Page 2 of 5
Then there were Shoko Spurrier and her son, Charles. They loaded their apartment at 536 Leavenworth to the ceilings with clutter; fumes from rotting garbage eventually set off a smoke detector. Because the Spurriers had a second apartment, Singer opted for a fast eviction. After the Spurriers moved out, a cleaning crew discovered a dead cat behind the door.
These extreme situations certainly don't represent the majority of hoarders, who often quietly accumulate items, slowly rendering their homes unsafe and unlivable. Some are perfectionists and keep their collections in tidy piles, while others — paralyzed by decisions about what to do with their stuff — wind up living in squalor. Some hoarders have difficulty moving around their homes and are forced to create alternative (and perilous) routes. Those can involve tunnels through piled junk, or entrances and exits involving ladders and windows. Almost all have difficulty throwing things away, and they always have their reasons. Maybe somebody would need that yogurt container later. Maybe the junk mail was a really nice color.
Some of the saddest cases involve animal hoarding, or the accumulation of animals for which a hoarder cannot give proper care. Singer saw one of those last year. Her name was Carol Fyfe.
Fyfe, who, according to the phone book still lives at 100 Broderick, first rented apartment 206 in 1975. According to a lawsuit, she eventually brought in so many dogs that she could no longer clean up after them. The smell of feces wafted down the hallway, and late last year her landlord hired Singer, though the eviction was never completed.
After several knocks on Fyfe's door on a recent Thursday, it became clear she wasn't there, but apparently a neighbor — who was laughing manically inside an apartment across the hall — was. Perhaps he knew Fyfe?
Another knock brought Phillip House to his door. The 46-year-old with wild salt-and-pepper curls and a Cheshire cat smile welcomed company into his apartment, which happened to be brimming with videotapes, books, shoes, and clunky wooden shelving units.
Another hoarder. What were the odds?
House turned sideways and crept past an enormous shelf parked in the middle of his narrow entryway, then offered a seat in the kitchen, where a solitary chair was surrounded by stacks of videos, a shoe reigning over each stack. He said he'd never heard of hoarding. "This is very comfortable," he said of his apartment. "It's like a dream to have a place like this."
When asked whether he has a hard time finding things or getting around, House shook his head no, then turned the conversation to What's Up, his self-published book of poetry, short stories, and songs, and his unsuccessful runs for supervisor in 2004 and mayor in 2007. His slogan: "Let Mr. House put your financial house in order by allowing me to be mayor of San Francisco." He handed over a card that declares him president and CEO of World Financial Services, an unlisted real estate, tax, and poetry business.
Fyfe, it turns out, was the only person in the building who would talk to House, and though she never let him inside her apartment, he remembers her having a lot of animals. A whole lot. But something bad had happened to Fyfe, and House didn't want to talk about it. Some digging later revealed that on November 22 — a little more than a week before she would have turned 59 — a depressed Fyfe took her own life.
According to police documents, Fyfe had spoken with a friend on Nov. 20 about her worries, including large medical bills and the threat of eviction, which would mean she'd have to give up her dogs. "Investigation at the scene revealed the subject lying prone on the wooden floor of her unkempt studio apartment, which appeared consistent with her lifestyle," the medical examiner's report stated. "Evidence of a possible self-destructive act was found in the form of a four-page note reminiscing and expressing regret for past events, as well as saying goodbye to the addressee and expressing a lack of desire to live."
The report mentioned nothing about the fate of the hoarded dogs.
The Mental Health Association (MHA), a city agency most active in dealing with hoarders, has been acutely aware of San Francisco's hoarding problem since the mid-'90s, when mentally ill program participants told them about it.
Bill Hirsh, the agency's director at the time, had heard so many stories about people filling their homes with garbage and getting evicted that he decided in 1996 to start the first Hoarding and Cluttering Conference. The inaugural conference lasted just a few hours and attracted 100 people. An article about the conference in the San Francisco Chronicle got picked up by newspapers internationally, and soon Hirsh was getting calls from people affected by hoarding all over the world.
"The more we looked, the more pervasive we found the issue was," he said. "It was frustrating to see how little was being done. There still is markedly little being done."
The conference grew each year as more hoarders came out of the woodwork, and in 2007 current MHA director Belinda Lyons started San Francisco's Institute on Compulsive Hoarding and Cluttering. In addition to the annual conference, the institute funds a peer-run weekly support group, a treatment group, trainings for service providers, and consulting services for local governments and nonprofits. Along with the Department of Aging and Adult Services, the MHA cochaired the citywide task force on hoarding. The task force consisted of 28 city leaders, service providers, lawyers, mental health professionals, and hoarders, who have spent the past 19 months surveying for statistics and costs to figure out how to improve hoarders' lives.
That's more than any other city has done, according to Christiana Bratiotis, a doctoral student in social work at Boston University who is writing a dissertation on hoarding task forces. "San Francisco is really a gold standard," she said, comparing the city to 34 others that have formed hoarding task forces. Unlike in San Francisco, many of the cities have not gathered all the stakeholders, she said, and only San Francisco has attempted to estimate the costs of hoarding.
