Lily�s Diary

Learning to Speak Bureauspiel

by Lily

July 8
Kiss of death—someone in the building next door is putting out food for pigeons. Since it’s usually cold pizza, my guess is that it’s the all-night enterprise that produces stacks of pizza boxes for recycling every week (I mean stacks of them). First there was one pigeon, then three, then five. Don’t ask why they come in odd numbers. It’s a pigeon thing. Then came the droppings on the front stairs and evidence of a nest on the cornice over the entry. I went to Cole Hardware to buy some of those wiry comb strips that stop them from roosting. Can you believe $32 for four feet? And I’d have to line them up every six inches, one in back of the other. After I totaled the cost, the clerk must have noticed my expression because he said, “some people have luck with owls.” I asked, “how much?” and he replied “fifteen ninety-nine.” Eagerly, I said “sold.” It’s too early to see if the pigeons are getting my “no vacancy” message. As long as the pizza’s out there every morning, they’ll keep coming for breakfast. I just don’t want to be providing the bed.

July 17
Sybil’s daughter, Kate, is buying a two-unit building in Viz Valley. She’s a single mom and figures that with child support, she can stay home with her kids and have some income to help with the mortgage payment. I was charmed by this old fashioned assumption. Anyhow, she’s moved into one flat and the tenant living in the other one is paying $800-plus for his two bedroom.Iasked Sybil if Kate was going to file an operating and maintenance passthrough and she said, “I thought there was a law against passthroughs.” I patiently explained that it was capital improvement passthroughs that were eighty-sixed (except seismic work cases). I told her that it was important for Kate to make plans now to file an O & M petition. O & Ms can be filed if there has been a substantial increase—between two consecutive years—in the cost of keeping a building going. The amount of debt service and/or taxes you pay the first year you own a building usually is much higher than that of the prior owner. You have to submit a detailed account of both years to the Rent Board. The reason it’s important for her to plan for this now—while she’s negotiating—is that she needs to get vital records from the seller and make them a provision of the sale. Like what? Examples of these would be past rent increases, utility bills, management fees and mortgage payments. The bright spot is that O & Ms become part of the base rent whereas CIPs and PG&E passthroughs do not.

July 24
Whenever we meet at Andronicos, Walter buttonholes me and wants to talk about his ghastly idea to bolster the income from his far below-market flats. He wants to pave over his back yard and install nine parking places and rent them out. I told him, whoa! (Years of going to the Planning Commission meetings have engendered in me a reverence for mandatory back yard open space.) Because I didn't want him to get in trouble, I called the department myself and presented a “hypothetical” situation. You know what they said? You have every right to pave over your back yard and, provided you have legal access to it—yep—you can park cars there. It doesn’t seem right to me.

August 2
Hey, if you like Reality TV, nothing is more gut-wrenching than watching the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in real time or rebroadcast. If they hired a Hollywood publicist, the ads would read like this: “see your money being spent on whimsical law suits” or “watch the city’s department heads squirm and stretch the truth.” One might even appear that claims you can “learn to speak bureauspiel, that language in which both important things and minutia are given the same weight so that the listener is lulled into a trance.” Seriously, if you don’t have basic cable, it’s a reason to get it. The whole sordid display is on cable channel 26 (City Watch). There are live broadcasts of the supervisors’ committee meetings as well as the weekly meetings of the full board. They’ve recently added the Planning Commission, too. These are repeated at various times later the same day and on subsequent days. Call 554-4188 for more information and 557-4293 for the recorded schedule. See, now you have a moral imperative for subscribing to cable.

August 9
How often do you sweep the street in front of your building? It depends whether you’re on the side of the street where the wind blows the trash, doesn’t it? If I see papers, usually fast-food containers, I pick them up. Stuff in the gutter under the parked cars I put off with the excuse that I’ll wait until the space is empty and I can sweep. Of course, when one car moves, another pulls in and I don’t pick up the trash. A few months ago, every homeowner got a very (ahem) straight-forward letter from DPW’s operations director saying, in very bold type, “As a property owner you are solely responsible for keeping the sidewalks and curbsides around your property clean at all times.” And then, in case you had cognitive impairment, it followed up with, “You have to spend the time sweeping the sidewalks and curbsides in front of your home.” My first reaction was who the hell turned me in? Then I noticed that it was addressed to all San Francisco property owners. When my heart rate returned to normal, I thought, hey we’re always complaining about sidewalk litter, and now this DPW guy actually is trying to do something about it the old fashioned way—blame and guilt.

Lily's Diary is written by a longtime rental property owner who reserves the right to remain anonymous on the grounds that her tenants might gang up on her. The opinions are hers and do not necessarily represent those of the SF Apartment Magazine.