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Although the task force surveyed only a small percentage of the city's landlords and service providers about their costs (including pest infestations, heavy cleanings, involvement of animal control, forgone rent, evictions, injuries, fires, and staff time), those who responded reported total costs of $1,166,105. When the task force extrapolated those numbers to represent the costs citywide, they came up with $6.43 million a year.
The two biggest financial burdens were unquestionably evictions and fires. One hoarding-related fire caused $500,000 in damage, according to the report. The task force found that an eviction typically costs a landlord more than $22,750, and that about 400 to 800 hoarders are evicted every year.
The report also emphasized "the incalculable human costs to the lives of individuals and families," referring to the fact that hoarders often feel ashamed of the way they live, isolate themselves, and have troubled relationships with family members. Plenty wind up on the streets.
Johnson Ojo, the lead inspector at the environmental health section of the Department of Public Health, says about 10 percent of hoarding-related complaints received by the department end in notices to vacate — which essentially means the property is condemned and its occupant must immediately move out.
That is the predicament Linda Harper now faces.
On Wednesday, March 11, Harper scoots into DPH Room 300 with her reading glasses perched on top of her head. Though she looks confident and ready to argue her case, she's up against some pretty damning evidence. It's been seven months since she was first ordered to clean up.
In this final hearing, DPH director Mitchell Katz may issue Harper a notice to vacate — or he may give her one last chance. He will certainly recognize that Harper is responsible for the landfill that room 721 has become, and stayed. But will he understand that she has her reasons?
"I haven't always been this way," Harper says. She has lived in the Columbia Hotel for more than seven years; it's the first place she can remember living in for more than six months without getting "itchy," a phenomenon she attributes to how often she moved as a child. But being in the same place for a long time meant that the things she brought home would accumulate.
Her first room in the hotel on the third floor eventually filled up, and then a pipe broke. To repair it, manager Scott Jordan-Michaels moved Harper to the seventh floor. Although she insists that she kept that room in good condition for a while, it eventually filled up, too. The problem intensified, she says, when the Columbia became a San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SF HOT) hotel, meaning the city paid for about 50 homeless people to move in while they searched for permanent homes.
Although nobody can back up her claims, Harper says the "sometime tenants" broke into her room, brought in drugs, and stole from her. Some people who became homeless again, including a man she identified as Worm, would sneak back into the hotel and sleep there, she says. She believes she was drugged and raped one night, and says the trauma exacerbated her agoraphobia. Harper locked herself in 721 for about six months, she remembers, too afraid to venture out.
Around New Year's Eve in 2007, she woke up to find someone standing in her room. She was so rattled that she moved in with a friend on the fourth floor, and hasn't lived in 721 since. Meanwhile, the friend's room has required a heavy cleaning from In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), a statewide publicly funded program.
Although Harper has a fairly obvious hoarding problem, and a clean-up will be a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, it's the only thing that can prevent her from being booted from the Columbia. For the last seven months, Harper has been eligible for a heavy cleaning from IHSS, but the byzantine system of social service agencies combined with Harper's protectiveness over her belongings has meant it never happened.
Now, she fears, it may be too late. "They're going to put me out," Harper says, and starts to cry. When she notices how many people are walking into the hearing room, she gets the urge to flee. "I can't do it," she says. "I don't want to go through this. I need to leave."
Calming Harper down isn't easy, but eventually she decides to tough it out. She doesn't want to go back on the streets, where she spent a year and a half after she lost Social Security during a bout with breast cancer. The streets are no place for a woman with a herniated lower disk, spinal stenosis, epilepsy, and sarcoidosis, among other ailments.
"411 O'Farrell Street. Room 721," director Katz finally calls out.
Harper takes a deep breath.
If rat infestations and Dr. Pepper bottles filled with urine sound bad, ask any hoarder about the Collyers. Everybody knows this cautionary tale of two brothers whose hoarding actually killed them.
It begins in 1929, with the death of wealthy gynecologist Dr. Herman Collyer, whose sons, Homer and Langley, moved into his New York City brownstone. For two decades, the eccentric, unemployed brothers inexplicably locked themselves away, jobless and obsessively accumulating newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and junk. In 1947, after a neighbor reported a stench, they were found inside, dead and barricaded in by 100 tons of debris. Homer had died of a heart attack. Langley, who had gotten caught in one of his own booby traps, was found weeks later, his corpse partly decomposed and eaten by rats. The sensational tale became a Broadway theater production, The Collyer Brothers at Home, and piqued plenty of public interest.
People are mystified by the lifestyle choices of hoarders, but mental-health researchers are convinced that hoarding isn't a choice at all. They say there is something different in the brains of hoarders.
