Update: At a Feb. 26 press conference announced that Ciculo de Vida will be able to remain at its 2601 Mission Street location
By Elisabetta Silvestro
Carmen Ortiz had no idea she would be next.
Even after she saw the company that shared the same floor as her organization being pushed out to make space for a tech startup last year, she didn’t worry too much.
Ortiz runs a nonprofit cancer support and resource center, Circulo de Vida, which has served Latino families at its 2601 Mission St. location for the last 11 years. Ortiz thought her landlord would leave that alone.
But Vera Cort is a businesswoman first, and when tech startup DoubleDutch needed more space for its 153 employees, she didn’t want that business to go elsewhere.
“A lack of space in the building to house Circulo and a fast growing tech company who is GROWING THE ECONOMY and hiring people everyday. JOBS, JOBS JOBS (for young people),” Cort wrote verbatim in an email response to why she chose to terminate Circulo de Vida’s lease.
DoubleDutch, a provider of mobile event applications, was founded in 2011 and received a total of $37.5 million in funding. The successful tech company expanded over the years and now takes up six out of the nine floors of the building.
After the news went public, DoubleDutch told online news publication 48 Hills they didn’t know they were expanding at Circulo de Vida’s expense, as Cort told them she wasn’t going to renew Circulo’s lease anyway.
Ortiz was notified at the end of November that the lease wasn’t going to be renewed but she decided to make the news public Feb. 9. In response Our Mission NO Eviction created a Facebook event asking people to take action, and to contact the landlord, DoubleDutch and Mayor Ed Lee, asking them to let Circulo de Vida stay in the building. That generated a strong reaction from the community, which then flooded Cort and DoubleDutch with concerned emails.
Cort said both she and DoubleDutch received “very nasty and threatening emails.”
Vera Cort isn’t a new name in San Francisco’s gentrification saga. She ownes 16 properties in San Francisco and she has a history of evictions.
In 1999 she bought the 2601 Mission St. building and made headlines for refusing to renew the leases of the two-dozen businesses and nonprofits that resided there, instead giving three entire floors to Bigstep.com. It was the first dot-com boom.
Two years prior, her family evicted a senior couple at 3257 20th St., using an owner-move-in eviction, to let their son move into that house, but the place remained unoccupied for at least two years.
Between 1990 and 2012 Cort filed 10 more cases, three for “unlawful detainer” and seven for “breach of contract.”
This time around, the tech startup offered help. That same Feb. 9 evening, Ortiz told the San Francisco Examiner, DoubleDutch CEO Lawrence Coburn offered Circulo a smaller space on one of their floors.
“I think we would be out on our butts if it wouldn’t have been for the support we have received from the community,” Ortiz said. “[Coburn] is wanting to resolve the issue.”
Since then, Ortiz and Coburn have been meeting with District 9 Supervisor David Campos to work out a solution.
“We have had very productive conversations about ways to keep Circulo de Vida in the building while also maintaining the integrity of their programming,” Campos wrote on his Facebook page Feb. 19. “I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a resolution soon.”
Ortiz said the issue will be decided by the end of the week. She hasn’t spoken to Cort since November.
“We are doing everything we can to help [Circulo de Vida] continue doing their vitally important work in the community,” DoubleDutch Public Relations and Communications Manager Elka Looks wrote in an email.
The nonprofit, which provides social support services to people diagnosed with cancer and to their families, has until March 31 to find a new place if they don’t reach a positive resolution.
Look for further coverage of the decision at Eltecolote.org