Randy Shaw makes a covert plea for help in this SPUR article today
Even worse, during the 1980s the neighborhood’s single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels were transformed into city-funded transient housing, driving out long-term residents and affirming the area’s status as a home for the downtrodden.
What Randy Shaw fails to mention is that the neighborhood SRO hotels are still being transformed into city funded transient housing in 2011, and that Randy Shaw himself, through Tenderloin Housing Clinic, is the largest landlord of this city funded transient housing. In other words, Randy Shaw is admitting that it’s ‘even worse’ because of his own actions, and that he himself has driven out long term residents, while refusing to take responsibility for it. In fact, Randy Shaw has now displaced over 1500 long term residents through his own exclusive master lease contracts, which doesn’t even include the other non profits involved
This is a 2008 interview with Art Bruzzone and Randy Shaw, with Randy Shaw basically admitting, or bragging, that he was instrumental in turning Tenderloin SRO’s into permanent supportive/transient housing
Also not mentioned, and even more important, is that none of the supportive housing contractors are able to cope with housing many of the people that the city itself pays to house. None of the contractors for supportive housing to the city are licensed to care for mentally unstable people and are no different than any other property management company. The ‘supportive housing’ part of the contract only refers to outside companies that are licensed in mental health and drug and alcohol issues. The only thing that the supportive housing contractors can do, is refer clients to outside licensed companies, like hospitals, on a voluntary basis, unless that person is an immediate threat
Because all of the supportive housing contractors are not specially licensed and no different than any other property management group, they are still beholden to the exact same laws as any other property management group, except that they house people that are often a nuisance to neighbors
The result of this is large scale evictions for many years, for all manner of nuisance
All of these hundreds (thousands now) of people are now back on the street, in the Tenderloin and Mid Market area, likely still causing nuisance, which is also likely costing more than if the city funded licensed homes in the first place, with greater care and control over it’s mentally challenged and drug addicted populace. Randy Shaw has, in effect contributed to the destabilization of an entire neighborhood in San Francisco
this also includes Care not Cash hotels, and yet another more recent example of the same problem, that none of the supportive housing companies in San Francisco are equipped to handle . The only real difference between the Feinstein vouchers of the 80’s and the Randy Shaw style of today with SRO ‘transient housing’ is extended for many people by only a few months
the filing is Tenderloin Housing Clinic, v Lyon at 66 Geary, a Care not Cash hotel. The attorney is Paul Hogarth, the main eviction attorney for Tenderloin Housing Clinic, who just wrote a tribute to, of all things, eviction defense
