San Francisco’s largest residential landlord has withdrawn an offer of rent reductions for tenants of a Tenderloin building who have been on rent strike and negotiating with the property owner for more than a year, tenant organizers say. The landlord is moving to evict six of the seven remaining striking tenants.
The property owners, Ballast Investments and Brookfield Properties, took over the building at 434 Leavenworth St. from Veritas Investments, previously the city’s largest residential landlord. Ballast and Brookfield acquired the property as part of a major buyout of 2,165 Veritas apartments in foreclosure in 2023. The tenants, who had withheld rent to force the landlord to negotiate over living conditions, received an offer of rent reductions in compensation for habitability problems last September. That offer appears to have been rescinded.
Neither Brookfield Properties nor Ballast Investments could be reached for comment.
The Leavenworth Street tenants are among many in San Francisco who formed tenant associations by majority vote in late 2023, a year after a local ordinance allowing tenants to unionize took effect. Soon after, they started a rent strike, withholding monthly payments until the landlord addresses what they say are unbearable living conditions. They were also demanding retroactive rent reductions for long enduring those conditions.
Tenants began the rent strike when Veritas owned the building. According to Katelynn Cao, a tenant organizer with the Housing Rights Committee, their main concerns included a broken elevator, hazardous mold and lack of trash collection, which has led to a severe rodent problem.
In the tenant association’s first meeting with the property manager after the change in building ownership early last year, chances of an agreement seemed good, as the landlord signaled the company might agree to some rent reductions for those in the tenant association who were impacted by habitability issues.
According to tenant organizers, last fall, the new landlords made a formal “best and final” rent reduction offer, though it did not specify reduction amounts. The tenant association voted to accept the offer within the month, then spent months calculating the rent reductions each tenant should receive. In November, the group reached out to schedule a final meeting with Ballast to accept the offer. In December, Ballast sent eviction notices.
In December, a tenant organizer said, Ballast withdrew the offer. The tenants spent months trying to get the landlord back to the table to reinstate the offer, according to the Housing Right Committee of San Francisco. The organization said tenants who received eviction notices are disproportionately from monolingual, non-English-speaking households as many English-speaking tenants settled.
The language barrier poses an additional obstacle tenants face in organizing.
In the past year, Cao has been trying to communicate with tenants about accessing their rent ledgers. These are the payment histories for their units kept by the property owner or manager. The ledgers were key to figuring out the rent reduction tenants are entitled to for the habitability violations they have experienced. But Cao struggled to find the right Cantonese words for “rent ledger” when she worked with residents. With no direct Cantonese equivalent, every time Cao advised tenants to request it, a simple task turned into a lengthy explanation.
Sign up for our free weekly newsletter for coverage of language access in San Francisco.
That’s also why one of the association’s demands is for the owner to communicate in multiple languages. Not only did the building’s tenants in their association speak four languages, some lacked email accounts and could not effectively request the documents, Cao added.
Still, Cao took the extra steps to help tenants request the ledgers and calculate every possible reduction, with the expectation that after years of back and forth, the fight was coming to an end.
That’s not what happened.
“The residents of this building do NOT have adequate housing,” wrote Johana Ramirez, a tenant facing eviction, in a statement. “We deserve better.”
Editor’s note, 3/7/2025: This story has been updated to correct the description of the timing of the rent reduction offer, the tenant union’s vote to accept it, and the receipt of eviction notices.
