Why do slumlords back Harris?

Why are the city’s worst slumlords supporting Kamala Harris for District Attorney?

By David Weir and Ted Gullicksen

Given the immense power a District Attorney wields over who will – and won’t --get prosecuted for breaking the law, it is imperative that voters look closely at who is financing the candidates for this office before voting next Tuesday.

If any of the financial supporters of challenger Kamala Harris or incumbent Terence Hallinan have good reasons to fear they are now the subjects of criminal investigations or will be in the future, they clearly have a stake in who gets elected.

On that score, Harris has what appears to be a potentially serious conflict of interest in that her campaign donor list reads like a Who’s Who of the city’s most notorious slumlords -- people who have been victimizing the poorest and most vulnerable citizens in San Francisco for years.

According to Harris’s 57-page filing of Form 460 for the period September 21-October 18, more than ten percent --22-- of Harris’s 208 donors were the owners or operators of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels that have been identified by the office of the city attorney as problematic. The donations came either as individual gifts, or as contributions by the hotels directly. (See Box.)

This is not the first ethical lapse by the Harris campaign. After pledging to respect the campaign finance limit of $211,000 in the general election, Harris’s fundraising machine blasted through the limit, leading to a large fine levied by the city’s ethics panel. Harris subsequently claimed she had been unaware that she had raised so much money and paid the fine.
Harris’s slumlord donations were mostly clustered on a single filing date – September 26 – when they accounted for almost 40 percent (17 of 43) of her total donations reported on that date.

On Harris’s list were two of the city’s ten worst residential hotels, as compiled by the city’s Department of Building Inspection in 1999 -- the Alder on Sixth Street, and the Elm on Eddy in the Tenderloin. Both have been cited for numerous violations of the housing code over the past four years.

These are not pretty places. The Department of Building Inspection described the Elm’s violations in direct language: “Ordered to provide heat, remove rubbish from a fire escape, replace a fourth-floor banister, repair jammed bathroom windows on all floors, fix broken smoke detectors in guest rooms, repair walls and ceilings in guest rooms, eliminate mold and mildew in two public bathrooms.”

Two years later, in 2001, Chronicle reporter Kathleen Sullivan reported that not much had changed at the Elm, because housing inspectors had to order the owners to “clean and sanitize public bathrooms on a regular basis; scrub and disinfect tubs, sinks, toilets; wash down human excrement from 3rd floor toilet room walls; and clean and shampoo hallway carpeting.”

Put simply, these are Roach Hotels, the kinds of places most of Harris’s well-heeled supporters on the richer sides of town don’t even know exist, let alone have ever visited. But is it a conflict of interest for Harris to accept donations from their owners?

“Consider the tenants of these flea-bag hotels who are worried about bugs and rats—and then they see someone who is supposed to be protecting them taking money from the landlord,” legal ethics expert Carol Langford stated last month. “What are they going to think?”

Langford, an attorney who has headed state bar and American Bar Association ethics committees and co-authored a 1995 book, Moral Compass of the American Lawyer – Truth, Justice, Power and Greed, made her comments to the first reporter to reveal several of Harris’s suspect donations -- John Roemer of The Daily Journal, a newspaper whose readership is mainly limited to members of the legal community.

After Roemer’s expose, the Harris campaign said they had returned four of the checks in question. But a closer look at Harris’s entire donor base during that period reveals that the extent of her slumlord support is far greater than previously reported.

Her backers include people who have been fined for violating housing codes and for tolerating illegal activities, such as prostitution, on their premises. The fines were assessed by the code enforcement unit of the city attorney’s office, where Harris was a deputy attorney before taking a leave to seek higher office.

Harris was herself a member of the code enforcement unit three years ago. “Of course, there’s a conflict there,” Langford told Roemer. “If your office sues someone and you take money from the defendant, that’s a conflict.”

A former colleague of Harris in that unit, and a donor to her campaign, expressed surprise and disappointment that the candidate accepted donations tainted by the stigma of a potential conflict of interest.

Karen Carrera, a former deputy city attorney in the code enforcement unit, told Roemer that she had herself written out a check in support of Harris, but that she had been unaware at the time that the SRO owners were among Harris’s donor base.

The list of slumlords includes many members of a branch of the notorious Patel family, including Vijay Patel, owner of the Alder Hotel. Last year the city attorney’s office levied $45,000 in fines against Patel in connection with prostitution and other crimes occurring at the Alder.

Approximately 15,000 people live in 520 SRO’s in the city. About 70% of the SRO’s are operated by people with the common surname Patel, though not all of them are related to each other. The SRO’s house many of the marginal and most vulnerable people in the city, including the disabled, the elderly poor, and the mentally ill.

Fires are commonplace in these hotels; between 1997 and 2001, 840 units in SRO’s were destroyed by fire, according to reporter Carol Lloyd writing on sfgate.com.

Sources currently or formerly inside the city attorney’s office, speaking strictly on the condition of anonymity, cautioned that while the long list of slumlord donations may appear to be a compromising factor in Harris’s race for D.A, many of the Patels seem to be regular donors to political campaigns, and their donations may not be tied to any expectation of leniency from the candidates they support.

In addition, these same sources noted, some of the Patels have responded well in the past to complaints by the city attorney’s office, and on occasion have taken constructive steps to improve poor conditions at their properties once they were brought to their attention.

Despite being a relative newcomer to San Francisco politics, Harris has raised a massive campaign war-chest – about $621,000, reportedly, or more than twice as much as Hallinan, at $286,000. Much of Harris’s fundraising success has been attributed to the role her former boyfriend, Mayor Willie Brown, has played behind the scenes in her campaign.

The perception problem with accepting donations from those connected to the Brown machine, however, is that they come with the taint of an entrenched patronage system. Harris has stated that she will not be obligated to her donors, and that she will enforce all relevant laws, if elected.

However, Harris has also stated that she will not proactively seek out corruption that may be embedded in the city’s government. She has been quoted as saying that she is unaware of any corruption inside the Brown administration. By contrast, Hallinan has prosecuted 49 cases of corruption inside the Brown administration, and reportedly has an additional 24 cases pending.

The fate of those pending cases is unknown if Hallinan loses Tuesday’s run-off to Harris.

The city attorney’s office also reportedly has many cases pending against the slumlord backers of Harris’s campaign.

In trying to sort all this out by next Tuesday, cynical voters might well ask: Why should we care that slumlords are supporting Kamala Harris? Haven’t we tolerated Willie Brown, arguably one of the most corrupt mayors in history, for what seems forever? So what if Harris carried Brown’s brand of patronage politics across town to Hall of Justice? In the end, do we even care anymore if our political leaders are unethical?

The answers to these questions await the outcome of next Tuesday’s election.


BOX

Kamala Harris’s Slumlord Supporters


DATE DONOR AMOUNT
9/26/03 Surf Motel $500
9/26/03 New Pacific Hotel $100
9/26/03 Franciscan Hotel $200
9/26/03 Drake Hotel $100
9/26/03 Sailesh Patel (1) $100
9/26/03 Elm Hotel $100
9/26/03 Roger Naran Patel (2) $100
9/26/03 Mission Hotel $100
9/26/03 Hotel San Francisco $150
9/26/03 Albert Hotel $100
9/26/03 JLAREM Hotel $100
9/26/03 Dipak Patel (3) $100
9/26/03 Ratilal Patel (4) $100
9/26/03 Jashvant Patel (5) $100
9/26/03 Jefferson Hotel Enterprise $100
9/26/03 Adrian Hotel $100
9/26/03 S.F. Travellers Inn Hotel $150
9/26/03 Pierre Hotel $200
10/10/03 Prabhaben Hotel $100
10/10/03 Vijay Patel (6) $200
10/14/03 Rashmikant Gajiwala (7) $100
10/14/03 Naresh Patel (8) $100
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(1) owner, Krishna Hotel
(2) manager, Caldrake Hotel
(3) manager, Norma Hotel
(4) manager, Elk Hotel
(5) manager, Fairfax Hotel
(6) owner, Alder Hotel
(7) manager, Normandie Hotel
(8) owner, Day’s Inn (610 Geary)

(source: Kamala Harris for District Attorney Form 460 (9/21-10/18/2003)

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David Weir is a Lokey Visiting Professor in Journalism at Stanford University and a Hewlett Fellow at the U.C., Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. Ted Gullicksen works with the San Francisco Tenants Union.