By Michael Stoll

Must all good things come to an end?

That question buzzed in the air at Café International in the Lower Haight early one recent Saturday morning, as co-owner Zahra Valverde and a few loyal (and heavily caffeinated) customers plotted their next move to keep the joint from folding because of oppressive rent increases.

A young woman named Margaret dropped off a dossier on the leasing agent, Edward Jong, promising to investigate his business dealings and former tenants. Another neighbor, Ursula Young, has spread the "save Café International" message far and wide over the Internet, proffering the unsubstantiated theory that a corporate chain like Starbucks lurks behind the landlord's tactics.

"This does not seem like an appropriate time to be raising the rent," said a sleepy-looking Peter Washburn, a 31-year-old computer programmer who lives around the corner and is helping to rally friends to save the 15-year-old café, which he calls the neighborhood hub. "It just seems really bizarre, to say the least."

Bizarre, maybe, but it appears to be happening throughout the Lower Haight, despite the presence of vacant storefronts up and down the strip, and despite the apparent logic of the market, which suggests rents should be coming down during a stagnant economy.

But in the last few weeks, several businesses have been uprooted after their leases were up and their landlords demanded rent increases. Botana, a burrito place that was long a fixture on Haight Street, closed down when faced with the prospect of higher rent. Its owners are trying to find a new space on the block. Naked Eye News and Video, which had been in its storefront for at least 11 years, closed down after struggling to pay a rent that jumped to $3,000 a month from $1,700 – though in early May it managed to reopen in a lower-profile basement location a block away.

"It's outrageous," Naked Eye owner Steven Chack said. "How can people pay these rents? Especially since they're talking about deflation now."

Young, a 29-year-old art-school lab tech who has lived at Haight and Fillmore for seven years, is convinced the landlords aren't committing financial suicide by kicking popular and stable businesses out on the sidewalk with nothing to replace them. She thinks chain stores, which have faced opposition moving into nearby neighborhoods and have made few incursions into this forgotten stretch of Haight Street, see it as unconquered territory.

For the most part the Lower Haight is filled with the smallest of small businesses: bars, restaurants, hair salons, record stores. "There is something family about it," Young said. But a few chains have shown up, such as Burger Joint and Pasta Pomodoro, which shut down and was replaced by an upscale wine bar called RNM. Corporate businesses, she said, threaten a vibrant neighborhood with a transformation into "cookie-cutter America."

Café International is anything but. Valverde is an immigrant from Eritrea, and the clientele of the café, which she co-owns with her husband, Robert, reflects a funky cultural mélange. Open-mic nights feature neighborhood poets – "sometimes good, sometimes depressing," Washburn admits – and musicians, from reggae to bluegrass. A masterly 20-foot-wide mural in the back patio, painted in 1994 by local artist Kemit Amenophis, portrays a fantasy dance attended by a United Nations of revelers in iridescent, culturally appropriate garb.

In other words, the place has personality. That's one reason Valverde is so upset at the prospect of leaving. "For the last year and a half we've been struggling," Valverde confessed over a cappuccino. Her rent has gone from $4,500 a month two years ago to $6,000 under her new lease, which she is contesting by claiming she had a verbal agreement to stay at $5,300 a month until 2006, a claim Jong disputes. "I said, come on man, this is a business where we sell $1 coffees," she told us. "At Union Square they charge the same amount of money [for rent]. This is ridiculous."

Jong cast the situation differently. He said he was actually ready to sign a lease with Valverde for $5,300 a month, a $200 discount from what she was already paying. But she balked on signing the lease, and Jong found another customer willing to pay $5,500, making Valverde fear losing the space. Only then, he said, did Valverde offer to sign at $6,000, and he lost his commission on the new tenant.

Now, he said, Valverde's customers, who are worried about her being forced out of business, are harassing and threatening him with e-mails and phone calls – some even late at night – to force him to renegotiate the rent level.

"She cannot put a knife on the landlord's neck, ask to lease the space at the price she wants," Jong told us. "You want the lease or you don't want the lease. You can have your deposit back; you can just walk away. Why make this trouble? We really regret leasing to her now. We would rather have less money and peace of mind. Her friends are bothering us."

Such strained relations are not uncommon. But just as often, businesses close on their own, even without rent increases. A few neighbors blame the changes not on demographics but on the removal of the north spur of the Central Freeway, which is making a whole swath around Hayes Valley seem less blighted and therefore more desirable.

Current neighborhood changes seem insignificant compared with past transformations: the influx of African American refugees from the Fillmore as it was demolished in the 1960s, their slow displacement in the 1980s by white young bohemians looking for cheap rent, and the hip dot-commer invasion in the late 1990s.

Joe Tobie, 74, has seen a lot of changes in the Lower Haight. "When I moved here 40 years ago, this block was 95 percent black; now it's 95 percent white," he said with obvious hyperbole.