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"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.
