Feature

Maintaining the Neighborhood

by Shawn Collins

The reality is that most San Francisco Apartment Association members don’t worry about maintaining their neighborhoods. The hidden fact, however, is that we suffer as a result of this obvious lack of attention. For instance, San Francisco Municipal Code Section 706 makes sidewalk maintenance a legally enforceable responsibility for all property owners, with stiff fines for noncompliance. Can you guess which of the following sidewalk maintenance duties are your responsibility as an owner?

repairing/filling unused subbasements under your frontage sidewalk;
strengthening frontage sidewalks that cannot bear loads up to the current city standard;
fixing frontage sidewalk cracks that may cause trip-and-fall accidents;
cleaning the frontage sidewalks on a daily basis.

The answer is that all of these are the owner’s responsibility. Many owners are under the mistaken impression that one or more of these are city services. These owners fill the coffers of the Department of Public Works every year, or they end up with nagging liens on their properties.

The worst part is that if you are caught with only one of these offenses during the initial investigation of your property, you may well be cited for any of the other offenses noted at that time. Recently, a Tenderloin property owner was fined for having a crack in front of the property’s entrance. Within a week, the owner received a notice to fill in the subbasements in front of the property, which weren’t even being used or accessible from the basement. This job alone will cost the owner more than $200,000, and must be done within 30 days.

Investing in the area around your property will go a long way to help you avoid these problems. The benefit of doing so before the sidewalk vigilantes inspect your property is that you will save money, avoid huge liabilities of trip-and-fall accidents or sidewalk cave-ins that cause injury, and make your property more attractive to potential renters as well as customers, if you have ground-floor retail.

At the highest level, time and money spent on neighborhood-wide improvement programs will always have a good return. Property values stay stagnant (yes, even in San Francisco) in run-down areas, regardless of the nice appearance of your individual property. Since the advent of the North of Market Neighborhood Improvement Corporation’s (NOMNIC) sidewalk cleaning program in 1999, similar programs have sprung up in 30 neighborhoods throughout San Francisco. Typically, these nonprofits focus on economic development issues. In addition to providing inexpensive maintenance of your sidewalks including tree maintenance, graffiti removal and even window cleaning, these programs support welfare-to-work trainees who often do the actual work. In the process, you will contribute to this training program and also meet other owners in your area who are committed to both the improvement of your neighborhood and the resultant increase in property values.

Another tip: the city is working hard to set up more Business Improvement Districts (BID) (or Neighborhood Improvement and Community Enhancement Districts, a less restrictive version of the BID that’s being championed currently by Aaron Peskin at the Board of Supervisors). The only one in San Francisco at this time is Union Square’s BID, a proven success that is being renewed after its first five-year trial. In a BID (or NICE), property owners in a geographic area vote to voluntarily assess themselves a fee for extra neighborhood services in addition to their regular property taxes. This fee is based on a variety of formulas, usually incorporating both the square footage and the usage of the building. The San Francisco Assessor’s Office collects this money and disburses it to a nonprofit management corporation (set up with the BID), which delivers the cleaning, security, marketing, and/or other services that the owners agree are needed. California (including the East Bay and LA) has hundreds of BIDs, and there are thousands more throughout the U.S. BIDs are a proven success in revitalizing downtown areas that require neighborhood clean-up or marketing services—ones that no single owner could ever afford or should have to provide. Yerba Buena and the northeast Mission’s industrial area are currently campaigning for an owners’ ballot on creating BIDs in those areas; and the North of Market area west of Union Square will probably begin a campaign before 2004.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Shawn Collins is director of the North of Market Neighborhood Improvement Corporation. You can reach him at tenderloinsidewalk@yahoo.com or at 415-409-8747.