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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.
