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Rent, for which everyone seemed to have a different payment arrangement, would now be due on the first of every month, and must be paid by check or money order. There would be a $25 late fee after three days and a notice to vacate served on the fourth day. These strict, if hardly extraordinary, payment rules seemed like astonishingly harsh dictates to residents accustomed to the Gotham's easygoing ways.
Cameras were installed throughout the building, which was by now accessed only by security code. The front desk, which had long been more a geographic point of reference for the lobby than a functional entity, was staffed 24 hours a day. Guests were told to sign in when they entered the building.
Two of the older tenants in the building were -- out of the blue -- visited by social workers. The social workers asked the older tenants a lot of questions:
Did they know what day it was? Did they know who the president of the United States was?
In fact, yes they did. They also knew what the questions meant -- a little official checking, just to make sure they were not so senile that they would have to leave Vantaggio for an institution -- and so did everyone else. Word of these events spread through the building like fire through a dry field. Neighbors were incensed. They saw that the seniors had help with cleaning and whatever they might need to stay in the building.
Before long, however, the tenants' organization went underground. Residents were increasingly suspicious of one another; confidential tenant strategy seemed to filter back to management. One woman reportedly announced in the midst of a meeting that she was tired of being accused of spying on her neighbors. It wasn't long before many residents had become convinced that every action, every notice, every letter at the Gotham was part of a large plot aimed at emptying the building of holdover tenants.
Panic grew as the Itos began posting three-day notices -- demands that residents pay overdue rent or leave -- on doors around the building. In fact, many of the residents of the Gotham did owe money for back rent. But it was unclear how many of them were behind, and by how much. Some had paid in cash and claimed not to have receipts. This was the way they'd always done business. And there had not been an eviction at the Gotham in more than five years.
"I was pretty lenient," says the hotel's former manager, Karla Keller. "That didn't mean that anybody who didn't pay could stay. But if I knew that someone was trying in good faith to bring in money, or they were waiting for a check that was coming, I would work with them."
Court records show that within two months of taking over the building, the Itos filed eviction proceedings against 13 residents. Some of these involved rent from six or eight months back; other eviction cases involved rent payments that were only two weeks late.
This being San Francisco, within days of the court filings residents were receiv-ing fliers from lawyers eager to defend against the evictions. Some residents took them up on it, or turned to tenant ser-vice organizations.
But most of the tenants on notice settled with the Itos and left, usually in exchange for forgiveness of back rent, a common arrangement in property management disputes.
Gotham dwellers had been paying a variety of rents, depending on when they moved in. But the average was less than $500 a month, a pittance in today's market, even for a single room. Were they to move to similar digs almost anywhere else in the city, the rent would double.
Nonetheless, by July, more than half of the 90 or so tenants residing at the Gotham in January had left, one way or another.
"We cannot afford to provide free rent," says Ito. "We took over the building in February. The evictions were simply due to their negligence."
But there are instances where this did not seem to be true.
Vivian Ferguson has called her room at the former Gotham Hotel home for more than a year now. She chose the Gotham because it was convenient to the downtown temporary jobs she took when she moved here from the Midwest to start a new life. Besides, the $600-a-month rent was all she and her two children could afford.
But in February, the Gotham became a new place, run by new managers, and she went to the office of Vantaggio Suites to ask about the timing of her rent payments. Previously, rent had been due on the 15th of the month; the new managers wanted their money on the 1st.
The answer was not anything close to what Ferguson had anticipated. Assistant Manager Brett Schlottman told Ferguson that her rent had been a month behind since December, and that she must pay up. Ferguson insists that she has receipts and canceled checks that show otherwise, but before she was able to produce them, there was a three-day notice to pay or move out posted on her door.
On March 6, Vantaggio Suites notified Ferguson that she owed $600 for the month ending March 15. On March 11, five days later, Ferguson received another notice saying she owed $755 for the same period of time.
A third notice arrived March 17, saying that Ferguson owed $1,305 (this figure included the $755 through March 15, plus another month's rent). On March 21, yet another three-day notice was posted on Ferguson's door. This one again showed the total as $1,305, but had no specific amounts attached to any dates.
"After the notice, I quit communicating with them because if I paid the $600 rent, they would say that I owed for the previous month," she says. "I just figured we'd go to court and sort it out."
