Activists Charge Wrong Doing At San Francisco Non-profit

San Francisco, March 20-At a noon press conference today at Mission and 10th streets, activists charged long time San Francisco non-profit Conard House with a number of serious allegation of wrong doing.

The following is from a press release handed out at the conference:
“The Conard Co-operative Housing Program which is a non-profit was set up to help disabled people in San Francisco is now involved in illegal evictions.
They have moved to evict disabled tenants without a proper investigation and also have sought to intimidate tenants who also work for the organization.”

Present at the news conference were labor activist Steve Zeltzer of United Workers for Action, and community activist Tony Robles of Poor News Network.

Conard House began in 1960 to work with mentally challenged people who were being dumped out of shutting down mental hospitals across California, as a federal non profit corporation. Over the years, it developed independent housing programs for mentally challenged people. As the homeless population grew, it incorporated some of them into the population it cared for.

Perhaps most notoriously, in 2002, it contracted with the city in then mayor Gavin Newsom’s homeless eleimination policy, Care Not Cash, to provide 725 housing units to single homeless people. Under this program, the cash went to the likes of Conard. The failure of this policy is obvious in the sight of so many still homeless all over are city.

Conard also joined with those overstating the numbers of those mentally challenged amongst our homeless population, thus also undercutting the need for affordable housing, the root cause of the problem for so many.

Conard still operates what it calls a Supportive Housing Program. According to Steve Zeltzer, this is going on in one residential hotel in the Tenderloin and another in the Castro. On its website, Conard house says it “owns, leases or manages 35 residential properties.”

Some of these residents work at Conard’s headquarters, and some of these workers are members of SEIU 1020, which also represents city workers. And it is from these folks who complaints of harassment and illegal eviction attempts come, according to Zeltzer. “They’re threatened with eviction, injured, intimidated, in a very vulnerable position,” he told me.

Today’s press conference also addressed the issues of government collusion and privtization as they relate to the Conard House situation. Again, from the press release: “The failure of public agencies to properly supervise these government funded housing operations is also a serious issue. The manager of Conard House Mark K. Hile has also failed to provide information on the website since 2010 of funding of this organization. More and more public funds of this operation instead of going to the tenants and workers is going to the lawyers who are harassing whistleblowers. The ACLU is also suing the SF Police for failure to protect Conard tenants because of improper training. The failure of the City and County to properly supervise these non-profits is growing. As the City privatizes more public housing and turns it over to so called “non-profits,” the issue of accountability and systemic corruption of these operations must be confronted.
We need to defend tenants and the workers at Conard Co-operative Housing Program who face harassment and retaliation.”

Tony Robles of Poor News Network told me about the federal Rental Assistance program. “It’s run thru HUD,” he said,” the federal housing agency. “Its purpose is to sell off public housing. “They use public money to refurbish the housing,” Robles said, “and then sell it to private developers. Ed Lee wants to privatize public housing like that here.”

For more information: 415-282-1908