Mayor Lurie and City Attorney Chiu Deliver a First-of-Its-Kind Reckoning for Alice Griffith — and the Community That Refused to Be Silenced Made It Happen
SAN FRANCISCO — Some days, the story you have spent a year writing turns a corner you did not know was coming. Today is one of those days.
For eleven installments of this series, I have documented the suffering at Alice Griffith Apartments and named the people with the power to stop it. The 129-plus failed inspections in a single year. The sewage backing into bathtubs. The rats on interior windowsills. The elevators dead for eight years while elders were trapped in their homes for a month at a time. The ceiling tile that tore loose on April 21 and slammed into 66-year-old Annette McClendon’s neck during a youth art show.
In Part 3, I named two men by name — Mayor Daniel Lurie and City Attorney David Chiu — and told them their silence was a choice. I asked one question: What exactly are you waiting for?
Today, August 26, 2026, the City of San Francisco answered. And the answer was bigger than the headline.
THE FULL SETTLEMENT — BIGGER THAN THE PRESS RELEASE
The Mayor’s announcement today carried a $5 million headline: a first-of-its-kind code enforcement settlement requiring the property owners to invest $3 million directly into critical improvements — pest control, security upgrades, health and safety repairs — plus $2 million from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development for new outdoor play areas and improved common spaces for the children of Double Rock.
That alone would be historic. But as Marina Newman’s reporting at Mission Local revealed, the full settlement is broader, deeper, and tougher than the headline suggests. When every obligation is counted, this is what the City secured:
- $3 million in penalties paid by the owner, St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar, for the code violations this series has documented for months;
- $3 million to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission for unpaid water and sewer fees — money owed to the public, now recovered for the public;
- $3 million invested directly into the property for the critical repairs themselves;
- A $2.5 million city loan to guarantee that elevator repairs are completed, hot water systems restored, 50 uninhabitable units rehabilitated, and $200,000 dedicated to pest control;
- A stipulated injunction filed in court requiring emergency habitability and life-safety repairs to begin within 30 days.Thirty days. Not a timeline. Not a projection. Not an assurance offered across a conference table by management while tenants live another reality. A court-enforceable deadline, with the full weight of the City Attorney’s Office behind it.
This is not the City claiming “limited authority.” This is the City exercising all of it — enforcement, investment, and the courts — in a single coordinated strike.
HONORING MAYOR LURIE: THE MAN WHO CAME BACK TO DOUBLE ROCK
I have been one of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s sharpest critics on this issue, and I will not pretend otherwise. I questioned his July visit to Alice Griffith. I questioned whether his administration understood the difference between a walkthrough and a repair. I asked him, as a member of the Black community in San Francisco: Where is the love, Daniel?
Today, I have my answer — and I am big enough to say so.
The Mayor did not have to make Alice Griffith a multi-department priority. He did not have to pair enforcement with investment or send MOHCD’s dollars into playgrounds and common spaces for children who have grown up watching rats instead of swings. He chose to. And he said the words that told me this administration understands the assignment:
“Every San Franciscan should have housing that is not only affordable but also safe and well maintained, and the residents at Alice Griffith have not. Over the past year, our administration has worked with the City Attorney’s Office to hold the owners and property managers accountable for the conditions residents have endured.”
And then, the sentence that matters most to a journalist who has watched too many press conferences produce too little change:
“We know that years of neglect will not be fixed overnight. That is why the city is committing additional resources… to help fulfill the promises that were made to this community.”
That is not a man declaring victory. That is a man acknowledging the depth of the wound and committing to heal it. There is a difference, and the difference is leadership. Mr. Mayor — this is what we asked for. Thank you.
HONORING CITY ATTORNEY DAVID CHIU: THE STANDARD-BEARER WHO ENFORCED HIS OWN STANDARD
In Part 3 of this series, I reminded David Chiu of his own biography: the man who authored AB 1482, one of the strongest tenant protection laws in California history. I challenged him to enforce the very standard he wrote.
Today, he answered with the strongest code enforcement settlement of its kind in San Francisco history.
Under Chiu’s leadership, the City Attorney’s Office did not settle for fines that a corporate owner could absorb as the cost of doing business. It built a settlement that compels investment — real dollars, directed into the property, on a court-supervised clock. His office coordinated with MOHCD, the Department of Public Health, OCII, the Department of Building Inspection, the Fire Department, and the Public Utilities Commission — the exact multi-department accountability this series called for when we documented that the violations spanned health, housing, plumbing, building, electrical, and fire codes.
“No San Franciscan should have to live in substandard housing, and there must be consequences when residents are deprived of a safe and healthy place to live,” Chiu said today. “This settlement represents a meaningful step toward improving conditions at Alice Griffith… this agreement directs real dollars into Alice Griffith and holds the property owners accountable for the terrible conditions at the property.”
Consequences. That word has been missing from this story for nearly a decade. Today it is in the record, signed and enforceable. City Attorney — you enforced the standard you wrote. That is what integrity in public office looks like.
THE UNSUNG HEROES AND SHEROES: THIS VICTORY HAS NAMES
A settlement like this does not materialize from goodwill. It is built by people — most of whom will never stand at a podium. Today, this series puts their names in the record, because they earned it.
Maika Pinkston — the resident organizer who, months before the July 2025 march, handed the Mayor the tenants’ letter in person. When the marchers carried a nearly five-foot-tall copy of that same letter to City Hall and were initially met with warnings of “escalation” rather than an embrace, Maika kept organizing. She never got a response to the letter. Today she got something better: results.
Evangela Brewster — sergeant-at-arms of the Bayview Hunters Point Coordinating Council and an Alice Griffith resident herself, who told the SF Bay View what this community has always known: “Community has teeth.” She lived the conditions while fighting them — organizing her own building while her own ceiling hung over her. That is a different kind of courage.
Kenisha Roach — co-founder of the Bayview Hunters Point Coordinating Council, who helped rebuild District 10 organizing from the ground up and walked just behind the Mayor in this fight, making sure the community’s voice walked into every room the powerful occupied.
Victoria Vandecourt — one of the community’s steadfast voices, the kind of neighbor who shows up meeting after meeting, year after year, when the cameras are long gone. Movements are carried by people like her.
Marina Newman — staff reporter at Mission Local, whose parallel investigation into Alice Griffith was, by City Attorney Chiu’s own public acknowledgment today, “tremendously helpful” to the City’s case — surfacing details his office had not known. Her reporting on the failed inspections, the spiraling finances, and the human cost of this property did what the best journalism does: it became evidence. Colleague to colleague — well done.
And the tenants whose testimony anchors this series — Jarhonda Jones, who played video of a rat on an interior windowsill at the May 4 Tenant Association meeting with a City Attorney’s investigator sitting in the room; Walt, who looked at management and said, “I am not your ‘runner'”; Annette McClendon, who took a ceiling tile to the neck and still showed up to testify; and every family at Double Rock who filmed, documented, marched, and risked retaliation to speak.
The evidence these residents put on the record became the settlement the City could not refuse. They were never the problem. They were always the proof.
HOW WE GOT HERE — THE RECEIPTS
Accountability journalism demands that the whole chain be visible, so let the record show it.
Part 1 documented the pattern: more than 129 deficiencies in a single year, poverty as a business model, corporate landlords collecting public funds while residents lived in hazard. Part 3 revisited the march and the letter and named the silence. Part 6 carried tenant testimony to the California Department of Justice — raw sewage, mold, structural neglect, retaliation — and reframed “tenant complaints” as what they always were: a pattern, a practice, a potential violation of law. Part 8 put the City in the room, with an investigator watching the rat video in real time and asked what the City would do with what it now knew.
Today we have the answer. And the lesson of Part 12 is the one I will carry into every future investigation: when documentation meets persistence, the wall moves.
THE WATCH CONTINUES — BECAUSE LOVE IS A VERB
I celebrate this day without reservation. And precisely because I celebrate it, the watch continues.
The stipulated injunction requires emergency repairs within 30 days — which means the true test of this announcement arrives in late September, in elevator shafts and hot water lines and sealed trash chutes. The $2.5 million loan must be repaid, and the repairs must be real, not cosmetic. Supervisor Shamann Walton, whose office pressed this issue from the beginning, vowed today to “watch and hold the owners accountable to make sure every dollar is spent on improving conditions.” This series stands shoulder to shoulder with that vow.
But today — today — we say the thing this series has waited a year to say:
Mayor Lurie, you were told the authority was yours. You used it. City Attorney Chiu, you were told to enforce the standard you wrote. You enforced it — with a settlement that will outlive this news cycle as precedent for every neglected property in this city. To Maika, Evangela, Kenisha, Victoria, Marina, and every tenant of Alice Griffith: you moved a city.
The price of being poor was documented in exposure for eleven parts. Today, for the first time, this series documents the price being answered.
We will be back in 30 days to check the elevators — and we expect them to be running.
REST IN POWER DEWAYNE GAINES. GONE BUT DEFINITELY NOT FORGOTTEN…… All Power to the People.
Read the full series: Part 1 — Special Investigative Report · Part 3 — Silence Is a Choice · Part 6 — The Legal Reckoning · Part 8 — The Moment the Room Saw It · Part 11 — A Tale of Two Standards · Settlement details via Mission Local · Mayor’s official announcement · Coordinating Council background via SF Bay View
SERIES: The Price of Being Poor
Here’s our song/video for this article:
Alicia Myers – I want to thank you (live)
