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Fighting Rent Gouging on Market Street

by Grant Building Tenants Association (grantbldg [at] yahoo.com)
San Francisco Unites to Save the Grant Bldg. and Market St. Out-of-State Owner Engages in Pressure Tactics and Rent Gouging
Grant Building tenants will protest the owner's tripling of rents and threats of eviction at a press conference Wednesday, February 21, at noon
on the City Hall steps (Polk St.). They will be joined Supervisors Chris Daly, Matt Gonzalez, and Aaron Peskin; the City's first poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Walter Johnson, San Francisco Labor Council; Howard Williams, Secretary, SF Bicycle Messengers Assoc.; labor and religious leaders; and others alarmed at the hollowing out of Market St.
<br><Br>"We're at an impasse--or worse," says Peter Wiley, member of the Grant Building Tenants Association, a diverse group of two dozen small businesses, community nonprofits, writers, and artists. "For the last five months, we've asked the owner to enter into good-faith negotiations with us. Their response is to continue to insist on exorbitant rents, backed up with eviction,"
according to Wiley, author of National Trust Guide:
San Francisco. "The tenants resent these heavy-handed tactics."<br><br>The press conference comes at a time when negotiations
between the GBTA and Seligman Western Enterprises, a Southfield, Michigan, company with ties to Sterling Bank and Seligman & Associates, have deadlocked.
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The GBTA is ready to accept new leases with an
affordable rent increase. But Seligman, which bought the eight-story Grant Building last summer for a reported $9 million, demands drastic increases that would force tenants from the building, even as commercial rents plummet in San Francisco. Erected in 1904 and a survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fire, the Grant Building is at 1095 Market St., on the corner of Seventh St.
<br><br>
In their bid to gentrify the Mid-Market area, Seligman Western Enterprises has also acquired 785 Market, 1035 Market, and 1540 Market. Reports indicate that Seligman has been no gentler with businesses and nonprofits in those buildings.
<br><br>Mayor Willie Brown, in a November 1 letter, reminded the owner that "The Grant Building has, for several decades, housed a wide assortment of community-serving nonprofit organizations as well as small businesses. [They] are the backbone of San Francisco, and are
essential to the health and well-being of our economy and our neighborhoods.... You have chosen to do business in San Francisco because of ... the unique character of this City. I ask that you assist us in maintaining that character by working in good faith with your existing tenants." Mayor Brown's request has gone unheeded, says Wiley.
<br><br>The GBTA formed at the end of last summer to resist rent gouging and eviction by the new owner. "The tenants are fighting to preserve the urban fabric ofSan Francisco," says tenant Susan Schwartzenberg, co-author of Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. "The Mid-Market area should be a haven for the kinds of people and businesses that make a city worth living in, that contribute to the city in ways that real estate speculation and gentrification can't."
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