Squalor Amid the Glitter

Wei Xi He lives two stories above Grant Avenue, the main tourist artery in the nation’s oldest Chinatown, with its souvenir shops selling ginseng and bright paper lanterns and the aroma of roast duck and twice-cooked pork floating up from the restaurants that line the block.

Yet, while so close, He’s world is one that no vacationer ever sees.

His family of five--including his wife, mother-in-law and two young daughters--inhabits a 10-by-10-foot unit in one of Chinatown’s ubiquitous single-room-occupancy hotels, a spartan setting where a narrow window to a dingy courtyard provides the only natural light.

On He’s floor, 60 people share one kitchen and four toilets. His wife, Xing Gong, often waits two hours for her turn to cook their evening meal. She has seen fights erupt when the line crawled too slowly or when work-weary residents exchanged scowls or brandished a pointed elbow in the narrow hall.

In Room 307, for which the family has paid $315 a month for six years, Xing Gong keeps several red plastic bowls the girls use in emergencies when the toilets are occupied. With a shy grin, He admits that he sometimes uses the bowls himself.

He (pronounced Huh) does not smile, however, when he recounts the fatherly advice he gave his 3-year-old daughter, Anna: Don’t ever touch the rats or the cockroaches, honey. Let Daddy take care of that.

At night, the 38-year-old unemployed busboy listens to his children’s chronic coughs from breathing the stale air laden with cigarette smoke, cooking odors, tuberculosis and flu germs that barnstorm the hotel’s 42 rooms each winter.

Despite the prison-like conditions, He is resigned to a way of life in which his bed, refrigerator and belongings all sit within arm’s reach in a space not much larger than a suburban family’s walk-in closet. The only privacy is afforded by a bedsheet hung across the top bunk.

For decades, Chinatown’s 145 residential hotels, known as SROs, have represented what one county supervisor calls the most embarrassing secret in an otherwise glittering city where housing costs for a decade have been the nation’s least affordable.

With 13,000 residents in line for government-assisted housing, the grim SRO existence has become a last resort for immigrant families who have dropped off the city’s social-service radar screen--many unaware of their legal right to complain about poor conditions.

“San Francisco has figured out how to ignore this problem,” said Supervisor Chris Daley. “In Chinatown, the population is largely immigrant. People don’t speak English. They don’t vote. They don’t complain. So, like a lot of communities of color, they’re ignored.”

But a recent census of San Francisco’s 457 privately owned residential hotels has finally brought some scrutiny: Chinatown’s 16 square blocks--one of America’s most densely populated neighborhoods--are home to 60% of the city’s 450 SRO families, including 760 children.

Activists say the problem has festered for years.

“Chinatown is a pretty contradiction,” said Norman Fong, program director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. “If the tourists ever looked up to see the pigeon’s nests that serve as homes right above their heads, they’d be in for a real eye-opener.”

The city census, conducted by housing advocates and financed by the Department of Public Health, followed a two-year study of San Francisco SROs released last spring.

Both exposed the contrast that is Chinatown, an exotic place that annually draws more visitors than the Golden Gate Bridge and yet crowds half its residents into residential hotels.

Chinatown families tend not to suffer from the alcohol and drug dependency or spousal abuse rampant in other inner-city SROs. They are more often intact multi-generation families with two working adults. Still, they remain in their quarters an average of six years--twice as long as their counterparts elsewhere.

Xing Gong frets that her family’s living conditions are even worse than back in their rural hometown in southern China’s Pearl River delta. And she fears that her year-old daughter, Amy, will be a teenager before the family can escape its Chinatown confines.

But her husband tells her to be strong: “We just have to get used to things.”

Although such longevity affords lower rents--averaging $350 while SROs in other areas of San Francisco can cost $1,000--many families endure living conditions that seem left over from another era.

Tenants live with “lead, rodents, roaches, mold, garbage and sewage, broken glass, exposed [electrical] sockets,” the city report concluded. The hotels are also fire hazards. In recent years, blazes at 11 SROs have burned 840 rooms and killed three people.

Sickness is another problem. One in three SRO tenants is infected with the tuberculosis germ--an early onset of the disease that does not always lead to an active case--with infection rates “similar to those found in sub-Saharan Africa,” the report found. Children growing up in SROs routinely suffer from psychological and learning difficulties.

“The highest rate of new TB cases comes from Chinatown,” said Madeline Ritchie, director of the Chinatown Public Health Center. “Hepatitis B and asthma are also prevalent, thanks to stagnant air in cold buildings with mold and dust mites and 40-year-old carpets.”

The city study concluded that “working immigrant families from communities of color” face a lack of “kitchens and bathrooms, living in cramped, unsanitary, unstable and unsafe environments, not having space for children to play or study or for parents’ privacy.”

Frustrated city officials insist that local, state, federal--and even private--money is needed to find solutions. Along with increasing the frequency of inspections at SROs, advocates are seeking to improve the overall lives of tenants.

They’re pushing for higher wages, job training and better family and children’s services.

As San Francisco looks for ways to build more affordable housing, officials say they will also work to improve SRO conditions.

Since March, building inspectors have found 1,578 code violations in the city’s 20 worst SRO hotels. More than a quarter of those are in Chinatown.

The violations included 456 citations for faulty smoke alarms, 73 for electrical problems, 25 for water damage and 42 for bad lighting. Even a first-time citation can cost $700, and the city often places liens on properties until landlords correct problems and pay fines.

Just this month, He’s building was cited for 17 violations that included “deferred maintenance” problems with ventilation, the fire escape, sprinkler heads in the ceiling and lighting.

Property managers downplay the problems.

“When I go to the building, I see happy people who are quite respectful,” said Laura Monoson of Hogan & Vest Inc., the company that oversees He’s hotel. “If I saw the conditions you described, I’d be horrified.”

The Chinese are used to community kitchens and bathrooms, she said. “It’s part of their culture.”

Constructed a century ago, Chinatown’s oldest SRO units were designed for single Chinese immigrants who helped build railroads and labored on the city’s wharves.

Today’s newcomers are attracted by cheap rents in an area where jobs and fresh meats and vegetables are within walking distance. Initially, it is a cozy refuge that keeps them close to the culture they left behind--with crowded streets and narrow alleys that remind many of bustling Hong Kong.

Soon enough, though, Chinatown begins to entangle many residents. Because so few speak English, the only employment they can find is in minimum-wage jobs amid conditions that are often poor.

Until recently laid off, He worked at a restaurant for minimum wage. Xing Gong sews clothes at a nearby garment factory.

Although many low-income families find alternatives to expensive San Francisco, Chinatown’s SRO residents don’t always have that option. Many fear trading their familiar urban turf for less-expensive rural areas where their language and culture are all but nonexistent.

He’s building, like most others, has no live-in manager or superintendent. Residents take concerns to the property manager’s nearby office. Tenants in other buildings sometimes must contact landlords as far away as Seattle.

Although Xing Gong keeps it neat, Room 307 is near the communal kitchen, which means an ongoing war against vermin. Instead of complaining, He methodically kills the pests himself.

“We’ve seen rats in Chinatown SROs, but residents don’t report them,” said Johnson Ojo, a public health environmental inspection manager. “Many are afraid to make their landlord unhappy.”

So far this year, Chinatown residents have filed only 51 complaints with city officials about substandard conditions: just 2% of the 2,860 citywide total, statistics show.

In addition to the sanitary concerns, the stifling lack of space breeds an ever-present stress. He must often go days without a shower because the bathroom lines always seem too long. And he bristles at the fact that there is no place for Anna to play: Children are banned from the hallways when adults are around. Riding bikes is forbidden.

“Chinese families are close, and we often have three generations living under one roof,” said Wendall Chin, director of the Chinese Progressive Assn. “But in these Chinatown SROs, there are often three generations in one room.”

The He family seeks a daily respite. Both parents take frequent walks. And when Ruing Li, He’s doting mother-in-law, eventually tires of watching over Anna, the gray-haired 72-year-old strolls to nearby Portsmouth Square.

The concrete park is known as Chinatown’s living room, where elderly expatriates spend hours joking and arguing politics in various Asian dialects.

“Tourists see old people sitting on benches and think it’s quaint,” said Tan Chow, a community organizer for the Chinatown Community Development Center. “They don’t realize these people have nowhere else to go. Chinatown has the city’s busiest public library branch. People don’t just go there to read newspapers. They go there to escape.”

Chinese have also moved to SROs in neighboring North Beach, inhabiting the floors above adult bookstores and topless bars.

For 10 years, Lan Fong Huey and her family have lived above the Garden of Eden strip club, enduring the whir of the pink and turquoise neon sign that flashes right outside their window at night. The thumping bass from the music below makes Huey’s two children toss and turn.

Until recent repairs were made, the family for months spread buckets on the floor to catch rainwater. There’s so little space that Huey’s husband sleeps on the partially carpeted floor.

Huey, 44, who works as a janitor, says her 10-year-old son is so ashamed of where he lives that he refuses to bring friends home. “The only thing that keeps us here is the $310 rent,” she sighs.

The building, which inspectors call one of the area’s worst, recently was cited for six housing code violations.

Despite the bleak conditions, city officials have not always been tough on the owners of many SROs in Chinatown and North Beach. Many of them are Chinese too.

“Every new-generation building inspector went in there and tried to enforce the law,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Chinatown. “But the Chinese business owners tapped them on the shoulder and said, ‘You don’t need to do that here. We’ll take care of it.’ ”

Senior housing inspector David Gogna said officials review SRO conditions at least once a year. “Chinatown’s no exception,” he said. “They get the same scrutiny. There’s been no ‘wink, wink, nod, nod’ that I know of.”

But activists criticize what they regard as lax enforcement.

“We had to force the city to hire Chinese-speaking inspectors and to print public notices in Chinese,” said Chin of the Chinese Progressive Assn. “Their whole process is complaint-driven, but how do you let someone know of a problem if you can’t speak their language?”

After several fires at SROs, officials in 1999 formed a task force composed of housing advocates and city officials. They interviewed 195 families, using SRO tenant-volunteers to gather information.

But although San Francisco building codes forbid entire families from living in single SRO rooms, city officials know that enforcing the law would throw parents and children onto the street.

Chinatown activists have recently refurbished more than a dozen SROs to improve conditions.

The city wants to create a family outreach team with public health nurses and case managers. And officials plan to hire more Chinese-speaking inspectors and stiffen fines for code violations.

Activist Norman Fong waits anxiously for change.

“The animal activists come to protest the cramped conditions of live chickens in Chinatown’s restaurants [before they’re slaughtered],” he said. “If they looked around, they’d see human beings in conditions that are just as bad.”

As the winter rains begin, Wei Xi He and his family try to get enough sleep to stay healthy. Each night, his wife and mother-in-law crowd into the bottom bunk with the girls between them. He curls into a fetal position on the mattress above, sandwiched by belongings he has no other place to store.

During the day, he dons a thin jacket and patrols Chinatown streets in search of work, almost invisible amid the crowds of holiday shoppers laden with bags and packages. At times, he picks up a newspaper and scans the ads for a cheap apartment that might offer a bit more room.

“We’ll just keep looking until we find something,” He says. “It’s the only thing we can do.”