She picked up a megaphone and lambasted the greed fueling no-fault evictions in the city. Her voice cracked and tears began to well up as she yelled, decrying the time and energy it takes to fight back.
“I can’t even be in my classroom today because I have to be here to fight for my right to live here,” Claudia Tirado said in front of around two-dozen people as they blocked a Google bus in the Mission District on April 11.
Tirado is a third grade teacher at Fairmount Elementary School and her landlord, Jack Halprin, a lawyer for Google, is evicting her and the other tenants out of a seven-unit Victorian on Guerrero Street. Halprin already lives in one of the units.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the country right now, so rent controlled apartments are one of the only ways many people, including teachers like Tirado, are able to afford living here.
Housing costs are only supposed to take up to one-third of a person’s monthly income, but low-income people tend to spend more.
San Francisco’s public school teachers can earn up to $82,000 a year at the highest level, according to the latest salary schedule from San Francisco Unified School District.
Tirado loves her job but only makes about $52,000 annually after working for the district for 14 years, she said, and pays almost $1,700 a month for her two-bedroom unit, where she lives with her partner Alexandre Barros, a local taxi driver, and their two-year-old son Valentino.
Her other monthly expenses include $900 for child care and $400 for cell phones for herself and five other family members, not to mention a mountain of credit card debt, she said.
She wants to continue raising her son here in San Francisco. She also loves being connected to her students in a way that wouldn’t be possible if she had to commute to work.
They run into each other around the Mission District, when strolling down the street or hanging out at the park, she said.
“I was on my way to see my tax guy and I ran into my student’s mom selling tamales on the corner,” Tirado said. “I bought eight tamales.”
While they fight to delay their eviction for as long as possible, Tirado is applying for affordable housing assistance.
Help for teachers
The Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH) offers a first-time home buyer’s program for teachers, called the Teachers Next Door Program.
“Most teachers who apply for (the program) have closed on their home purchase,” a representative from the MOH told El Tecolote via email.
Since it was launched in 2007, the city has helped 45 teachers buy homes through the program, according to data provided by the MOH. Four of those homes were in the Mission/Bernal Heights areas and only two of the teachers identified themselves as Latino.
Additionally, two people were teaching in Mission district schools at the time when they purchased a home but the data doesn’t indicate in which neighborhood.
Most sales through the program took place in District 10, which includes Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch and Visitacion Valley.
Residents displaced by Ellis Act evictions since Jan. 1, 2012, can also apply for the city’s Ellis Act Housing Preference Program (EAHP), as long as they resided in the unit for at least 10 years, or five years if disabled or suffering from a life threatening illness.
Affordable housing programs in San Francisco are notoriously difficult to get through. Even if you’re eligible, you still have to be lucky enough to land an available unit or home through a lottery system.
Fighting buyouts
Benito Santiago is also a teacher with SFUSD. He’s fighting an Ellis Act eviction from his Duboce Triangle home of 37 years.
They tried to buy him and the other three tenants out for $20,000 each, he said. After they refused that offer, the property owners issued an Ellis Act eviction notice last December.
As a senior, Santiago gets more time before he actually has to move out but, they’re all hoping to stop the eviction, he said.
Santiago is a paraprofessional who works with special needs students. He has a master’s degree in Creative Arts Education and lives and breathes music and dance. A natural storyteller, he lights up when he talks about his art.
His one-bedroom apartment on Duboce Avenue is full of books, records, CDs and drums. Now much of it is in boxes though, as he prepares for the worst case scenario — being forced to move out.
“I’ve been giving away a lot of stuff already,” he said, and worries that getting evicted will force him to retire early. “If I don’t have (an address), I basically don’t exist.”
Like Tirado, he has already started looking into his options for applying for the city’s affordable housing programs.
Santiago attends as many anti-eviction rallies as he can, always with a drum.
When Tirado yelled into the megaphone in front of the Google bus, Santiago was there, too.
They are part of the rising tenants’ movement here in San Francisco and they have many supporters.