San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/series/public-housing-in-private-hands/page/2/)
With the pandemic raging, the Public Press is focusing on the most vulnerable renters in the nation’s most expensive housing markets.
Yesica Prado / San Francisco Public Press
A private developer proposes that Plaza East Apartments in San Francisco, built less than 20 years ago, be demolished and rebuilt. Tenants want to see a plan for repairs to existing homes.
“Public Housing in Private Hands” is a series that explores poor living conditions in government-run and other subsidized housing, examining the decisions of both public officials and developers. Stories also examine the limits of local and state eviction moratoriums designed to help those in economic need in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The reporting team includes reporters Nina Sparling and Madison Alvarado, data journalist Frank Bass, infographics intern Jenny Kwon and research assistants Ande Richards and Imran Ali Malik, who are students at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.
Support for this series was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Thanks also to the Investigative Editing Corps, which helped launch this series, “Public Housing in Private Hands,” in 2020.
Federal officials are considering a proposal to allow a developer to tear down and rebuild a 20-year-old public housing complex in the Western Addition — a plan that does not address residents’ demands for repairs to health and safety issues in the current structures.
After an eight-month pause, court-ordered evictions in San Francisco have resumed, and they’re coming down hardest on some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. The Sheriff’s Department has conducted evictions at 33 addresses across the city since November 2020, according to documents obtained through a California Public Records Act request. More than half — 18 — involved tenants in permanent supportive housing.
Landlords have tried to force hundreds of San Francisco renters from their homes during the coronavirus pandemic. From March 1 to Dec. 31, 2020, landlords filed close to half the number of eviction notices as in the same period a year earlier, even as state and federal moratoriums on pandemic-related evictions remain in effect.
As the pandemic stretches into its second year, an estimated 278,000 households, or roughly one-quarter of the Bay Area’s 1.1 million renters, have little or no confidence they will be able to make next month’s rent, according to a San Francisco Public Press analysis of Census Bureau data. An estimated 60,000 renters living in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and San Francisco counties who were behind on their rent in mid-December said they feared eviction in the next 60 days.
Laura Wenus, Reporter & Host for "Civic"Months ago, legislators approved several layers of protections to keep renters from being kicked out and potentially made homeless during a pandemic. Now, several of those protections are expiring, though there are efforts under way to extend them and Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he supports an extension.