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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.
