Justice Kept Waiting

by Gretchen Hildebran/PoorNewsNetwork

The Board of Appeals hearing room on the fourth floor of San Francisco City Hall was packed, but the people kept coming. I had found a seat around five o’clock, but now the walls were lined with scores of people all wearing a bright green sticker that read, Stop Illegal SRO Conversions! The Appeals commissioners peered out from behind their high tables and glanced nervously around the room between their comments. We had all been waiting for an hour while the board discussed a procedural issue when Board of Appeals President Arnold Chin asked people waiting to have public comment and address the West Cork Hotel SRO conversion case to wait in the overflow room, he looked up for a moment and muttered " Most of the people here aren’t going to be speaking anyway, they are just here to listen" Clearly he hadn’t been paying attention when the majority of us stood and were sworn in to speak. I and the other activists and tenants had no intention of budging. But we didn’t know that President Chin would be right that none of us would get the chance to speak tonight.

A couple months ago my fellow POOR Magazine staff writer Lani Kant wrote that the West Cork Hotel case stunk. What stunk badly back in October turned rotten last Wednesday. After waiting for more than four hours, the 50 or more tenants and SRO advocates who had waited to argue this case were told that it would have to be delayed again. One of the commissioners, John McInerny III, had left the hearing due to a conflict of interest on an earlier case and simply failed to return to complete the agenda.

This is not the first time the West Cork case has been kept waiting. Randy Shaw of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic has been waiting for the case to be decided since a ruling in August of 2000 that the West Cork could not operate as a tourist hotel. The West Cork, formerly an SRO known the Empress Hotel, was closed for severe safety violations by the city in the eighties . The landlords of the building let the building sit vacant for twenty years before renovating and reopening it as a tourist hotel. The landlord’s appeal of the ruling and the endless subsequent delays have allowed them to continue operating the West Cork and cashing in on what should be homes to SRO tenants.

This hearing could have ended all that. "This should be an open and shut case," Shaw told me when I spoke with him outside the hearing room while the many assorted lawyers, tenants and activists milled around waiting (before we knew that we were waiting in vain). The landlords would need 4 commissioners to vote in their favor in order to overturn the ruling. And that wasn’t likely, as the West Cork is in open violation of a city law that protects SRO units from destruction or conversion. "But there is something fishy going on here," Shaw added. If this case was in the landlords favor, they would never keep them waiting this way."

The landlords showed up around 6:45, after the rest of us had been waiting for two hours. They must have known something we didn’t. When approached, the owners of the West Cork refused to speak with me or Tiny from Poor Magazine. They referred us to their attorney, Andrew Zacks, who must conduct his practice under the strictest guidelines of only accepting cases which perpetuate cycles of poverty and homelessness for folks in SF. This is the same attorney who made it his business in recent years to help landlords get around pesky eviction laws in order to boost up rents, thus fueling the ongoing housing crisis which has placed entire communities at risk.

In the hearing room I watched the back of Zacks’ eager balding head as he leaned forward in his chair. President Chin and the Board were joking with him about how he takes the Appeal’s rulings to court. These are the people that were to debate, decide, and delay, the fate of people’s homes. I was getting sick of waiting, of listening to people who never intended to listen to us.

After another two hours had passed, well after nine o’clock, the Board informed the dwindling crowd that they would be unable to vote on the West Cork case. Commissioner John Mcinerney, who had left the room earlier due to a conflict of interest in an earlier case, had failed to return. Landlord attorney Zacks turned down all suggestions that would have allowed people to speak on the matter anyway, even after Shaw and the THC offered to automatically count McInerney’s vote in favor of the landlords. All remaining agenda items, including hearings on illegal evictions of Philippino small businesses from the Mint Mall, were rescheduled for January.

The other commissioners, who apparently hadn’t spoken up because they thought the errant commissioner would return, seemed almost as frustrated as the crowd who had waited for four hours to speak. Perhaps they sensed the irony in the fact that during the procedural debate that had kept us waiting for the first hour and half of the meeting, Commissioner McInerney had repeatedly chastised the Board for not reviewing cases in a timely fashion. Perhaps he is only interested in expediency for certain cases.

Tenant organizer Wendy Phillips of the SRO Collaborative described the entire meeting as "very frustrating." She and other activists and tenants have been trying to get their voices heard on this case for months. "It is hard to say how intentional it was, but the effect is that people lose faith in the process of participating with city commissioners." Both Phillips and Shaw recommended that the Board revise its agenda strategy and work on communicating with the public so these kinds of mishaps don’t waste people’s time. Phillips also pointed out the inefficiency of a commissioner who is so connected with developers and landlords that he needs to recuse himself so often. Evidently commissioner McInerney is somewhat notorious for his rate of recusal. Says Phillips, "Its his responsibility to hear the cases before the board. Instead he wasted everybody’s time."

When I spoke to Shaw later in a telephone interview, he emphasized the reaction of the public to any commissioner’s lack of accountability. For one, the Board of Supervisors has put Proposition D on the March ballot, a measure that would allow the Supes to appoint some commissioners to the Planning Commission and Board of Appeals and balance out the mayoral appointees. It would also create consequences for commissioners who break the public’s trust. The stalling and poor decisions by commissioners are part of the housing crisis. As Shaw said, "building by building, this kind of behavior by city officials has helped create homelessness as we know it today."

I had to leave the hearing before it was over. But before I left, Board President Chin took time out of the lengthy meeting to, "wish everybody the warmest holiday greeting" He said, "I just want to show that I am human" As I left the hearing room, waving goodbye to tenants, advocates and fellow reporters who would wait through the night, this struck me as ironic. Chins’ and the rest of the Boards best "wishes" amount to nothing if they don’t do the work set before them. This holiday season, the West Cork will be allowed to charge tourists to stay in rooms that legally should be occupied by low-income tenants. For the thousands of folks who could be living in those rooms but have nowhere to go, and to the thousands more of us who pay rents we can’t really afford, these wishes are only empty words.