better protected by complying with San Francisco’s Mandatory Soft Story Program (MSSP). Failure to submit permits and plans to DBI by the deadline will result in code enforcement action and monetary penalties. For more information, visit www.sfdbi.org.

Tier One Soft Story Property Owners

If you are a property owner of a building containing educational, assembly, or residential care facility uses (Building Code Occupancy E, A, R2.1, R3.1, or R4), your completion of work and issuance of certificate of final completion is due September 15, 2017.

Tier Three Soft Story Property Owners

If you are a property owner of a multi-unit building with three or more stories, five or more units, your permit application must be filed with the Department of Building Inspection by no later than September 15, 2017, which is only about two months from now. You also may be able to add accessory dwelling units to your property when performing a seismic retrofit.

Recology Rate Changes

Effective July 1, Recology will raise rates 16.4%, with separate rate schedules for residential buildings with five or fewer units and apartment buildings with six or more units. The last set of rate changes was approved in 2013.

For apartment buildings with six or more units, but fewer than 600 rooms, three changes are proposed: 1) the charge for 32 gallons of bin capacity is proposed to go from $25.90 per collection to $24.50, a decrease of 5.4%; 2) the monthly dwelling unit charge is proposed to go from $5.16 to $5, a decrease of 3.1%; 3) new parameters for the diversion discount, a cost reduction based on a building’s recycling rate.

The rates noted in points 1 and 2 are for Monday through Friday curbside collection. Apartment buildings that request inside collection service pay additional costs such as key, distance, and elevation charges.

SFAA Website Revamp

The SFAA has upgraded and redesigned its website for a better user experience. Members can now more easily access forms, register for events and classes, view videos of member meetings, browse the magazine, and review the vendor directory, among other improvements. To log in to the website, users need to enter their member number and use the password: SFAA2017.

May 15th SFAA Members Meeting

The May 15th SFAA member meeting, held at the Jewish Community Center in Kanbar Hall, was sponsored by Terence Jones of Tri Commercial. The meeting began with the monthly Legal Q & A, moderated by Dave Wasserman of Wasserman & Stern.

The meeting then moved on to the annual tenant-attorney panel, also moderated by Dave Wasserman. The panel featured respected tenant-attorneys Joseph Tobener and Jacqueline Ravenscroft, Tobener and Ravenscroft LLP; Daniel Wayne, Law Offices of Daniel W. Wayne, PC; Andrew Westly, Westly Law Office; and Josephine Alioto, Law Offices of Eric L. Lifschitz. The group discussed how landlords can avoid the most common mistakes that could lead to lawsuits, and how landlords and tenants can work together to resolve issues before getting the courts involved. The panel ended with a member Q & A.

For handouts from the member meeting, click here.