Original Post Date
2014-12-21 01:44 PM
Original Body
“The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him—six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.”—Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories
Decades before explicit penury recast Detroit as a gothic, deindustrialized curiosity, 5-year-old Patty Kerman was out for a Sunday drive with her family in their blue Kaiser-Frazer sedan. No pastime could be more emblematic of the 1950s. Gas was cheap, cars were roomy. And for dwellers of the Motor City, then at its frenzied zenith as auto production capital, a pleasant spin around town was the perfect pride of place exemplar.
Along for the ride was a friend of Patty’s parents, Mae. Her presence, too, lent an unsurprising, familiar air—until the car slowed and stopped. Two men in actual white coats materialized at the side of the road. Patty gaped in stunned alarm. “It was those hands of hers,” Patricia recalls over beers at the Uptown as she describes Mae’s struggle, “those white, clawing hands—clawing and gripping inside the open door as they tried pulling her from the car. The tension in those bloodless hands.” And then the men in white simply plucked the woman away.
Patricia’s seemingly complicit parents never discussed the event, and its immediacy paled with the years. But even now it reruns vividly through Patricia’s eyes in the dim light of the bar. The hands, the white coats, the violence—glimpsed through a caul of shameful memory. As though she too were guilty with her parents in the perhaps misguided committal of a mentally ill friend. Or that she too knows the vagaries of malevolent force.
No one ever knew what happened to Mae. Patricia honors her memory by testifying to what was perhaps the woman’s most ignominious moment. In so doing, she may also have inadvertently identified a vanished, spiritual soulmate. But unlike Mae, Patricia’s faculties aren’t in question. She also had warning of her own precarious destiny. And she too has been struggling to resist it—only in slow motion. To be wrested from one’s home is to be the recipient of a violent act, whether the instrument of removal is a document or the Sheriff. In this case, the violence has played out for well over a year now—its collective manifestations serving as both a primer on predatory greed and a blueprint for its subversion.
In August of 2013 Patricia’s landlord evoked the infamous Ellis Act to “go out of the rental business.” As has been widely reported, landlords and real estate speculators citywide, spurred by the tech boom, have exploited this state law to relieve countless folks of their homes, either through direct eviction or threat. These combined actions amount to a sort of neutron bomb attack, which leaves buildings unscathed but liquidates people. The resulting stories are now so commonplace in the City, they may have induced a new-normal ennui—the unintended but alarming consequence of telling them. But Patricia believes they must still be diligently told. They should still have the ability to touch us, anger us, and stir us to action.
As scores of San Franciscans have been touched and angered, the City suffers no shortage of action these days. The aggressively Darwinian approach favored by speculators and developers to economically power hose every last urban quarter, maximizing profits before boom goes bust again, has led to the most spirited tenant pushback in years. Lobbyist-besieged legislators in Sacramento rejected Ellis Act reform earlier this year, and local and national real estate interests funneled nearly $2 million toward defeating ballot measure Prop. G—an anti-speculator tax proposal—tossing added tinder on the fire. From all appearances, the American Dream dyad—that home is sacred, and property, sacrosanct—have ironically gone to war with each other, no more evident than in the current polemical climate of San Francisco. Revived tenant militancy, whose guiding principle is the belief in the right to self-determination, to one’s home and community, has thrown in bold relief the antique dichotomy between property as investment vs. home, landlord vs. tenant—a dynamic with roots in feudal Europe.
While this historical tension fuels current conflicts, it’s also used as an obfuscating tool in a white-hot housing market. Real estate speculators are speciously selective about how they apply definition to “home”—especially if it gives any authority to an existing tenant in a marketable property who they see as simply hogging a unit of wealth-generating square footage. But for a tenant, a home is not purely a physical space to inhabit, easily switched out for another—especially if you’re a senior, disabled, or are deeply woven into the fabric of your community. Contrary to what speculators might wish to insinuate, these folks are not squatters merely keeping the spot warm until a rich person wants it.
Yet the tenant’s movement is also fed by a base pragmatism. Many just can’t afford to move. San Francisco rents have gone so famously stratospheric that the ability of long-termers with rent control to relocate within an even remotely level playing field has long ago been turfed. In other words, if your back is against the wall, you come out swinging. As such, Patricia Kerman has become one of a growing roster of media poster folks for the displacement epidemic, where legality and morality layer like oil and vinegar. If the law is being abused in order to force you from your home, you have no choice but to elasticize the rules, owing no fealty to your “overlords.” And sometimes, your efforts might even pay off with a surprising twist. It is one such twist that sharpens the apex of this story. But first, there lies a road on which no Sunday drive will be taken.
Patricia’s walnut-colored hair is tied in back, feathered bangs in front. She wears a blazer, but just as easily might don an Iggy Pop T-Shirt, or a San Francisco Giants cap. Her blue eyes amplify kindly through a pair of large glasses. I’ve joined her at the Uptown, a dolefully ironic meeting place. Her friend and the former owner of the bar, Scott Ellsworth, suffered a fatal heart attack several months ago while he too was clawing to hold on. The same reason for both struggles is embodied in one Kaushik “Ken” Mulji Dattani, a small business owner from the UK. His modest-looking Mission district accounting office belies the fact that Mr. Dattani doubles as a multi-millionaire real estate speculator. His record of harassment and eviction is so egregious, he’s been named by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project as one of the “Dirty Dozen” worst serial evictors in San Francisco (repeated attempts to contact Mr. Dattani for the purposes of this story have failed).
Scott Ellsworth, a beloved Capp Street fixture for thirty years, became swiftly embroiled in a legal battle when Dattani bought the building housing the Uptown. Though Ellsworth’s lease protected him from unreasonable rent hikes, Dattani wasn’t deterred from unleashing litigious hounds in attempts to harass Scott into paying triple the allowable amount. The last social media post by Ellsworth before he died called Dattani an “avaricious asshole.” According to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, residential tenants in the same building as the Uptown, some apparently undocumented workers, were informed that new entrance locks were being installed. Keys would be remitted—only after identification and a social security card were provided. The building has now suffered at least two evictions.
This is just one property. Dattani’s holdings may tally out to more than twenty in San Francisco and the Bay Area, including Patricia’s home for twenty-eight of her sixty-five years. Housemate Tom Rapp has shared the flat with her for sixteen of those years. In 2012 their relationship with Dattani, which until then had been cordial enough, began to rapidly deteriorate, culminating in their Ellis eviction the following year. The epic battle that ensued might well be taken as a bellwether for current tenant apoplexy in San Francisco. As Patricia says in contextualizing the fight, “Better not mess with me, I’m from Detroit.”
Daughter of a former Golden Glove boxer, “Kid Zuckie,” and a devout Ukrainian Catholic mother, Patricia and her six siblings were raised strictly Christian, despite their father’s Jewish heritage. “To have her marriage blessed,” says Patricia, “my mother had to promise the Church that the unborn children would be raised Catholic.” Patricia’s father, she remembers wistfully, turned down a full scholarship to MIT in order to provide for the family, operating Bob’s Bicycles and Hobbies, a humble but popular store. “He was never regretful,” says Patricia. “This was the era when you did the responsible thing. But then, he also had no desire to be wealthy.”
As Detroit began experiencing rapid job loss from shifts in the auto industry, crime came to define the city more than cars. In 1967, simmering tension sparked one of the worst race riots in American history. Patricia recalls a National Guard armored vehicle aiming a machine gun at her. Her crime? Violating curfew. Her takeaway from the incident was telling. “If I’d been black, I might not be here today.”
The following year, the offer of a way out was met with hair-trigger acceptance. “What awed me most about California was the terrain—all up and down.” Directly behind Patricia was the roadtrip west in a carful of friends, a stint at Wayne State University, and all her possessions. Los Angeles was a vast bowl of adventure, and having freshly dusted Detroit, Watts looked to her like a nice neighborhood, Topanga Canyon, an oasis of counterculture. Where else could you glimpse Jim Morrison stumbling drunkenly in the street, or get an invitation from a skinny English lad named Graham to a gig by his new band, Crosby, Stills & Nash?
Patricia eventually dated a record shop owner named Ted who was responsible for bringing the first notable Bob Dylan bootleg tape, “Great White Wonder,” into the hands of producers. His underground cred preceding him, Ted was once asked to dinner by some potential clients. The gathering was strange, recollects Patricia, who accompanied him. Young hippie dudes snapped fingers and waifish girls instantly produced joints, while the guests listened politely to some recordings. If only the world actually heard Charlie’s songs, the group argued, referring to their by-then jailed guru, they too would see how really enlightened he was. A song about food procurement made Patricia joke with her hosts during dinner, “Is this spaghetti from a dumpster?” The group was not amused. But as few may be able to claim, Patricia survived insulting the Manson Family without winding up a butchered carcass.
She admits of those times that her choices were often informed by a conscious effort to transmogrify early indoctrination. Her Catholic schooling had impressed on her that tampons led girls out of virginity, angel blouses suggested maternity, and patent leather shoes were sinful, as someone might catch a prurient glimpse up a girl’s skirt in the reflective surfaces.
She was in motion, hitchhiking up and down the state, pursuing experience. Then in 1970 Patricia scored a ride into San Francisco. The casual introduction to the City would mark the quelling of her restlessness, or at least its scope, though she was as yet unaware of the moment’s full profundity. She kept thumbing into the City every day from a friend’s down the Peninsula, and each time, “it was just more intense. I mean, there were people on the street strumming guitars. In Detroit, you’d get jumped on by a cop.”
While hitchhiking, she met a long-haired boy who brought her to live in an apartment building on 16th Street near Noe, when the corner was a used car lot that would later become Café Flore. Her new home turf operated as a stack of interpersonal flats, and she was asked to choose between being addressed, “Patty, Patsy, or Patricia,” as there were two other Patricias in residence. Some of her neighbors were junkies, though it wasn’t immediately apparent. She began experimenting with filmmaking, writing and photography. As did everyone in the neighborhood, she took her film to be developed at Harvey Milk’s camera store on Castro Street, often sharing toke with the man while reclining in his famous barber chair.
She sampled a variety of survival jobs—food service worker, housekeeper, and “camera girl” at two hotels downtown. Folding her life to fit a square 9-to-5 schedule did not appeal to her, as the zeitgeist of San Francisco was all about the expression of freedom. She moved among all types of people, never identifying with any one group, except a generalized coterie of beguiling oddballs.
Artists and writers, seeming as abundant in San Francisco then as techies are now, bulked out her milieu. She knew painter and poet Jack Micheline (“came off as a toughie, but was a sweetheart”), Beat icon Gregory Corso (“a womanizing asshole”), and filmmaker David Brown (“an absolute gentleman”). When the ‘89 earthquake toppled and broke the work of artist friend James Redo, he happily reported to her, “The sculpture revealed to me it was actually two pieces.”
She lived for a time in North Beach on the same block where Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, and had an affair with a flamenco guitarist. She discovered the candlelit stairway at Spec’s leading to a stage of writhing, naked bodies, tripped on acid in the VIP lounge at Mabuhay Gardens to the Dead Kennedys, and attended wild costume parties at Bimbos. As a life drawing model at the SF Art Institute, she once motioned over an election canvasser and registered to vote in the middle of class. “I was naked, he was embarrassed, I registered Republican.” (She later regretted only the Republican part).
Spanning the City’s 7X7 square miles, she landed in a series of pads, from the Excelsior to Cow Hollow, and once, called a pink garage on Guerrero Street home. She thought nothing of walking home alone from clubs and bars through shadowy after-hour streets. But when the news story broke about teenaged Mary Vincent, who was picked up in Berkeley, raped, mutilated with a hatchet and thrown over a cliff, Patricia finally curtailed at least the hitchhiking (Ms. Vincent survived the assault, later appearing at her attacker’s trial).
Long before fussiness had its way with Capp Street, Patricia came to live in a scruffy Edwardian apartment building at nearby 20th and Folsom. She had no quarrel with the street hookers, just didn’t care much for their suburban johns. Drug deals went down on the sidewalk with efficacious regularity, horizontal drunks off-gassed their latest fifths in the doorway, and the block fell on the line of bifurcated Mission gang turf. “They’re happy to take our rent for living in a sketchy neighborhood,” she now says generally of slumlords, “but once things start changing, we become instantly disposable.”
And things did begin to change. As Ernest Hemingway lamented in A Moveable Feast, “Then you have the rich, and nothing is ever as it was again.” But since this was San Francisco and not Europe, Hemmingway’s “pilot fish”—emissaries sent ahead of the wealthy to scout a location’s cultural viability—would be the unwitting dot-commers. “That was the first bump,” recalls Patricia about the late-90s boom. Before then, one would not have found the Mission on a big-money speculator’s short-list. But even once that boom tanked, it didn’t matter. The Mission wasn’t only on the map, it was the pink Google marker at its center.
On the heels of Mayor Ed Lee’s mollycoddling Twitter tax break, tech boom 2.0 arrived with a clap of jejune predictability, and San Francisco got recolonized—only this time by what seemed like a perma-plutocracy of geeks. The Mission’s traditional soft grime began giving way to glaring glass and aluminum, the very sidewalks condemned and replaced in front of shiny new starchitecture. Stroller-choked Valencia Street rewrote the neighborhood as a simulacrum of the suburbs, and more recently, Latino kids got kicked off a soccer field by entitled white dudes in Dropbox T-shirts.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Kaushik Dattani relocated his office from the Marina to the Mission, which had become his favorite Godzilla-like stomping ground. As early as 2000, he had begun tossing tenants out of his buildings, including an 82-year-old Latina who swept the sidewalk each morning.
Meanwhile, he bought the building at 20th & Folsom. A laundromat on the premises morphed into a Yoga studio. But the first to go was the mom-and-pop market on the corner. “If all you needed was one egg, they’d sell you one egg,” Patricia sighs in remembrance of the Latino family who owned the store. When their rent galloped out of reach, they were forced to close. The space was reworked into an upscale German eatery.
The restaurant’s kitchen exhaust system in the airwell often ran up to twenty hours a day and was so loud it shook the building. When Patricia contacted Dattani, he sent workers over to “remedy” the issue. “They cut my clotheslines and threw out my plants,” recounts Patricia. And it was from this relatively modest event she divined a terrible glimpse into her future. “Because that’s when I knew—we were in for it.”
Since 2006, when restrictions tightened condo-conversions of properties with histories of no-fault evictions, real estate speculators’ highly incentivized method to empty a building is to offer buy-outs. These are often couched in sunny win-win terms, and if that doesn’t work, either/or threats i.e. take a wad of cash and get lost, or stay and you’ll be evicted anyway. Right on time, Patricia and Tom began receiving theirs from Dattani. A resounding “hell-no” response from the pair echoed increasingly that of many tenants who knowingly construed a buy-out as a one-way ticket on the pain train out of town.
But Patricia and Tom saw their neighbors bend to pressure, leaving them as sole occupants of the building. And that’s when things got rough. Contractors arrived and began to gut the other three empty units, stripping them down to 100-year-old studs. Coupled with the operation of the restaurant, the noise was often unbearable. And on three occasions, workers actually broke through the housemates’ ceiling.
But nothing would equal the day that a stunned Patricia gazed at the naked, indifferent print of the Ellis document that had arrived in the mail. When a Detroit native says, “I felt like I’d just been shot,” you’d best listen up. “We’d been bracing for it, but nothing will ever prepare you for that moment.” Instantaneously, her future had downsized to 120 days. Beyond that was no horizon for someone living on a small disability income—at least in San Francisco. Tom felt he could find alternatives, though it would probably mean leaving town.
Over a year later, Tom is now weary of being misquoted in the media. I meet him at Mission Creek Café and sweat the hope not to misquote him. But with a self-effacing grin, he puts things in perspective. “No one wants to hear about a 48-year-old white guy.” The comment dovetails with an evident and respectful deference he shows for Patricia, who he knows is the more vulnerable of the two. A senior living on little more than $900 a month, and who doesn’t drive a car, is not one with options for relocating just anywhere.
Tom moved to the Bay Area with a friend in 1988 to start a hardcore band. Fresh from Bakersfield, a town populated by “a lot of angry people suffering PTSD from having to live there,” he landed for a time in “The Ashtray,” a punk rock squat in Oakland. Residential hotels were his introduction to San Francisco, and he eventually found work as a maintenance technician. Observing the scene now, he finds a lot less of everything that made the City attractive to him then.
But while Tom doesn’t vilify the current newcomers, he nevertheless admonishes, “The libertarian tech bros need to understand that the people they are replacing are the very ones who made this city what it is.” He is frustrated by the blatant collusion of city government with big tech. Google busses, for instance, “have no place on our streets.” A public transit infrastructure already exists to ferry workers to suburban campuses. Besides, he believes, “you should have to work a little to be here.” In a vote against douchy lifestyle choices, he proposes, “(Techies) should pledge not to rent or buy an apartment where’s there’s been a no-fault eviction.”
Until Tom got the Ellis notice, he thought the only “just cause” for eviction was an owner move-in. He immediately parsed the Ellis Act as a flagrant end-run around San Francisco rent control law. As a result, he told Dattani, whom he characterizes as perpetually hat-switching between slumlord and speculator, “We’re not leaving, and you need to get your head around that.” Patricia puts it in a historical context. “It was the people of San Francisco who demanded rent control. This wasn’t something that was given to us by the goodness of City Hall.”
An anti-eviction themed Dia de los Muertos procession in the Mission that year became for Patricia an unintended nexus with activism, turning her onto Eviction Free San Francisco, a direct action, mutual aid tenant group. She and Tom began attending meetings. The group took on their case, as did ace attorney Steve Collier of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. Patricia had already gotten the eviction delayed for a year because of her senior and disabled status. With the alarm now reset, the clock still beat like something out of Poe. But Patricia had finally landed in a ring where she knew how to fight.
“After all,” she says, brightening, “my generation took it to the streets.” Her lengthy history of social protest goes back to the 1967 Expo in Montreal, where she demonstrated against Canada’s complicity in the Vietnam War. She wore out shoe leather marching at nearly every protest flashpoint, from Roe v. Wade to Iraq. In later years, however, she became disheartened seeing only the same white-haired activists at every event, wondering if the all the kids had gotten sucked up by the corporate machine, or were too busy thumbing smartphones to care.
It wasn’t until Patricia got involved with tenant activism that she truly found her community, or rediscovered it in a different guise. As she crisply sums up her relationship with Eviction Free San Francisco, “They got my back.” The cross-pollination of familiar older activists and impassioned young ones thrilled her, as everyone huddled over how to fight the evictions of those who came to the group.
“I invoked every spirit I could think of,” Patricia relates with a wry laugh about the first time someone handed her a bullhorn. She’d always been adept at blending into a crowd of demonstrators, never imagining herself a focal point for one. But she quickly became an eloquent orator at rallies, having absorbed the strength of those who’d told their stories before her.
“There were so many people, we shut down 22nd Street,” says Tom about the first organized protest against Dattani, which included a march through the Mission, followed by a rally in front of his office. The housemates and others mounted the office stairs to present their landlord a letter demanding he rescind the eviction. They were met by Dattani’s adult sons, one of whom stood with his hand resting atop a baseball bat. “I mean, I’ve known these guys since they were boys,” says Patricia. The letter was not accepted.
Throughout a contentious but invigorating year, and galvanized by Patricia and Tom, EFSF orchestrated further actions on their behalf—more marches and rallies, leafleting campaigns in front of Dattani’s office, and on one occasion, a carpool to Marin brought an assemblage to the man’s street where flyers were spread to educate residents about their ignoble neighbor. Owing to Dattani’s occupation as a tax consultant, April 15th was dubbed “Tax Day Fax Day,” when dozens of the housemates’ supporters jammed his fax and phone lines with repeated demands to cease the eviction.
But tension redoubled in August 2014 as the clock chimed on the housemates’ eviction extension. This meant that their building’s definition as a rental property was now legally obsolete—in effect, instantly making Patricia and Tom trespassers in their own home. As expected, Dattani immediately slapped them with an Unlawful Detainer—the actual eviction notice—designed to fast-track their forcible removal from the property. Ready to play his hand, Steve Collier responded by filing a motion to quash, and a court date was set.
For Patricia, the year’s quota of sleepless nights had long ago been surpassed. The anodyne of her newfound community helped soften the edges, but when it was quiet and dark, and she was alone, the dread of her future became paralyzing, coupled with a sensation of extreme gravity. “Sometimes it was enough for me consider saving sleeping pills,” she reflects.
The bright September day of the hearing found Patricia and Tom on the front steps of the courthouse, joined by supporters and media members. Squinting and sweating were all anyone could do. In the courtroom, Steve Collier presented to the judge five technical and procedural irregularities in Dattani’s notices to the tenants and their filings with various agencies, including the Rent Board. The judge accepted three, effectively throwing out the eviction. Outside, cheers and thumbs went up as two lives were instantly snatched back from an unceremonious tumble to the street.
Dattani was scarce that day, though irony involving his actions abounds. The moment he filed the Unlawful Detainer complaint against Patricia and Tom, he also lit the fuse of its own destruction as a legal cudgel. The Ellis Act, while used as a Me-Tarzan terrorist tactic by speculators against tenants, can also be highly prone to misfiling errors in the race to bum-rush renters from their homes.
One might argue that even if Patricia and Tom hadn’t mouthed off against being displaced, their eviction still would’ve been thrown out on technicalities just the same. Yet acting up does not exist in a vacuum, especially in a small city of tiny villages like San Francisco. Making noise exalts the meme that the seemingly powerless many, when pushed, will refuse to cooperate with the privileged few who expect from them collusion in their lives’ destruction, enabling the greedy furtherance of power.
Tom is plain-spoken about eviction threats. “Don’t take a buy-out.” Compared to the obscene profit to be made by your removal, it’s chump change, anyway. The best alternative is to dig in and fight. At the very least, whether you’re victorious or not, you’re buying time, if not piling on disincentives for the landlord. The cumulative effect results in the narrative changing from one of vulnerability to that of empowerment. All tenants ultimately benefit from your actions.
Perhaps as evidence, a growing number of tenant victories aren’t reliant upon improperly crossed ‘t’s’ or undotted ‘i’s.’ A building of residents in North Beach had their evictions rescinded after they organized, rejected divisive buy-outs, and stayed in their homes. San Francisco native Benito Santiago, a Unified School District teacher of special needs kids, had his eviction withdrawn after a months-long direct action campaign forced speculator Michael Harrison, co-founder of Vanguard Realty, to throw up his hands and shed Benito’s building from his portfolio.
For his part, Dattani is free to file another Ellis notice against Tom and Patricia, though the process would kick-start the allowable year for senior/disabled tenancy all over again. The man also now knows exactly with whom he’s dealing. For whatever it’s worth, he is currently appealing the judge’s decision.
“Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little.” Greek philosopher Epicurus authored these words more than 2,000 years ago, presciently nailing a feature intrinsic to speculators like Kaushik Dattani. Patricia believes that a virulent rapacity is creating a horribly desensitized world, especially in which to grow old. She tsks at the last three mayors, who she sees as responsible for putting the city she loves on the auction block, affecting a systemic greed. “Everyone’s on the express train to the bank, and we’re out here walking the rails,” she says as a member of a generation who felt experience and community as true currency and the accretion of wealth, a prosaic goal.
In San Francisco, the demolition of a city’s memory, held within the experience of its traditional occupants, has reached critical mass, contributing to a sea change in the definition of what it means to be urban. For many, it is unconscionable to consider that a minute population of speculators, landlords and foreign investors, has the potential to hold a two-thirds renting majority in a tremulous state of anxiety about their futures as residents here.
Patricia still believes this is a unique place, despite a hegemony that is “eviscerating the population.” Her folks are sometimes, somehow holding on out there, often beyond the reach of a bullhorn. But as she navigates the community, she urgently offers her seasoned wisdom. “Educate yourselves, know your rights as a tenant!” Then munificently adds, “Use us! We’ve been through this now. Look, we have the battle scars.”
The recent subject of a French television piece, Patricia was taken to the Golden Gate Bridge for a filmed interview. Once there, the producer wrinkled up his nose at the backdrop. “Too much like a postcard.” This assessment could well sum up Patricia’s feelings about her adopted town. Forget the scenery, it’s about the people.
I am deeply grateful to Patricia Kerman and Tom Rapp for inviting me into their lives, and am humbled by their generosity and trust. I feel honored to have born witness to their many acts of courage in the battle to save their home over the past year. This story, written with their approval, has been the result of their unflagging good will.
Ron Winter has been a San Francisco Mission resident for 23 years and is a member of Eviction Free San Francisco. He is most often a writer of fiction. The above story contains no fiction.