Lily’s Diary
by Lily
November 1
Thinking of putting in a garage? My old friends, Henry
and Ramon, are in the process of converting their four-unit
building into condos. During the five years they waited
to have their names picked in the lottery, they had
plenty of time to decide what upgrades they wanted to
make. The biggie was a garage large enough to hold six
cars. They figured the units would bring a much higher
price with parking. Of course, they didn’t know
just how big a biggie could be. They also didn’t
know the building was on bedrock. Nine months after
the contractor started, he asked if they would mind
if he used just a little dynamite to perhaps speed up
the process. Dynamite? Dynamite placed under a 90-year-old
building worth two million dollars? With what I consider
to be excessive confidence in their contractor and weary
of the baby-steps the construction was taking, they
agreed. Neither Henry nor Ramon slept that night. I
know, because Henry called me at 4 a.m. in the middle
of a panic attack, the martinis having worn off. The
following morning between 10 a.m. and noon, three small
shakes occurred. Success. The boulders were dislodged,
and work progressed at a new clip. One full year passed
after groundbreaking, nevertheless, before the first
car rolled in. Just before this, they had a party with
a band. The contractor danced with his girlfriend, and
Henry danced with Ramon. All four faces registered not
so much happiness as immense relief.
November 7
When Sandy called me and said that his Oakland triplex
had just been exempted from rent control, my reaction
was, “What the hell are you smoking?” But,
no, it was true. Early in October, the Oakland City
Council actually listened to the plight of small property
owners and passed a motion to exempt owner-occupied
buildings of three units and under from rent control.
A bare majority of the panel actually got what San Francisco
Supervisors still don’t understand. What convinced
them? The answer: many buyers of small buildings have
no other way to become homeowners. Speaking for myself,
I could never have afforded to pay a mortgage on a single-family
home in San Francisco. Only with the income that rents
provide, can I afford to own in the city of my birth.
Another powerful argument was that these buildings were
the homes of the owner, not solely income property.
That’s what most of us find so unfair—to
have almost no control over tenants living in the building
that is also our own home. When I’m told I can’t
evict a troublesome tenant without hiring a lawyer and
going before a board, or that I can’t take back
a storage area or a parking space when I need it, I
wonder just what ownership means in San Francisco?
November 16
I finally rented Apt. #3 (whew). The new tenants are
a referral from the newlyweds living on the same floor.
I guess I didn’t want to break up the old gang.
Anyhow, the guy had super references. He’s also
a UCSF employee for the past six years, and he teaches
Sunday school (would I make that up?). The downside
was that he had been living with his parents (which
always has a whiff of bankruptcy or rehab when someone’s
over 30). But that wasn’t the case. His fault
is that he’s a fuss-budget. He’s only been
in the unit a week, and I’ve been up there to
remove a door and replace an off-white smoke detector
with a white one. Then he said that the fresh paint
in the dining room was “cracking” along
the baseboard. My immediate response to the last complaint
was mea culpa. In my new job as painter (hard times
have forced it on me), did I inadvertently use flat
over semi-gloss? I went up with a can of primer and
brushes only to find that he was referring to the painted-over
wallpaper. Paint over wallpaper? That’s long off
my radar. When a flat is a hundred years old, there’s
going to be some painted-over wallpaper on its rap sheet.
This suburban guy had just never seen it before.
November 22
I let the two girls in #6 have a rabbit, because they
promised me it would never leave its cage. (More important,
they implied that if I banned the bunny, they would
move out.) Then I had second thoughts. “If it’s
in a cage all the time, how will the poor thing learn
to hippity-hop?” I asked. “No problemo,”
they said. “We have a friend with a fenced back
yard in Bernal, and he says we can let him exercise
there.” Point made. Rabbit moves in. Days pass.
I begin to see clumps of dried grass on the stairs.
As more grass accumulates, I recognize it as straw.
Then one day there is a small, wired bale of hay at
the foot of the front steps, evidently delivered by,
well, a farmer? I suddenly get the picture. The rabbit
cage is lined in straw to absorb the you-know-what.
Much straw is needed for this task. I speak to the girls
and they say that, yes they need more straw these days
because they found the rabbit was lonely, and the only
humane action was to purchase another one. I asked to
see them and was taken into their apartment where I
saw a cage the size of a bathtub. There was hay all
over the carpet. One rabbit was in the cage and was
stuffing himself, while the other was snuggled in the
lap of the roommate. What could I do? I had approved
a rabbit. Supervisor Gonzalez would defend the rabbit’s
right for a domestic partner. A beautiful 6-room flat
now looks like a 4-H project. Hey, but at least the
place is rented, right?
December 2
Maggie and I went down to city hall again a few weeks
ago for another hearing on this so-called “Housing
Element,” which is an update of the city’s
long-term housing policy, part of the city’s General
Plan. It advocates increasing density (read massive
rezoning) along transit corridors without the usual
one-to-one parking requirement. This might sound good
to you if you’re a bottom-line property owner
living outside the city. But for those of us who shop
in the neighborhoods and take public transit, more people
and more cars sound like a recipe from the devil’s
cookbook, especially when there are vast tracks of under-utilized
land in the southeast section of town. If this new philosophy
of city planning were based on developing old transit
corridors (the new urbanization), wouldn’t it
be simpler to run some new bus routes though an underserved
area and charge the cost to the developers? Well, after
four hours of testimony, zoning administrator Larry
Badger hadn’t moved a nanogram other than to say
he would add the words, “subject to input of neighbors.”
I say, save the ink.
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. A longtime rental property owner who reserves the right to remain anonymous on the grounds that her tenants might gang up on her writes Lily’s Diary. Comments, corrections or ideas are welcome at lilysdiary@aol.com. Copyright © 2003.