Houses of Horror

Spooky season is here — grocery stores overflow with candy and plastic pumpkins, the veil is only getting thinner, and the empty house in your neighborhood feels a tad more uncanny.

The idea of an unused home is even more sinister in San Francisco, a city struggling to survive another tech boom. Rents have increased 26%, and eviction attempts are up 44% in the past year — all the while, almost ten thousand unhoused people sleep outside every night. 

How many ‘haunted houses’ are among us?

The latest count has it close to 50,000 vacant units in the city, but like many statistics, it’s a hotly contested number. Some argue that they’re not truly vacant, and according to how the city defines these units, this is true. Some are listed as second homes, some are on the market but not leased, others are under redevelopment - the list goes on, all considered “justified vacancies.” But if you are of the mind that housing is a human right, all this may seem like just housing being hoarded: units too expensive for working-class residents, units held off the market or “renovated” to reset rent control and/or control housing supply, and vacation homes in a city of 8,000 unhoused people.

There are zombie houses lurking in every section of the city — there are five within my own five minute trick-or-treating radius. The real scare, though, is often what (or who) lurks behind these vacancies. In true mystery machine fashion,* I was able to unmask some of the ghoulish and ghastly landlords possessing my neighborhood. 

A step outside and already an empty building looms at 625 Hyde St. A four story, seven-unit skeleton, tagged and run down as its boarded up windows blankly stare back. According to DBI complaints, in 2011 one of its lower extremities — a sewer line — began gushing and leaking on a neighboring building for weeks without end. That same year the last eviction was recorded, an Ellis Act withdrawal assisted by the infamous Bornstein Law Group. Since then, the building has sat vacant. The glutton hoarding this once beautiful San Francisco Victorian? Yoko “Ziggie” Kato, a man sued for domestic violence, hoarder owner of over a dozen other properties in the Bay Area, and issuer of over 300 eviction notices across his “portfolio.” Jeepers!

I shiver and scurry down the hill. But just a block away sits 656 O’Farrell, another ghost. A broad four-story building, it’s less visibly vacant, shrouded by thick cypress leaves. Upon closer inspection, there are doorbells punched out in a checkerboard smile, old withering curtains, and empty rooms. It has years of complaints recorded by the Department of Building Inspection: residents dealing with no heat, fighting mold, putting up with broken elevators, and many more issues of neglect. A fire in 2024 wiped out the top floor, and the neglectful owner let the shards of broken, blown out windows slowly spill glass onto the sidewalk for weeks. One of the last complaints is a neighbor concerned about “homeless break-ins” and people squatting in what’s clearly a vacant building. The Frankenstein behind this monster? Giampaolo Boschetti, owner of over 30 other San Francisco properties, who, one New Year’s Eve, ran over and killed a community elder in his pickup truck, resulting in an out-of-court settlement of $2 million.

Looking for respite, I hurry further down the hill and around the corner, only to run into another skeletal specter looming on the intersection of Polk and Ellis: the Civic Center Inn. A once esteemed budget motel, it now sits gutted and derelict, an undead monster barricaded in by DPW gates.

The motel has a vast history of slumlord tormentors, according to documents stored from the city’s Assessor-Recorder Office. First it was Vijay Patel, who bought it in 2004, but within five years had stopped paying the water bill. Soon Patel’s paradise was perpetually violating health and habitability codes, and in a little under a decade, the city filed over 100 liens against the building. Patel only managed to pay off 70% of those fees, all the while continuing to use the motel as collateral for millions of loans (that he consistently defaulted on). Still, he found a way to charge rent/room fees as he let his building crumble. Business!

Luckily for Patel, slumlords have lifelines in this city. A group of local financiers stepped in to take over his rotting loans, led by the heroic Joseph Giraudo. He had only a minor smear on his record: a 15-month stint in federal prison after leading a conspiracy to rig foreclosure auctions across Northern California. Giraudo and his associates (known as “The Big Five”) would collude with, bribe, and threaten bidders to control who won which properties, often artificially fixing the price to fit all their little business needs. In just three years of auction-rigging, the syndicate manipulated over $36 million worth of property purchases (but there are many testimonies that surfaced during the trial claiming the conspiracy had been running for much, much longer).

Giraudo would soon go on to sell the asset to CH Ellis LLC (also known as Core Hotels LLC), who seems to now be actively renovating the building. Slumlords in their own right, the individuals managing Core Hotels LLC recently lost a settlement to the city, who accused them of providing uninhabitable SROs for years. 

What does the future hold for the poor, mangled, beaten Civic Center Inn? Perhaps more uninhabitable SROs, where our city will pay these landlords millions and millions to house our poorest and most vulnerable neighbors.

So beware! In the days of billionaire mayors and trillion-dollar tech IPOs, the city is only getting spookier. As long as our housing is treated like an asset, our local Draculas will drink till they’re  full, and then some, and the scares will last far beyond this weekend…

* Some tenant tools made for meddling:

If you’re interested in joining the gang and finding the truth behind your local haunts, here are some helpful resources:

• Using a combination of a DBI sunshine request and roaming my neighborhood, I discovered there’s a handful of vacant buildings within just my 5 minute trick-or-treating radius
• Evictorbook - tells you who owns what property, as well as any other buildings they may own
• San Francisco’s backlog of DBI (Department of Building Inspection) complaints
• The California Secretary of State also has a tool for looking up LLCs registered in the state — handy when you find yourself on a block of buildings owned by spooky, mysterious, poorly-named ghost LLCs
• Talk to your local tenant union and they may have access to even more advanced tools, tips, and tricks!