Mayor’s advisor says like a drumbeat: These units are ‘private,’ our power is limited
by MARINA NEWMAN August 23, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
Read Mission Local often?
Help grow our newsroom, joining the hundreds of San Franciscans who support us by giving below.
At the top of “The Hill,” Bayview’s steep enclave of largely low-income, subsidized apartments overlooking the western half of San Francisco, residents driving by or sitting on stoops on an uncharacteristically warm Tuesday afternoon got a bit of a surprise: There was Mayor Daniel Lurie, clambering up the steep slope, followed by a band of his security, staff, organizers and residents going unit to unit.
Lurie knocked on the door of each resident who opened their home to him, along with a security guard, two mayoral staffers and reporters. Clad in his characteristic tailored suit, Lurie entered each unit for about five minutes, nodding as tenants described black mold, asbestos, stoves that spontaneously combusted and water leaks that eroded the ceiling.
He shook residents’ hands, assured them he would make some calls and jokingly scoffed at a young tenant’s Los Angeles Dodgers hat. “We gotta talk about this,” said Lurie, taking on a more serious, mayoral tone. “What’s going on with the hat?”
Want the latest on the Mission and San Francisco? Sign up for our free daily newsletter below.Sign up
But it’s not clear how much Lurie can do. Though his presence puts property developers and management in the hot seat, his advisor repeated the word “private” throughout the visit: City Hall’s power over these privately-owned complexes is limited, his staff told tenants.
After the visits Tuesday, Lurie and his staff did contact property management, and it worked: The pressure of receiving a call directly from the mayor’s office led property managers to visit some apartments that same afternoon. The managers are “making progress” on clearing out black mold and other issues, said mayoral staff.
Still, it wasn’t an entirely convivial trip. “The Hill” is a complex of some 600 units of garden-style apartments, smack in the middle of Bayview. It houses tenants receiving federal subsidies through project based vouchers, most of whom are Black and deep in poverty. Three years ago, Mission Local documented “leaks, roaches, and rats” and an unresponsive property manager.
A kitchen in Plaza East Apartments on July 29, 2025. Photo by Marina Newman.
Black mold covers a tenant’s bathroom at Plaza East on July 29, 2025. Photo by Marina Newman.
Black mold on the door of a resident’s unit at Plaza East on July 29, 2025. Photo by Marina Newman.
Tenants say little has changed. As resident after resident crowded around the mayor, one Bayview local asked if Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, understood the disenfranchisement of Black people. “I do,” Lurie responded simply, saying nothing more.
During the nearly 90-minute trip on Tuesday afternoon, Lurie stood in several black mold-covered bathrooms, crowded with tenants into a lone working elevator, and inspected vents spewing smoke and ash. After visiting three apartments on the Hill, he hopped back into his Rivian and drove a mile south to Alice Grifith, a former public housing complex near Candlestick Park.
It was his second time this month making a similar visit after tenants living in low-income housing complexes across the city rallied at City Hall and marched into the mayor’s office, demanding he come by their apartments and see how they live.
He followed through: In the past month, Lurie has walked through six low-income housing complexes in the Western Addition and Bayview in an effort to show put-upon tenants that City Hall is listening.
Most subsidized housing complexes are privatized
Most of the apartments the mayor visited this month are privately owned. Even Alice Griffith in Bayview, which used to be owned and operated by the San Francisco Housing Authority, is now owned by McCormack Baron Salazar, a private firm based in St. Louis, following its redevelopment in 2017 through the HOPE-SF program.
Mission Local has been documenting conditions in San Francisco’s subsidized housing complexes. Read our coverage below.
Bayview’s Alice Griffith housing was built in 2017. It’s already falling apart. Why?
Tenants of Fillmore low-income housing, owned by Black church, plead for help
Fires, squatting, scandal: S.F.’s last public housing gets new management
The program aims to revitalize dilapidated public housing projects into modernized, mixed-income developments by tapping private investors and transferring ownership into private hands.
The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development requires the owners to submit Annual Monitoring Reports, and must approve the hiring of a new property manager, but it cannot hire or fire property management itself. Only the owner of the building can do that.
In conversations during the tour, Lurie and Ernest Jones, who serves as the mayor’s office’s community ambassador, frequently deliberated what was in the scope of their power.
Standing in a low-income apartment with no heat, Lurie asked Jones what could be done. Jones told Lurie the building was “private.”
Earlier in the month, during Lurie’s visit to subsidized apartments in the Western Addition, the mayor told Mission Local the city “is not able to do much” to wield their power at apartments that are privately owned.
Anita Blackwell, a resident at Shoreview Apartments in Bayview, on Tuesday ushered Lurie and his crew into her home. It was ready for the army of visitors — Blackwell had cleaned her apartment in anticipation of her guests, lit scented candles, and R&B music softly hummed on her TV.
But Blackwell quickly pointed Lurie to her main point of concern: a heater vent above her living room spotted with ash. Lurie quietly nodded, squinting his eyes as he inspected the heater. Blackwell told him she hasn’t had heat in two months: She’s afraid to turn her unit on. Every time she does, smoke blows in, her fire alarm goes off and her home is covered in a blanket of soot.
Blackwell is one of thousands of federally subsidized low-income tenants in apartments where the city has little oversight. Residents at the Shoreview Apartments and other complexes like Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass Haynes Gardens in Fillmore and La Salle Apartments in Bayview get federal subsidies, but the apartments are privately owned and managed.
Still, tenants want City Hall’s help.
Blackwell’s property manager, Related California, promised someone would come on July 3, she said. No one did, she claims.
Jones, turning to Lurie, told him Blackwell’s building was “private.” It is an issue for the Department of Public Health or the Department of Building Inspection if there is a code violation.
Lurie nodded and assured Blackwell they would make some calls. The mayor’s office said that property management will conduct a “full duct and chimney cleaning” next week.
With little to no oversight, what can the city do?
As the group made their way out of Shoreview and onto La Salle Apartments, Jones told Dennis Williams Jr., executive director of a local contracting nonprofit, the Fillmore Community Development Corporation and a resident at Plaza East Apartments in the Western Addition, that there was little the mayor’s office could do in apartments like Shoreview, La Salle and Thomas Paine.
As Williams and Jones trudged down the hill and back up a narrow flight of wooden stairs again, Williams asked that Jones do something about the stairs. Lurie had taken off his suit jacket in the late August heat.
“Sheesh,” exclaimed Williams. “Is this wheelchair accessible?”
“It’s private,” Jones replied. To change anything, he said, “you would have to convince [the owner] to sell.”
“Oh, no,” Williams chuckled. “They aren’t going to do that.”
When asked what the city can do if tenants complain of maintenance and mismanagement, Anne Stanley, a representative from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said the office connects tenants back to their property managers, the “correct contacts” for any issues.
If there is a code violation, tenants can report it to the Department of Building Inspection.
And though Lurie’s calls to property management helped, you can’t always rely on the mayor coming around. Tenants have described ongoing issues such as broken-down elevators, garage doors stuck open to the public, problems with security, plumbing issues with sewage and tap water that comes out brown. For these, tenants say, multiple attempts to contact property management have not made a difference.
Damaged ceilings, sheetrock over windows, and mold infested apartments
Tenants’ issues are extreme.
A unit at the La Salle Apartments in Bayview was deemed “uninhabitable” by the Department of Building Inspection when they last visited, says Dequinda Johnson, who lives in the unit. Johnson, who lives there with her three young children, one of whom has asthma, said Tuesday she will move in with family at the end of the month.
It has been months of living with black mold that she says has affected her and her children’s health. The mayor’s office said the black mold had already “been cleaned and removed.”
Two other units at La Salle are missing windows: When two tenants moved back into their apartments after renovations, sheetrock, painted purple, was hung up over the window openings. One tenant, who is mentally disabled, says it has been like that for weeks — they have had to keep the front door open for ventilation.
Another mother at Alice Griffith fastened a plastic sheet over her kitchen when a leak upstairs caused the ceiling to cave in. She says the leak had been an issue for two years. Other leaks at Alice Griffith have caused the ceiling to cave in as well, according to tenants, and video from April showed a piece of plaster falling on a senior resident’s head.
For these units, the mayor’s office said new windows will be “prioritized.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie crowds with staff, organizers, and residents, into the one working elevator in a building at Alice Griffith, a former public housing complex in Bayview. Photo by Marina Newman.
Sheetrock painted purple covers the window of a resident at La Salle Apartments in Bayview. Photo by Marina Newman.
Mayor Lurie, residents, and staff walk down “The Hill” on August 19, 2025. Photo by Marina Newman.
A plastic tarp covers where a ceiling has caved in over a tenant’s kitchen at Alice Griffith on August 19, 2025. Photo by Marina Newman.
There are places where the city can, theoretically, be more active. The San Francisco Housing Authority is still a part of the ownership structure at two properties currently considered public housing, Plaza East Apartments and North Beach Place.
There, Lurie told Mission Local, “We’re able to do more.”
In August, Plaza East’s prior property manager was replaced and, since then, the Housing Authority has told Mission Local it will assume direct oversight over its performance — a change from before.
But at the 40 or so properties that have been or will be privatized, property management is the purview of the owner, a private developer sometimes headquartered out of state.
The number of public housing complexes turned private will only grow.
After Mission Local reported on squatting and deadly fires at Potrero Terrace and Annex, a former public housing complex currently undergoing reconstruction, property manager Eugene Burger was replaced by Bell Properties.
But after the property is reconstructed, the city will no longer have that power.
“People take it as if we’re always nagging,” said a tenant at Alice Griffith, who wished to remain anonymous. “But we’re screaming for help.”
LATEST NEWS
David Crook, Mission District artist and astrologer, dies at 69
Besides closing the Great Highway, what has Joel Engardio done?
S.F. is taking lots of misdemeanor cases to trial. But not winning them.
Support the Mission Local team
We’re a small, independent, nonprofit newsroom that works hard to bring you news you can’t get elsewhere.
In 2025, we have a lofty goal: 5,000 donors by the end of the year — more than double the number we had last year. We are 20 percent of the way there: Donate today and help us reach our goal!
MARINA NEWMAN
Marina is reporting from Bayview-Hunters Point and wherever housing stories may take her. She is originally from San Jose and is proudly Bay Area born, raised, and educated at UC Berkeley with no plans to leave the best city in the world anytime soon. She enjoys hiking on the weekends, photography, and exploring San Francisco’s many eccentric bookstores.More by Marina Newman
