1,500-Plus Building Code Violations in SF's Mission District

The epicenter of San Francisco’s affordable housing difficulties received an extra helping of bad news: The city’s Department of Building Inspections has found 1,564 housing code violations in more than 150 residential buildings in the Mission District during the 2014-2015 fiscal year.

According to coverage by KQED, this new report—the first of its kind in San Francisco—was spurred by a series of apartment fires in this neighborhood. Many of the residential buildings in this section of the city are old, with some dating back to the 1890s, and the violations that were discovered ran the gamut from collapsed ceilings and broken stairs to pest infestations and unabated lead paint.

“The Mission historically has had a difficult housing stock to maintain, so we’ve always had a high number of violations in the Mission,” said Senior Housing Inspector James Sanbonmatsu. “But, we didn’t realize it was this many.”

Housing in the Mission District has been a sociopolitical sore spot in recent years, with many longtime tenants complaining that efforts to gentrify this traditionally working-class community with luxury housing has made the neighborhood unaffordable for many residents. The increase in fires in the Mission Districts has exacerbated tensions, and the San Francisco Fire Department acknowledged that it has a backlog of 140 cases that are being investigated for possible arson.