As one of San Francisco's most affluent neighborhoods, the Marina doesn't have a ghetto. It just has the Bridge Motel, a tilted, reeking monument to neglect whose proprietors are being sued by the city for their egregious pattern of crime and safety code violations.
Knock at the door to room 35 of the residential motel on Lombard Street, and you'll find Anita Fritz.
"Who?" she grunts, and it comes off like a command, not a question. Only voices she recognizes will hear the bolt slide.
It was a perilous journey up the stairs to Fritz' room.
Behind the motel's scuffed front door lurks a stench that her neighbor once described as that of a charnel house, one where human remains are stored — except this is a noxious cocktail from decaying rat carcasses and human waste. It emanates from the ripped, uneven carpet of the ground floor entryway and wafts to the top of a winding staircase, where a desolate common area sags beneath a skylight that has been dripping rain into the motel since the Loma Prieta earthquake.
On the north side of the room, two hallways roll back and connect in a loop on which 53 motel rooms are situated. Many of them have been full of trash and crawling with bedbugs, rats, mice, and cockroaches. Their human occupants are sometimes fresh out of prison, mentally ill, or on drugs. One female tenant used to smear her feces on the walls and toilet seats.
Fritz' living space, however, is very tidy. Very funky. Very purple. "I'm a
purple person," she says. "My eye goes right to purple." Stylish and compact with a shock of frizzy, black-pepper-colored hair, she perches on her futon and readies a menthol cigarette to inflame her bronchitis. From an earlier trip to the dentist, she's dressed up in a flowered purple skirt, a lacy white tank top, and purple-tinted glasses. Fritz — who is missing several of her teeth — was turned away because of her cough.
About 10 years ago, her brain became swollen, she says, and as a result she had to relearn basic motor skills like walking and talking. Her spatial abilities, balance, and hand-eye coordination were never quite the same. She has trouble focusing on what she's doing with her hands, and sometimes ends up puffing unlit cigarettes.
Fritz' intellect — sharpened during a two-decade career in business administration — was not impaired. This was a bit of good fortune for her and many of the other tenants at the Bridge. She is the primary plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the motel, a status through which she can help win a $1.35 million settlement for herself and her fellow tenants. The lawsuit, filed in late 2006, exposed how the motel proprietors allowed their property to fall apart and blight the neighborhood.
Over the last decade, while Marina residents groused, city code inspectors bombarded the motel owners with citations, and police became regulars responding to calls over violence and drug use. But nothing seemed to change. In the midst of all the turmoil, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department actually began placing ex-offenders at the Bridge and paying their rent with city money.
You wouldn't expect Fritz — a down-and-out woman living in deplorable conditions — to be more effective at implementing health and safety policies than an army of bureaucrats. But in a city known for coddling slumlords, it took her and a class-action lawsuit to do the trick.
For some people, the Bridge Motel was supposed to be an escape. They wanted to get out of the Tenderloin, or a family member's spare room, or some equally uncomfortable situation. They wanted to save money and start over.
That was the plan for Jon Evans, a mild-mannered and bleary-eyed 43-year-old. Seven years ago, he decided to stop floating around and staying with relatives in San Francisco's downtown. He wanted to try living on his own, he says, and his family in Oakland agreed to pay his rent at the Bridge.
Upon moving in, Evans says he was offered a job cleaning the motel. He took it, he says, because he had nothing better to do and he wanted to make some cash. For his services, which he estimates that he performed every day for three to four hours, he says he was paid just $5 a day. (Citing the pending litigation, the managers of the building refused to comment for this story.)
Evans has lived in five different rooms at the Bridge; his current one has cracks in the wall and a sink without knobs. Sitting on a bare mattress, he laments that the living arrangement didn't live up to his expectations. "I thought it was a nice place and everything at first," he said. "But as time went on, I seen that it wasn't."
In the '60s, Don Stewart, a photographer, followed the Grateful Dead around and smoked pot. He eventually landed in the Haight and worked as a carpenter for a while before he and his partner moved to an SRO in the Mission to save some money. "It wasn't dirty and filthy like this," he said, indicating the Bridge.
The men later moved into the Bridge in hopes of upgrading their lifestyle and saving more money, but they were disappointed to find that many of their neighbors had "bags and bags of headwork" — meaning they were mentally unstable.
Before Stewart and his partner could move out, they both developed cancer. The partner died, and Stewart didn't much feel like going anywhere. Now he takes photographs around San Francisco every day, and sells the enlarged portraits in front of the Ferry Building. He keeps his modest room in immaculate condition, but sometimes the bedbugs still get in. "I've had some battles with them you wouldn't believe," he says, picking up a can of Good Night bug spray. "Finally I got this stuff, and it works like a champ. ... It seeps in and rots them from the inside. Sometimes it melts them right into the mattress, and you've got a big bloody mess on your sleeping gear. You can't ever get it out."
Stewart has changed his mattress four times in the last three months.
Anita Fritz comes from a different background entirely. She once held down a corner office at Deutsch, Shea, and Evans — a well-respected advertising firm — right down the hall from CEO and president Charles Gould. She worked her way up to become the human resources director. "She wore a lot of hats," Gould fondly remembers. "She was so good and so smart, and had such great people skills."
Fritz absolutely loved her job, and hoped to work there for the rest of her life, but the company wasn't doing so well. One day, Gould pulled her aside. "Anita," she remembers him saying, "get out there and get yourself another job. Fuck Deutsch, Shea, and Evans." (Gould says that although he doesn't remember using profanity, the gist of the quote is accurate.)
After the company was sold and Fritz lost her job, something inside her snapped. She worked for brief stints at other jobs she hated, but nothing measured up in her mind. One day on a lunch break, she drove back to the ad firm's office, parked, and took the elevator. When she found the door to her old world locked, she sank to the floor and cried. "I lost it," she says.
That was the beginning of a dark period in Fritz' life. She broke up with a lover of eight years, her mother died, and one of her sisters was murdered. She fell into a lifestyle she would rather not discuss, but will say that it ended with the traumatic brain injury and the necessity of rehabilitation.
While in rehab, Fritz met Kenneth Baldwin, an unruly and independent soul whom she immediately adored. "I fell in love," she says. "I fell madly in love." Before she moved in with her new boyfriend, Fritz had never even heard of an SRO.
San Francisco has plenty of nicknames, which most people are familiar with. Fog City. Baghdad by the Bay. The City of Love. And of course, the undying and controversial Frisco. But there's also a lesser-known, century-old nickname that says quite a bit about San Francisco's history: the Hotel City.
That's because back in the early part of the 20th century, a majority of San Francisco's population lived in hotels now known as single-room occupancies (SROs). Start a conversation about SROs with the average San Franciscan today, and you may have to back up and explain what one is: a relatively cheap hotel with single rooms and communal bathrooms that rents by the week or month, where those unable to afford an apartment must live. Unless, of course, they prefer the streets.
Although hundreds of San Francisco's SROs have been demolished or have burned down over the past several decades, about 30,000 people — about 5 percent of the population — continue to reside in SROs. In large part, that's because of the efforts of the city's leftist politicians and activists, who have fought to preserve places for the poor — even if those places aren't always ideal.
The problem is far from simple, particularly because the geographical and economic challenges of San Francisco limit other options. There's not a lot of space in this seven-square-mile city for new housing of any kind, let alone affordable housing. Although one solution might have been to build up rather than out, San Francisco places a high value on its unobstructed views.
And so the SRO lives on, with conditions ranging from decent to downright inhumane, depending on the management. The city — particularly in tight budgetary times — often has no resources to diligently enforce health and safety laws. Slumlords are well aware of this sad fact, and are often known to perform maintenance on their properties only when forced to do so.
"It's a game of chicken that some people play with the city," said Eileen Shields, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health. "They push it to the limit."
The results of such conditions can be devastating.
When Fritz and Baldwin first moved into room 35 at the Bridge Motel in 2002, they were relatively satisfied with the place. At that time, they remember, a woman they knew as Julie and her husband, Ali, were managing the building. According to property records, the Bridge was owned by the Vyomesh Patel living trust, which had purchased it in 2001 from other Patel family members. In fact, many of the city's SROs are owned by people with the surname Patel, a Hindi word for "innkeeper."
Back then, Fritz remembers, the motel was cleaned regularly and the residents were peaceable, for the most part. The front and back doors were secure. Although there were sometimes issues with the power cutting out when too many people used appliances at once, she didn't complain. She had a relatively safe and clean room to be with her man, and that was enough.
About two years later, there was a regime change, and Julie's brothers, Nasir and Mohammed Shaikh, took over as management. That's when the conditions began to slip, Fritz says. In a deposition, her neighbor, Michael Kassel, said, "They cut enough corners to make a new street."
Under the Shaikhs' laissez-faire management style, any tenant with a monthly check from the government was welcomed, Anita claims. The front and back doors were constantly broken open. Fritz, Stewart, and Evans say they were afraid of people who came into the motel from the outside, camped out in the bathrooms, and discarded drug needles in the hallways.
Worse than the human intruders were the cockroaches.
"They were crawling in bed with me," Fritz says. "They were in my refrigerator. They were in the microwave. They took over this room." Nasir Shaikh advised her to set off more roach bombs, but they didn't work, and she was concerned about releasing chemicals in such a small room.
Eventually, it got so bad that Fritz couldn't sleep because she was afraid bugs would crawl on her body. She began taking photographs of the problems in the motel, and placed the first of many calls to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
In the winter of 2006, Fritz' boyfriend ran into an old friend from the Baldwin House Hotel, where the couple had previously lived. The friend asked whether Fritz and Baldwin were in on the class-action suit against that SRO. It was the first Fritz had heard of it, but she contacted Jay Koslofsky, a lawyer handling the case, and signed up.
He eventually asked Fritz where she lived now. Did she have anything she wanted to share about it? A shiny new class-action lawsuit was born.
When Fritz started to recruit others to be named as plaintiffs, she didn't have much luck. "They felt I was promoting a situation where these folks were going to lose their housing if I didn't shut up and just leave well enough alone," she said. "That's why I couldn't get people on my side."
Fritz' neighbor, Kassel, had been at the Bridge for more than 20 years. She says his rent-controlled space cost him just $200 a month, and he didn't want to risk losing it. Although he eventually decided he did want to be part of the suit and gave a lengthy and sometimes poetic deposition, he died last year from a methadone overdose.
Across the hall, a resident named Jeff Antunez — who Kassel claimed was working for the Shaikh brothers — told Fritz that he was not interested in being part of the class action. Antunez and two others, William Bell and Patrick McInerney, actually opted out of the lawsuit. "It was for personal reasons," Antunez said curtly, then shut his door.
Evans immediately liked the idea of being part of the suit, but says Mohammed Shaikh threatened him. "He advised me to tell my lawyer that I didn't want nothin' to do with the lawsuit," Evans said. But when Fritz and the lawyers told him he had every right to sue and could not be evicted for doing so, he reached for the pen. He says his participation in the lawsuit cost him his off-the-books cleaning job.
Stewart also says Mohammed Shaikh threatened him with eviction over the lawsuit. In response, Stewart says, he called the manager a "dirty motherfucker." (Again, the Bridge managers declined to comment.)
According to Fritz, several tenants refused to be seen talking to the lawyers inside the motel because they believed it was too dangerous. Instead, they arranged clandestine meetings at a diner across the street.
In the end, seven people agreed to be named in the lawsuit. Anita Fritz, Kenneth Baldwin, Greg Breeze, Sandra Hines, Jose Espinoza, Jon Evans, and Gregory Rausch.
Though she had been out of work for nearly a decade, Fritz used her communication skills and her knowledge of the law to persuade four of those people to participate.
The hardest part, she said, was making them understand something she innately knew from her time in the business world. "No matter how little they think they are, they actually have rights here," she said.
On Sept. 24, 2007, a team of experts including an entomologist, a general contractor, a structural engineer, and a plumbing contractor evaluated the conditions of the Bridge Motel. The results — made public as part of the class-action lawsuit — weren't pretty.
Structural engineer Bishwendu Paul observed cracked walls, sloping floors, and a shallow foundation, and ultimately concluded that the motel was "structurally deficient" and "seismically unsafe." Plumber Rick Peyton found natural gas meters that weren't vented, which could cause a fire or explosion, and an uncapped sewer connection that "will allow gas and odor from the city's sewer system to enter dwellings."
Bruce Powelson, a licensed general contractor, discovered trash, dead rats, and rat feces and urine in the entryway and basement. He called the exterior "decrepit," the floors "spongy," and the motel's eight 20-amp circuit breakers "insufficient to adequately power these hotel rooms" and therefore "likely to result in electrical blackouts."
Entomologist Arthur Slater determined that the motel had become a breeding ground for rats and cockroaches, which he found living and dead throughout the building. Pest control operator Juan Hernandez later told attorneys that when he first visited the motel in May 2004, he saw roaches everywhere and believed there had been no professional pest control for at least six months.
Hernandez came to the Bridge seven times, he said in a deposition, but discontinued his service in 2006 because the motel management stopped paying him (and apparently owed him $200). Six months later, after the Department of Public Health cited the building for infestations, the management called him again. Upon his return, Hernandez said he encountered one of the worst infestations of his career.
To understand how the situation had gotten so dire, lawyers took depositions from the building owners, management, and tenants. When they asked about cleaning responsibilities, everybody had a different answer.
Mohammed Shaikh testified that the cleaning was done by himself, Nasir Shaikh, and Thomas Regan. Nasir Shaikh told the attorneys that Regan alone was responsible for cleaning and fixing anything that was broken. Regan said that although he cleaned once in a while, he was never provided with cleaning supplies or maintenance training.
Nobody mentioned Evans, who claims he was hired to clean for $5 a day, but some residents told the attorneys that the Shaikhs often hired tenants to clean for little or no money. The Shaikhs' lawyer, Richard Stratton, said he doubts this is true, and that the tenants may be trying to get out of paying full rent.
The Shaikhs did, however, heap quite a bit of responsibility on Regan. Starting in 2006, according to Nasir Shaikh, Regan was in charge of keeping the receipt books, registration cards, daily logs, and tenant roster. But when attorneys questioned him about record-keeping, he told them he was illiterate. "I can't read or spell," he said. "I was born almost handicapped, okay?"
On Nov. 12, 2007, attorneys Koslofsky, Paul Wartelle, and Christina Schreiber filed an amended complaint on behalf of the seven named members of a class of about 150 people. Each had lived in the motel for more than 30 days during the period the lawsuit covered, which the judge ultimately determined as Dec. 4, 2003, to April 17, 2008.
Over that time, the attorneys estimated the management had collected approximately $1,170,000 in rent. They assumed the average monthly rent was $500 — which may be a low estimate — and multiplied that by 45 rooms occupied over four and a half years.
The attorneys set out to win each class member a 60 percent discount in rent in addition to statutory and punitive damages. Their complaint referred to the defendants — Vyomesh Patel, Sangita Patel, Vinodkumar Patel, Tarunkumar Patel, Nasir Shaikh, Mohammed Shaikh, and Hanif Shaikh — as "experienced landlords and real estate investors" who had continued renting the premises even as they knew of the structural problems, infestations, and other health and safety issues.
For their part, the Bridge's management and ownership — who would not comment directly for this article — blamed the tenants for the problems in the motel via their attorney, Stratton.
The tenants try to avoid paying rent, Stratton said, by vandalizing the property and then claiming they shouldn't have to pay full price. "The owners and the managers don't like the idea that these problems exist," he said. "They want to upgrade the quality of the tenants."
Certain responsibilities come with running an SRO, and one of those is choosing who can live in the building. If tenants are unruly, part of the problem may be that the management didn't do a great job screening them.
If the Shaikhs were so concerned about their tenant population, it's surprising that for nearly two and a half years, they accepted parolees and probationers with long rap sheets and violent pasts from the San Francisco Sheriff's Department.
The placements came through the No Violence Alliance (NoVA), a community violence prevention project that involved about a dozen nonprofits and city agencies tasked with helping repeat offenders "overcome previous violent behaviors" and "become productive members of society." The typical client was an African-American male who had been arrested numerous times, violated parole, and committed at least one violent offense.
As part of the re-entry process, many of the project's 290 clients were hooked up with housing of one kind or another, and between Jan. 2007 and April 2009, NoVA placed 59 people at the Bridge Motel. Some stayed just a few nights. Others stayed for months.
Those running the NoVA program believed there were benefits to using the Bridge.
"It was attractive as a placement because it was outside of the Tenderloin," said Eileen Hirst, spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Department. Although Hirst said she didn't know how many of the NoVA organizations had relationships with the Bridge, Stratton said he knew of just one person who directly placed clients at the motel. That was Richard Rendon, deputy director of the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Program.
Rendon said he visited the Bridge about once a month and paid his clients' rent — gleaned from the city's general fund — to Mohammed Shaikh. When asked whether he was aware of the class- action lawsuit, Rendon initially said he had heard about it from clients living at the motel, but had encouraged them to focus instead on rebuilding their lives.
Rendon never thought to check on the motel's reputation with the Department of Building Inspection or the Department of Public Health. If he had, he would have discovered what a recent city lawsuit referred to as an egregious pattern of code violations and inhumane conditions.
Rendon said he knew the motel bathrooms weren't great, but found out about the rest of the health and safety issues only this year. "The moment I did was the moment we started pulling folks out," he said. (After his first interview, Rendon called back and changed his story, claiming he learned about the class-action lawsuit only after all his clients had been moved out of the motel.)
In addition to the code violations and infestations during the time NoVA clients resided in the motel, there was a near-constant police presence, according to the city's lawsuit. Violence and drug use were commonplace, and occasionally somebody would report, say, a sex offender illegally living in the building. One time, the cops were called because a man was wildly swinging a golf club and throwing glass bottles out of a second-story window. Another time, a woman had thrown drug needles over a fence into a yard where children play.
According to San Francisco Police Officer Marty Lalor, the Sheriff's Department wasn't the only government organization placing vulnerable and potentially dangerous people at the Bridge. He said that until early this year, the state was sending parolees to live there. (Brian Clay, a deputy regional parole administrator, denies this, and said there have been no placements at the Bridge in the past two years.)
Regardless, the criminal activity in and around the Bridge seemingly had little to do with the NoVA program, Lalor said. (Since the clients were removed from the motel in April, arrests have continued, and the police have received more than 90 calls from the building.)
A larger concern is that NoVA residents may have been set up for failure. Although the department would not provide the names of clients, an evaluation of the program from July 2008 demonstrates that about a quarter of the 290 total NoVA clients dropped the program. Of the 59 placed at the Bridge Motel, a little more than half dropped out. Two Bridge clients were suspended from the program, and a third died.
In April, an informative meeting with the police department convinced the Sheriff's Department that the conditions at the Bridge weren't conducive to a fresh start for their clients. "We decided that it was not particularly well-managed," Hirst said.
On June 11, Judge John E. Munter ordered the Patels and the Shaikhs to cough up a total of $1.35 million, of which each named plaintiff would receive $17,500. After the lawyers took their fees, the rest of the money would be divided among the class.
Since the settlement, tenants admit that things around the Bridge Motel have been better. Each day, several people clean the hallways and bathrooms, and a building department inspector said that nearly all of the code violations have been corrected.
There is still a bedbug problem, the back door still has no lock, and the building itself is still tilted and still smells like a charnel house. The cops are still called out there almost daily. On the same day the city attorney's office filed an injunction against the Bridge, a female tenant was arrested for attempting to hijack a car from the gas station down the street.
That was on Oct. 26, nearly three years after Fritz and her neighbors took on the motel. In addition to finally taking action and filing the injunction, the city attorney's office sent out a self-congratulatory press release: "Herrera Sues Bridge Motel for 'Egregious Pattern of Crime, Safety Code Violations.'"
By that point, of course, the conditions were livable. Show up now, and it's as if the place had been decent all along.
Although Fritz, Stewart, and Evans say they are satisfied with the changes and continue to stay at the Bridge, they all have plans. Evans says that when he gets his final check, he's going to Oakland to live with his family again.
Stewart told Fritz on a recent night that he expects to buy himself a motor home to travel the country. "I'm working my way to get out of here on the first of the year," he said.
"Me too, darling. Me too," she answered.
Sometimes Fritz can't believe that after all these years, she's still living at the motel, but she has her reasons. At first, she stayed because her man was here. After they split up and she got involved in the lawsuit, she began to feel a renewed sense of purpose and obligation to the people around her. The feeling, she says, is not so different from the passion she felt for her old job at the ad agency.
Fritz hopes that her work at the Bridge Motel will have a lasting effect, and that the management will continue to take care of the building.
