Gustavo García has never liked conflict.
The soft-spoken 61-year-old widower has lived in a 391-square-foot studio at 907 Valencia St. for 34 years, along one of the Mission District’s most rapidly gentrifying corridors. He often fixes small problems himself to avoid tension with his landlord.
But last year, after a fire damaged parts of the building, García said his landlord, Mosser Living, offered tenants about $4,000 each to move out.
Instead of leaving, tenants organized a building-wide association and launched a rent strike on March 2 against San Francisco’s second-largest corporate landlord.
“I’m not scared,” García said. “I’m angry.”
García is among a growing number of tenants across the city organizing with their neighbors to launch rent strikes, a tactic organizers say is beginning to force landlords to negotiate repairs and refunds.
A powerful framework for tenant organizing
Tenant organizers say rent strikes have become more common in San Francisco in recent years, particularly after the city passed the first-of-its-kind “Union-at-Home” ordinance in 2022.
The law allows tenants to form building-wide associations and requires landlords to negotiate with them in good faith. It also classifies tenant organizing activities such as door-knocking, flyering and holding meetings as official “housing services.” If landlords interfere with those rights or refuse to bargain, tenants can petition the San Francisco Rent Board for rent reductions.
According to a UC Berkeley Labor Center report, tenants in about 50 San Francisco buildings representing more than 1,000 units formed tenant associations in the first year after the law took effect.
Since then, at least seven rent strikes have taken place in the city, mostly in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and Mission District, where many tenants are low-income, immigrant or elderly, according to the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco (HRCSF).
The law does not guarantee concessions, but gives tenants a legal framework for building majorities and pressuring landlords to negotiate.
“In those striking buildings, tenants were able to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent refunds,” said Hayle Meyerhoff, a tenant organizer with the group.
Rent strikes producing major results
Several recent rent strikes have resulted in major concessions from landlords.
At buildings located at 434 Leavenworth St. and 209 Geary St., tenants negotiated directly with their landlord, Veritas Investments, after organizing a rent strike.
Mathilda Lind Gustavussen, a housing researcher and PhD candidate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin, said those negotiations improved language access, transparency around maintenance contracts, replacement of a building manager and repairs to long-standing code violations.
Tenants also secured substantial financial compensation. Across the two buildings, residents received rent refunds totaling more than $1 million, according to Gustavussen.
The rent strikes came amid financial instability at Veritas, which had defaulted on a nearly $1 billion loan backed by more than 2,500 rent-controlled units.
San Francisco’s Union-at-Home law is more useful to tenants than Los Angeles’ 2021 Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance because it allows tenants, not the city, to hold landlords accountable through collective action.
“Union-at-Home appears to more effectively mediate the severe power imbalance between tenant and landlord by enshrining a right to organise and bargain collectively, refashioning the tenant-landlord relationship along the lines of labour contract negotiations,” Gustavussen wrote.
Last year, the 434 Leavenworth St. Tenants Association also joined a two-year rent strike led by tenants at 781 O’Farrell St. against Veritas, now operating as Ballast.
Despite issuing eviction notices to some tenants during the dispute, the landlord ultimately suspended those notices and addressed several maintenance issues, including cockroach infestations and broken kitchen cabinets, said Leavenworth tenant Johana Ruiz.
“All the tenants worked together to pull this off,” she said. Remembering the days of anxiety and stress that accompanied her association’s strike, she said it was worth it. The cockroaches are gone from her studio unit.
Another group of tenants secured what organizers describe as one of the city’s biggest victories.
In 2024, tenants at 324 14th St. negotiated the sale of their distressed building to the San Francisco Community Land Trust, converting it into permanently affordable housing.
Displacement pressure fuels tenant movement
Tenant organizers say these conflicts are unfolding as corporate landlords have purchased thousands of older rent-controlled buildings across neighborhoods such as the Mission District and Tenderloin neighborhoods.
Corporate investors often seek to replace long-time tenants paying below-market rents, with new tenants paying market rates, said Molly Goldberg, director of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition.
“Tenants are showing up to do the hard work of building with one another and finding that it’s working,” she said. “These big landlords whose business model is built entirely on the assumption of displacement are defaulting again and again and again on their portfolios because tenants are refusing to be displaced.”
García’s apartment illustrates the pressure.
He pays $715 per month for his rent-controlled studio in a prime location. Just doors down along the increasingly gentrified Valencia Street corridor, a comparable studio rents for about $2,200 a month.
“What a coincidence,” said García, “that another [Mosser Living] building also had a fire like us.”
He was referring to a blaze at 50 Golden Gate Ave., a six-story apartment building in the Tenderloin where a fire displaced about 130 residents in the middle of the night just weeks before Christmas last year. Many remain displaced.
The San Francisco Fire Department has not determined the cause of either fire. Mosser Living did not respond to requests for comment from El Tecolote.
“I don’t like to fight. I could move but I won’t,” said García. “They can repair the fire damage to the hallways without kicking us out. We’re only asking for what’s fair.”
