Free Fax: Save the Civic Center Hotel

The Civic Center Hotel, a 156-unit building at 12th and Market Streets in San Francisco, is home to a diverse community of retirees, working people, disabled folks, immigrants and families with children. It is one of the few affordable housing options available to low-income residents of downtown San Francisco.

This community is in danger of being destroyed. The Plumbers' and Steamfitters' Union Local 38, which owns the Civic Center through its pension fund, applied last year to demolish the building. Now, after repeated requests from the tenants, the union has refused to disclose whether it still plans to demolish the building. Recently, the union’s attorney stated in a letter that “The demolition of the building remains an open question.”

Meanwhile, the Civic Center is one of the few hotels in San Francisco that still has no in-room fire sprinklers, more than two years after the city-wide deadline for installing them. This puts tenants' lives at risk. Fires are a major problem in the city’s SROs, and there have been several at the Civic Center in the past two years.

Tenant advocates have expressed outrage that a union which is supposed to stand up for working-class San Franciscans would put profit motives ahead of low-income tenants' right to safe, stable housing. The fact that a plumbers’ union delayed installation of fire safety sprinklers for years adds insult to injury.

Please go to Local Impact to send a free fax telling the Plumbers' Union to abandon the demolition and do the right thing for San Francisco’s low-income tenants.