December 18, 2002

Safety on hold
Residential hotel landlords blow off another deadline to install fire sprinklers.

By Michael Stoll

FOR MORE THAN a decade, a large fire has ripped through a residential hotel in San Francisco every year or so, sending panic-stricken residents – many elderly and infirm – fleeing for their lives.

This year is different. Now it's the hotel owners and operators who are in a stampede to meet a New Year's Eve deadline to install life-saving automatic sprinklers in every room.

At least two-thirds of the hotels would flunk a visit from the Department of Building Inspection. Some landlords have unsuccessfully lobbied for an extension to the August 2001 sprinkler ordinance, in order to avoid paying hefty city fines. And while landlords say they will get financially burned by the companies doing the installation, hotel tenants point out that they remain at risk, and they are keeping the pressure on. It's been slow going getting the hoteliers to comply with the law. Work plans have been submitted for just 98 of the 353 residential hotels subject to the sprinkler ordinance – something that should have been done months ago.

Landlords, who procrastinated, hoping the city would delay the deadline for the second time, face administrative costs and liability in court for up to $1,000 a day per building. City staff have already cited 31 hotels for ignoring the September deadline to file plans. But the Housing Inspection Services Division is bowing under the additional weight of the new regulations, at a time when it's also supposed to be checking to see if buildings are adequately heated. So in January, Rosemary Bosque, the city's chief housing inspector, will start a system of inspection triage, cracking down first on the biggest hotels without sprinklers.

When hotel owners and operators finally realized they wouldn't get yet another extension, they began inundating fire-safety companies with more work requests than the companies could handle. That has only exacerbated the delay, and doubtless will increase the fines. "What happens is that the building owners sit on it for a while and then cry hardship and ask for it to be repealed," said Jim Dalton, president of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, which tracks sprinkler laws around the country. "If they started when they should have, they would have been done by now." San Francisco's 17-month timeline was among the shortest nationwide of cities that have recently passed sprinkler laws, including New Orleans, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Louisville, Ky., because officials here say they felt a delay would mean more dislocations and possibly death in future hotel fires.

Sprinklers are becoming increasingly relied on as a first defense against fire because they are so effective – there has been no known multiple loss of life in any building in which the sprinkler system was working and designed properly, experts say. Still, landlords are prostrating themselves before San Francisco Fire Department officials, asking for an extension.

Many of the hotels were built early last century and have either outdated blueprints or none at all. Going back to the drawing board takes more time than the landlords have at this point. Sam Patel, the founder of San Francisco's Independent Hotel Owners and Operators Association, said sprinkler companies are gouging his members as they rush to comply with the law.

"We're paying two to three times what it should cost," said Patel, who also runs four hotels. Sprinkler companies deny taking advantage of the spike in demand for their services by boosting prices.

Patel estimated an average installation will set an owner back $70,000, plus the thousands of dollars in charges for plan approval and water hookups. "Half of the people just don't know what to do," he said. "They're leveraging their hotels or their personal assets, whatever they can to get this done."

Yet activists complain that even in the weak economy, the shortage of housing citywide has allowed residential hotel managers to charge between $500 and $600 a month for a room with no kitchen, a sink if you're lucky, and a communal toilet down the hall. Banks are reluctant to make loans on such properties, Patel said. Ten members have come to him seeking additional sources of quick cash. So it should come as no surprise that a few owners and managers are talking about passing the extra costs on to tenants by jacking up their rent. There is a small pot of money at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency earmarked to help hard-up private owners finance the rehabbing of their buildings, but it's targeted to redevelopment zones, such as the Sixth Street corridor. Discussion of opening up these funds for sprinkler retrofits has just begun, said Dariush Kayhan, director of housing and homelessness programs for the Department of Human Services.

In many ways, it's the thousands of low-income San Franciscans living in modest single-room-occupancy accommodations, not their landlords, who have the most to lose. Some tenants have become repeat refugees, escaping fires in their hotels two or three times. Large fires at 20 residential hotels have displaced as many as 2,000 people in the past 15 years.

Landlord Gerda Kircher blamed the city for slowing the process. She received erroneous notices of violation for two of her hotels that already are fully sprinklered. And at the 10 hotels where she's paid the contractor $3,000 to get started on the plans, the city won't approve them without seeing the final blueprints. If threatened with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, she said, she would have no choice but to evict all of her tenants from those 10 hotels and shut the buildings down until the sprinklers are installed. "I'm willing to do it," Kircher said.

What sparked this crisis? Naturally, everyone has someone else to blame. But most trace the confusion back to Sup. Gavin Newsom's sponsorship of, and then backtracking on, the August 2001 sprinkler ordinance.

The legislation was eminently well-meaning, speeding to passage at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on the heels of a fire that displaced nearly 100 people from the Raymond Hotel at Sixth and Howard Streets four months earlier. But the ordinance had so many holes in it that landlords assumed it would be amended, which it was. Even now, confusion about the requirements reigns. "It's very hard to figure out what areas of the hotel need sprinklers," said another Sam Patel (no relation) who runs the Winsor Hotel on Sixth Street and the Albert Hotel on Mission Street. "Attics? Stairways? Crawl spaces? Why do they need sprinklers in the shower? It's nonsense."

Above all, hotel owners had complained that the original June 30, 2002, deadline was insufficient. They asked for an extension to 2004. But Newsom also was tugged by activists who didn't want the deadline extended, arguing that a delay could kill hotel tenants. Three weeks after the initial deadline passed and the city began citing hotels, the board extended the deadline to December, a compromise that left both sides embittered. "We're not asking for much here," said the hotel association's Patel. "We're just asking for time."

Activists say the hotel owners have had enough time. Sam Dodge, a tenant organizer with the Central City SRO Collaborative, said the lack of action typifies the managers' general aversion to change. "Everyone's gotten their second and third chances already," he said. "I'd hate to be the last owner to do this, because the last person's going to get slammed."

Residential hotel rooms lost to fire in the past 15 years

Hotel Address Year Units closed

Hugo 214 Sixth St. 1987 150

Dudley 160 Sixth St. 1988 100

Hacienda 580 O'Farrell 1988 70

Holland 1411 Stockton 1989 55

Vincent 457 Turk 1990 100

Folsom 1082 Folsom 1993 47

St. George 395 Eddy 1995 36

Grand Southern 1941 Mission 1996 58

Delta 88 Sixth St. 1997 180

Star 2176 Mission 1997 53

Jerry 3032 16th St. 1998 20

Leland 1350 Polk 1998 90

Thor 2084 Mission 1998 50

Hartland 909 Geary 1999 150

Park 325 Sutter 1999 100

King 818 Valencia 1999 44

Kinney 410 Eddy 2000 52

Minna Lee 149 Sixth St. 2001 51

Raymond 1011 Howard 2001 57