Hope in the hood

City officials get serious about slum conditions in Oakdale

By A.C. Thompson

› acthompson@hushmail.com

A new multiagency task force paid a visit to the Oakdale public housing development Feb. 27, moving from apartment to apartment, interviewing residents and cataloging myriad housing, fire, and health code violations.

Orchestrated by San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, the nine-member team is made up of staffers from the town's police, fire, public health, and building-inspection departments, as well as lawyers from the city attorney's code enforcement unit.

The formation of the task force was inspired by numerous complaints from Oakdale tenants, as well as by stories in this newspaper.

The task force discovered "egregious and pervasive" code violations, deputy city attorney Neli Palma said. Common problems, Palma told the Guardian, include mold, "major leaks," "many, many broken windows, most of which were boarded up rather than repaired," and "dilapidated stairs and railings."

Located on Oakdale Avenue in the Bayview district, the complex is the property of the San Francisco Housing Authority, which is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the 133 beige and blue apartments. Home largely to poor and working-class African American and Samoan families, the decaying complex was erected in 1953.

Housing authority executive director Gregg Fortner was offended by the creation of the task force. "The City Attorney's Office has obviously been investigating this for months and didn't say anything to us until 10 days ago," Fortner told us. "We're working for the same city. You'd think they'd notify us. They even met with HUD" — the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that funds the Housing Authority — "before they met with us."

Housing Authority spokesperson Michael Roetzer insisted the agency is doing the best it can to repair and renovate Oakdale and said the agency last year made 73,000 maintenance calls citywide. "Clearly, we address maintenance issues when they're brought to our attention," Roetzer said, adding that emergency calls are handled within 24 hours and routine problems are dealt with "within 30 days."

But the tenants we spoke to don't buy that. One was Camille Coats, 60, who had a dark, gaping hole, perhaps nine inches across, in her bathroom. Apparently there was a plumbing glitch on the next floor up. "Whenever they take a shower upstairs, the water comes down on the floor," she explained.

And how long has she been trying to get the hole plugged? "About five years. It's been going on a long time."

There were plenty of other signs of neglect — like the gutters on the next building over, which were brimming with weeds, or the mailboxes, which had been busted for at least four months, or the mound of feces that bubbled up from a pipe in the ground at the northeast end of the development, the last the product of a sewage system that's been slowly collapsing for years.

In the view of Yvonne Mere, a deputy city attorney, many of the problems "seemed to stem from deferred maintenance. These are not things that happen overnight."

Some things in Oakdale have improved in recent months. Several apartments have been renovated, and as the task force made its way through the development, carpenters were toiling in at least two apartments.

Still, at this point, it doesn't seem like a lot of people want to live in the complex — dozens f apartments are boarded up, and some have been for at least a decade. In Joanne Abernathy's apartment row, for example, half the places are empty: Out of 10 units, only 5 are occupied. "Why are all these places vacant when so many people need a home?" asked Abernathy, a member of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), a community group active in the neighborhood.

Two doors down from her, black scorch marks darkened the outside of the building. A few weeks back, a squatter had set fire to the place.

At the Housing Authority, Fortner suggested his agency's lawyers would be seeing the new task force in court.

The task force seemed ready for some head-butting. "Federal and state law clearly states that they must comply with local housing codes," Mere said. "I know the housing authority believes that to be novel." *