So they decided to build Gary a house next to their family residence on 10th Avenue, in the hills above the Inner Sunset.
"We have a very close family," Sandra Chan says of her children. "They love my cooking. They love me for the way I raised them up. They want to live next door. They say they'd like me to ring the doorbell, anytime. They'd like me to raise their kids."
You couldn't blame the Chan kids for being devoted to their parents. Consider the parental track record: The three Chan children -- Gary, 24; Michael, 21; and Lisa, 16 -- all have excelled, academically and otherwise. All made their way into, and then thrived at, Lowell High School, the city's only secondary school with an academics-based admissions policy (and even though Asian students were required to score higher to gain admission than other Lowell applicants). The Chan kids also shone on the baseball diamond and the tennis court; they sped to victory in track and field. Their athletic trophies crowd the mantel above the Chan fireplace. All three children also play the family's grand piano; Michael is actually studying the instrument in college.
The Chans thought they had everything in place so their first-born son could live near them after he finished college.
In July 1994, the San Francisco Planning Commission gave the Chans the principal approval they needed to build Gary a home. The commission granted the Chans' application to divide their land, legally speaking. Instead of one large lot containing one house, it now was two smaller lots, one containing the old Chan homestead, and the other containing the site for Gary's new home.
Gaining approval for such a subdivision of residential property is no simple matter in San Francisco, the promised land of land-planners and neighborhood activists. In this particular case, the Chans needed to obtain a waiver from standard residential zoning rules -- that is, a conditional use permit -- because the newly created lot was believed to be slightly smaller than would ordinarily be allowed in this neighborhood. (Actually, the new lot was wrongly surveyed and did not need the waiver; but the bad survey was discovered only recently.)
So notices were sent. Hearings were held. And the Planning Commission gave the Chans their conditional use permit and the subdivision of their lot. In 1995, an architect, Gary Gee, designed the three-bedroom house the Chans wanted to build just to the south of their home at 2150 10th Ave.
And on April 9, 1996, exactly one year ago, the city Department of Building Inspection blessed the architect's drawings, granting the Chans a "site permit" for Gary's new home.
Everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan.
But the Chans did not yet realize that they had gotten new next-door neighbors: Jerry Roberts, then the city editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and his wife, a business executive named Linda Kiefer.
For Sandra and Anthony Chan, life was about to get very complicated, very, very unpleasant, and very, very, very expensive.
Being a member of the Forest Hill Association means something. For one thing, it means you own a house in Forest Hill, the hillside and hilltop neighborhood of the well-to-do, well-connected, and, ostensibly, the well-mannered of San Francisco. Forest Hill counts city commissioners and the chief of police among its residents. And Forest Hill offers its denizens side benefits, including the Forest Hill clubhouse, a setting appropriate to the most upscale of social gatherings. The clubhouse was a creation of Bernard Maybeck, the California architect who designed San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, but who is best remembered for making warm, intimate dwellings settings out of redwood and shingle. Forest Hill residents can use their Maybeck-designed clubhouse for up to eight hours, if they pay $1,200 in rent.
Jerry Roberts and Linda Kiefer paid a steep price for their Forest Hill dream house, a big gray shingled beauty that lords over the hill where 10th and Mendosa avenues meet. They bought the home in December 1995, using profits from the sale of a Potrero Hill house they'd owned for 21 years and $644,000 they borrowed from the Bank of America.
The dream cost a total of $920,000.
Once they owned the house, Roberts and Kiefer became members of the Forest Hill Association. Although they live next door to the Roberts-Kiefer duo, Sandra and Anthony Chan are not in the association, and, unless they move, never will be. The property line between the Chan and Roberts lots, it so happens, is the northwest boundary of Forest Hill.
Roberts and Kiefer worked damn hard to get to Forest Hill. Kiefer runs sales and marketing operations for a family lubricants-supply business her grandfather started on the East Coast, and also directs an employee benefits consulting firm she founded while she was home after the birth of their third daughter.
Jerry worked so hard it nearly killed him.
He joined the Chronicle as a reporter in 1976. The Chron assigned Roberts to cover City Hall. A series of promotions landed him in the paper's state capital bureau in Sacramento in 1978. He was back in San Francisco, as editor of governmental-affairs coverage, in 1982, then became political editor in 1987. At the Republican presidential convention of 1992 -- the night Vice President Dan Quayle's wife, Marilyn, addressed the delegates -- Roberts fell seriously ill. A blood clot had formed in his leg. He was hospitalized upon his return to San Francisco.
After a yearlong recuperative leave, during which he wrote a fawning biography of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Never Let Them See You Cry, Roberts re-entered the Chron hierarchy as editorial page editor in 1994. He was named city editor in 1995, and eventually the paper's managing editor, its top spot.
As a made man in journalistic circles, Jerry Roberts has encountered more than his share of influential activists, politicians, and political operatives. Through him, his wife has come to know many of the same political actors. Both Roberts and Kiefer are quite well-briefed on the vicious, petty games the politically connected of San Francisco play on a day-to-day basis.
In April of last year, for some reason, the managing editor of San Francisco's largest newspaper and his businesswoman wife began to play just those kinds of games against a couple who owned restaurants and had no idea how much power a newspaper editor can wield, even when he wields it indirectly.
Linda Kiefer can remember the very day she began the neighborhood jihad she would lead on behalf of her family: April 15, 1996. She remembers the day because on that day she and her three daughters were returning from a road trip they had taken over an extended Easter vacation.
Roberts, who had not accompanied his family, asked Kiefer whether she had seen the public notice posted on the telephone pole outside the Chans' family home. Kiefer had not, she says, but examined it the very next morning. The notice said a site permit for a new house had been issued, and the deadline for appealing the decision to grant the permit was just a week away.
Anthony and Sandra Chan heard from Kiefer that night. "Linda called to say, 'We'd like to see the plans,' " Roberts recalls. "I'm not sure I even told them I worked for the paper."
That weekend, Roberts and Kiefer met with the Chans, but left unsatisfied that they had any idea how the new house might affect them. A call to the Chans' architect also failed to assuage the couple's angst.
On April 24 of last year, Roberts went to work at the newspaper as usual. Kiefer took a day off to lodge an appeal of the site permit for the new Chan home. The appeal was filed in her and Roberts' names, presumably because both are official owners of the home they live in.
"I just wanted to have the option [of opposing the project], until I got my questions answered -- to see whether I agreed or not," Kiefer says.
She got on the telephone and started soliciting advice. Marcia Smolens, perhaps the city's most formidable lobbyist, was more than happy to offer insight, including the names on a short list of the best and most connected land-use lawyers in town. The first name on the list was Alice Barkley, who had the virtue of being Chinese-American in a matter that dealt with a Chinese-American family and in a city where you can never take racial politics for granted.
When Kiefer called, however, she discovered that Barkley had represented the Chans since they first applied for the subdivision.
But the list's second name, John Sanger, also fit the bill. Sanger wasn't exactly a political slouch either. Roberts had known Sanger since his pre-Chronicle days, when he reported for the Bay Guardian. Back then, Sanger had worked at the city Planning Department.
But a contest between families with high-caliber counsel could hardly guarantee a Kiefer-Roberts victory. After all, the Chans had a head start. The time period in which to challenge the Chans' division of their property was long lapsed. Roberts and Kiefer could appeal the site permit for the new Chan home. But even if they got the site permit overturned, the Chans could get another, based on a new or altered architectural design. Contesting the site permit could never change this reality: The Chans had a legal entitlement to build some kind of house on their land.
And that was something Kiefer and Roberts just would not abide.
So, Kiefer started walking the neighborhood after work and weekends, banging on doors to drum up support for opposition to a second house on the Chan property.
The property at the center of Kiefer's near obsession is triangle shaped; the Kiefer-Roberts lot backs up to one side of the triangle. Looked at from street level, the Chan land is a wooded hilltop, protected from 10th Avenue foot traffic by a run of young cypress trees, which the Chans planted themselves. More mature trees stand farther back.
Kiefer says her organizing efforts started this way: "I would say, 'Do you know about this?' "
By "this," Kiefer meant the division of the Chan property into two lots, one of which would contain a new home. But the conversation inevitably would turn to the cypress trees on the Chan lot, which Kiefer had grown fond of. The Chan plan called for cutting some of the trees down.
Invariably, Kiefer says, the neighbors would reply: "No. Shouldn't I have gotten notice?"
Well, yes, in fact, the neighbors should have gotten notice back in 1994, when the public hearing was scheduled on the permit that allowed the Chans to subdivide their land. And, according to the city's zoning administrator, Robert Passmore, the neighbors had received notice, or ought to have, because records show notices were mailed to owners of property within 300 feet of the Chan residence, as required by law.
But Kiefer had set the hook, and was ready to reel in protesting neighbors. After all, the character of the neighborhood, which called for trees and big houses with room to breathe, was at stake. Never mind that several of the neighbors Kiefer had enlisted in the battle lived on a street that had neither large lots nor stately trees.
A steering committee was organized. A networking phone tree was established. Kiefer began publishing a newsletter to keep everybody informed.
It was a movement.
From the start, Jerry Roberts acknowledges, his wife's attempts to stop the Chans from building a house on their own property made him uneasy. Speaking inside his tiny glass office at one end of the Chronicle newsroom, Roberts tries to explain how he attempted to keep his hands clean.
"When it first came to our attention, I knew it could be a strain professionally and politically down the road," he says.
At the same time, his wife would remind him, Roberts was a citizen, as well as a journalist. And they did have one amazingly large mortgage payment to make. Anything that reduced the value of their Forest Hill home was important to both of them.
And, of course, they lived in San Francisco, where one person's lawful use of his or her own property is, after all, everybody else's business.
But Roberts insists he made sure he "scrupulously" avoided working directly in the anti-Chan campaign. One day after work, he recalls, he returned home to find the neighbors meeting with various aides to various members of the Board of Supervisors; one representative from the Mayor's Office was there, too.
Roberts says he turned around and walked out the door.
Jerry Roberts was a 500-pound political gorilla, but, as Roberts tells the tale, he decided to restrain himself, to climb inside a glass cage. He would be seen. He might watch. But he wasn't getting directly involved.
As Linda Kiefer was whipping her neighborhood into a froth over the proposed Chan home, she decided to seek a little ethnic cover and some advice on dealing with Wayne Hu, the president of the Board of Permit Appeals, which would hear the appeal of the home's site permit that she and Roberts had filed.
So Kiefer picked up the phone and called Rose Pak.
The spokeswoman for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Pak has raised money for and hung around mayors since the election of Art Agnos in 1987. And before that, she worked on and off as a reporter for Jerry Roberts' newspaper, the Chronicle. Nowadays, nary a story involving Chinese-American affairs appears in the Chron without a quote from Rose Pak.
When Pak heard from Kiefer, she was more than happy to give hints on working Wayne Hu. And, she went a step further. Hell, Pak just gave Hu a call.
"I told him they should really take a look at this," Pak said in a telephone interview. She said she had gone to see the property herself and was surprised the Chans succeeded in getting their subdivision, given the trees and grade of the land. "We have such tight regulations."
Wayne Hu listened.
"What are you going to do?" Hu says Pak asked him. "She said I should inspect two or three times."
And what did Hu do?
"I drove out there," he says.
Anthony Chan's father, Bill Chan, published a small, red, paperback book about his family's heritage in 1989. It is titled The Wet Wah Story. The 51-page missive traces his extended family's flight from Japanese invaders and Chinese communist collectives; their immigration to San Francisco, by way of Chile; and finally their success in opening several Mandarin restaurants, all named after Anthony Chan's mother, Yet Wah.
Anthony and Sandra Chan own the Yet Wah on Clement, where Sandra works as hostess.
The Chans could add several chapters to the Yet Wah story, just by recounting what Wayne Hu and the Board of Permit Appeals has put them through.
While Rose Pak worked the bureaucracy and Linda Kiefer riled the neighborhood, the Kiefer-Roberts lawyer, John Sanger, dug into the city's planning code, coming up with a raft of arguments as to why the Chan site permit should be revoked. All of those arguments, however, stem from one basic contention: The subdivided lot is either too small, in legal terms, for the house the Chans want to build on it, or the house is too big for the subdivided lot.
By the time the Board of Permit Appeals finally got around to scheduling a public hearing on the Kiefer-Roberts appeal in December, the Chans' architect, Gary Gee, had already agreed to trim the size of the house from 2,000 square feet to 1,700.
But after listening to Kiefer and the Forest Hill neighborhood taste police -- with Jerry Roberts sitting silently in the hearing room -- the board decided to ask the Chans for more concessions. Board members said the family had to lower the back of the proposed house, preserve two trees that were to be cut down, and return for yet another hearing after the first of the year.
The board's new demands cost the Chans a bedroom, and knocked the size of the new home down to 1,400 square feet.
Then, came an act of God.
Early in January, after weeks of rain, a 50-yard-wide section of a Forest Hill hilltop sank some 18 inches, forcing a precautionary evacuation of about a dozen residents, including San Francisco Police Chief Fred Lau. A pending natural disaster involving the police chief proved irresistible to the local daily newspapers.
"Land Sliding Near Forest Hill/Several Families Leave Homes in S.F. Neighborhood" is how the Chron played the story in its local news section, one of the first to come out under newly installed Managing Editor Jerry Roberts.
When the hilltop, at Edgehill Way, didn't keep sliding, nature's wrath, and the news story, fizzled. But the disaster that never materialized still had its uses.
Even though the droopy dirt of Edgehill Way was on the other side of the Forest Hill subdivision. Even though that site had a history of instability related to a rock quarry operation that did not come anywhere near the Chan property. Even though what happened had absolutely nothing to do with the Chans' land, the Board of Permit Appeals -- egged on by the noisy neighbors -- reached into the Chans' wallet one more time.
Before the Chans would get final approval of the site permit, the board ruled, they had to commission a geotechnical and shoring study -- and come back in February.
According to the Chans' architect, the board's ridiculous abundance of caution and the various compromises and conditions have multiplied the cost of planning the project many times. Gee says his bill tripled to $45,000, and the meter is still running.
Alice Barkley, the Chans' legal counsel, billed the family $15,000 for her work responding at the board.
And there are a host of related costs that have brought the tab for planning the $375,000 home to more than $60,000.
"It's like a nightmare, and I don't know when I am going to wake up," Sandra Chan says. "I would not have started. I'd buy someplace else, because it's going to be cheaper."
"Normal people compromise," she continues from a seat on her living room couch, which has a view across the top of the Presidio eucalyptus groves to the Golden Gate Bridge. "We the ones who live here 20 years. You just move in, and we compromise."
Growing agitated, she adds: "We are still neighbors. But they are stepping all over us."
One of the advantages Roberts and Kiefer had over the Chans was their ability to get prominent people to write letters. Some of the letters can only be described as sanctimonious. In extremis.
Letters such as the one oncologist William M. Wara wrote to the city's Planning Commission and the Board of Permit Appeals:
"The particular proposed home will completely change the nature of the neighborhood. ... I urge you to oppose this proposed development as entirely inconsistent with the laws and values of San Francisco."
Adding a touch of hubris to his piety, Wara, who lives across the street from Roberts and Kiefer and is a professor and department vice chairman at the University of California at San Francisco, sent his letter on medical school letterhead. He copied the Honorable Willie L. Brown Jr., mayor, just for good measure.
"I think it adds credibility that I live and work in San Francisco," Wara said in an interview.
But Wara has a curious sense of credibility.
During an open house to unveil their dramatically scaled-down, 1,400-square-foot home design, Wara quizzed the Chans about how their eldest son, Gary, could ever really raise a family in such a small space. He apparently suspected some nefarious plot, something that involved renting out the new home.
"I asked about that," he said, pointedly.
The Chans responded that the long-range plan is for the parents to swap their larger house for their son's smaller house, as he has children and has a need for more space.
The Chans found this a sensible solution to the space problem.
But Wara found it unbelievable.
"I did not find that a credible answer," he said in a recent interview that revealed the Forest Hill method of calling someone a liar.
Early this year, San Francisco Supervisor Sue Bierman took a drive up to 10th and Mendosa avenues. Bierman is the Board of Supervisors' resident slow-growth champion and was probably predisposed to see things through the eyes of Linda Kiefer, who had complained to the supervisor.
Bierman didn't disappoint.
"The supervisor went out there and thought it [the lot] looked awful small," says June Gutfleisch, Bierman's City Hall aide. "And, there was a wonderful stand of trees."
Supervisor Bierman was so distressed about the Chans' home-building plans that she did something stunningly callous on Feb. 10 of this year.
After Sandra and Anthony Chan had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to comply with the entire panoply of San Francisco land use regulations, playing by the rules in every way in an attempt to build a home for their son, Sue Bierman decided to introduce an ordinance that, if adopted, would accomplish just one thing: It would repeal the July 1994 subdivision of the Chans' lot, and make construction of a home for Gary Chan impossible.
Forever.
The absurdity of Bierman's act was matched only by the tortured nature of the legislation itself.
The city did not have an ordinance that would allow a residential lot subdivision that had been lawfully granted to be repealed.
So, at the request of Kiefer, Roberts, Wara, and company, Bierman asked the city attorney to draft such a law, together with a resolution stating that it was the specific intent of the Board of Supervisors to employ it to merge the Chans' two lots back into one.
And how does Bierman explain this extraordinary action?
She doesn't. She leaves such explanation to her aide, Gutfleisch.
"Supervisor Bierman has taken a leadership position on subdivisions and neighborhood preservation," Gutfleisch says. "And, is adamantly opposed to losing trees."
But Bierman is a politician, too. Her actions could just as fairly be interpreted in a less charitable light.
Back in the spring of 1996, Sue Bierman was gearing up to run for re-election. She also was eyeing the presidency of the Board of Supervisors. The post would go to the top vote-getter in the field for five board seats.
Heading into the contest for the top spot, Bierman knew her chief rival would be Supervisor Barbara Kaufman, who is a darling of the real estate and downtown business community.
On May 30, 1996, mere weeks after he was hired by Roberts and Kiefer, attorney John Sanger dropped $500, the legal contribution limit, into Bierman's campaign coffers, according to disclosure statements.
Sanger says he has known Bierman for 25 years and backed her out of sympathy for her policies, not because he expected favors in return.
But it remains absolutely undeniable that Bierman had performed an extraordinary favor for a political contributor and his clients.
And one of those clients has absolutely no compunction about admitting that she took advantage of every ounce of political power she possessed.
"We actually took it to her," Kiefer says, explaining how Bierman came to introduce the legislation. "We [Sanger and I] both contacted her."
Kiefer makes no apology for it. "Here is this little neighborhood with this little neighborhood issue," she says, seated in front of a large, homemade map on which she has used felt markers of varied color to delineate each household and how it stands on the Chans' plans. "The only way to address it was through the Board of Supervisors."
And so the objective was finally clear.
No compromise.
No house for the Chans.
You would think a political journalist, and a political journalist's wife, would see the value of compromise. For there might come a day when the tables turn, or you require dispensation yourself.
In addition to attorney Alice Barkley and architect Gary Gee, the Chans eventually got mad enough to add a new professional to their team: high-priced campaign strategist and lobbyist John Whitehurst.
Bierman's legislation, wrongheaded as it was, posed a threat. The Chans had spent so much money already; what was a little more to drive a stake through Bierman's play?
After Bierman introduced the bill to reverse the Chan subdivision, Board of Supervisors President Barbara Kaufman, a Whitehurst client, sent it to a three-member legislative committee. The committee is chaired by another Whitehurst client, Supervisor Mable Teng. With Supervisor Leland Yee, who is sympathetic to the Chans' plight, also on the committee, Bierman, Sanger, Roberts, and Kiefer will be lucky to get the bill a committee hearing, much less to hustle it past the entire board.
Meanwhile, as Gee arranged the geotechnical and shoring study, a new survey of the Chan property turned up a new wrinkle in the Chan-Roberts-Kiefer brouhaha. It now appears that the Chans' original lot was bigger than first thought. And that had one purely academic consequence, and one that is anything but academic at this stage of the game.
If, as the survey appears to show, the lot for Gary Chan's home is in fact greater than 2,500 square feet in total area, then the Chans should have obtained their subdivision faster, without the need for a conditional use permit. That is the academic consequence of the new sur-vey.
The new survey found something else, though, that is not academic at all. It is a finding that amuses the Chans. It is a finding that Jerry Roberts and Linda Kiefer consider irksome.
It turns out that, according to the new survey, the fence marking the rear of Roberts and Kiefer's back yard is actually standing on the Chans' property. This discovery gives the Chans some leverage in the dispute. But all they really want, at this point, is the final approval to begin building Gary his new home.
As the lunch crush at Yet Wah on Clement whirls about her, Sandra Chan coaxes an old Chinese man to his seat. Placing a hand on the back of his chair, she scoots him forward to his table, as if tucking him into bed.
A consummate hostess, Chan spends most every afternoon and evening greeting her restaurant guests, overseeing her waitstaff, and ringing up the checks. Because she runs the restaurant, Chan is often working when other people are socializing, or getting to know the neighbors. Or organizing a petty political campaign.
On this Monday afternoon late last month, as Sandra Chan contended with the lunch crowd at Yet Wah, Leland Yee, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, picked up a fax at his office.
Linda Kiefer was calling. She wanted to meet, to talk about her neighborhood, and a project involving some people named Chan.
