SF Sues Man for Illegally Packing 3-Bedroom Home, Highlights Desperate Housing Need

One Bayview house has been the subject of a decade of complaints from multiple city departments — black mold and mildew lining the bedroom baseboards and bathroom, mice droppings littering the property and a rotting floor.

Despite citations for unsafe conditions, the owner has been raking in almost $10,000 a month by renting the three-bedroom home to 15 people, including three minors.

On Thursday, City Attorney David Chiu announced that his office had filed a lawsuit against Rafael Garcia Sanchez, who owns the single-family house at 1465 Oakdale Ave. that was illegally divided into five units. Sanchez is accused of violating state housing law, profiting from people living in unsafe conditions and “endangering the health and safety of the tenants.”

Housing policy experts say this isn’t a one-off situation.

In the Bay Area, the rate of new housing production hasn’t kept up with population growth. The median rental asking price increased 50% in San Francisco and 30% overall in the region between 2012 and 2015. The lack of space and affordable options has made some people desperate to hang on to whatever housing they can get, according to Sarah Karlinsky, the research director at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

“Kind of liken it to a game of musical chairs,” she told KQED. “The chairs keep getting taken away, but you still have the same number of players. Those remaining chairs become very coveted.”

People are crammed into housing units, pay more of their wages toward rent than is reasonable or live in homes where the conditions are less than acceptable because it’s all they can afford, according to Karlinsky, who previously worked for the nonprofit policy organization SPUR. A study published by the think tank in 2021 showed that the Bay Area needed to build a little over 1 million housing units over the previous two decades to keep up with population demand.

Only 358,500 units were added at that time.

“When you underbuild for decade after decade after decade, but you continue to add jobs, you end up with a chronic housing shortage,” she said.

Between 2010 and 2019, the incidence of overcrowding, which is defined as more than one person per room in a home, increased almost 1%, another SPUR study found. According to the U.S. Census Bureau data, there were 362,354 households in San Francisco in 2019, meaning roughly 14,856 households were considered severely overcrowded.

In 2014, an executive summary from the city planning department estimated that there were between 30,000 and 50,000 illegal additional units. While the city now has legislation that allows people to legalize some previously unauthorized ADUs, there are still homes where too many people live or homes that aren’t up to code, like the one Sanchez allegedly rented.

Muhammad Alameldin, an associate professor at the Terner Center, said that units with poor conditions are often the last line of defense for people at risk of becoming unhoused or having to move out of the region where they work and have built their lives.

“To be in a situation where you have to split up existing houses into multiple units for multiple families means that we have not built enough housing for everyone in this county, and people are being forced into desperate situations because of that,” he said.

Karlinsky said it doesn’t have to be this way.

In November, voters will decide on a $20 billion affordable housing bond put on the ballot by the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority. If passed, the funds would be used to build or preserve at least 70,000 affordable housing units, almost half of which would be reserved for very low-income households in the nine Bay Area counties.

She also said municipalities could change zoning laws to allow for more apartments, especially in suburban areas near transit. Additionally, more small and mid-size apartments could be built in single-family neighborhoods. Legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021 allows homeowners to divide a single-family lot into as many as four units in some cases.

Karlinsky said if done many times, these conversions could contribute substantially to the housing supply.

“There are many policy levers that can be pulled to help the region and the state kind of get out of this situation and enable people to live in safe, decent, affordable housing,” she told KQED. “It’s just really a matter of political will to make those things happen.”