SAN FRANCISCO—THE CRAMPED SPACE they call home in a five-story apartment building on Mission Street is a seeming affront to Jose “Joe” Ferrer and his roommate, Mang Aurelio Domingo.

Those who know them— or at least who they used to be back in the Philippines — know they deserve better. Not a place like Unit 225, which they share with yet a third occupant, a fellow Filipino surviving on financial aid from the US government.

Ferrer, 51, and Domingo, 65, are former professors in reputable universities in Manila, with Domingo having authored a college textbook. But here they are ordinary Joes— Ferrer is a teaching assistant cum department store clerk; Domingo a security guard — trapped in their humble space.

Their shared apartment is more of a bodega, a pile of used clothes, seldom-used appliances, balikbayan boxes, and an overall accumulation of American junk. There’s very little room left for decent sleep on their old double-decker. Not to mention the gas pipe hanging under the ceiling that’s their makeshift clothesline.

For many of its 500 or so occupants, mostly Filipinos, the rest of the Mint Mall and Hall, also known as Apartment 957, gives a general feeling of despair—its reeking garbage depot, smelly carpeted corridors, vandalized elevator, to name a few details.

Just like Ferrer and Domingo, they’re haunted by the same problem of decent housing, a Philippine reality that has followed them from across the Pacific. In a fine tourist city like San Francisco, home still is a problem.

Where Filipinos live

The city’s sweeping gentrification that began over two decades ago has limited housing options for immigrants like Filipinos. The rise of swanky condominium buildings, convention centers, and malls sent rental soaring, further underscoring the social divide between the haves and have-nots.

“That’s the natural flow and the effect is that low-income residents will have no place to stay anymore,” conceded Fr. Ed Dura, pastor of the predominantly Filipino St. Patrick’s Church on Mission Street, in an interview.

Filipinos who can afford them didn’t go for condos, but instead relocated to neighboring areas like Daly City, Vallejo, and Hercules. The unfortunate ones stayed and found refuge in buildings like Apartment 957, the best place their money can buy.

In a way, Apartment 957 is the enduring symbol of the community’s last stand against San Francisco’s gentrification. Located at the heart of the South of Market area (Soma), the building offers arguably the cheapest lease in all of San Francisco. Until late last year, a studio apartment there could fetch as low as $500 monthly. In contrast, a similar space in nearby condominiums commanded at least $1,500.

Ferrer and Domingo’s lease is exactly $501. Divide the rent between them and a third tenant and you’re basically getting a house for a song.

Filipino ghetto

But you get only your money’s worth at Apartment 957. Not long ago, it was—and probably still is—the unenviable “Filipino ghetto” of San Francisco to many observers.

Many of Soma’s homeless, particularly Filipinos, found regular refuge in the apartment’s corridors, much to the fear and displeasure of its paying residents. The scenario exposed them to danger, the possibility of strangers breaking into their homes.

Vagrants sneaked into the apartment usually late in the evening, slipping by the electronic door after legitimate tenants had gone by. They stayed well into the morning, lying on spread newspapers, a bottle of liquor on hand. Tenants suspected they were on drugs too.

Nenette Platero, 51, recalled isolated cases of break-ins, apparently because of the lack of security in the apartment building. Estefania Menchavez, 65, said her son was beaten up when he confronted a group of homeless on his way to their unit last year.

“It’s unfair. We want to have peace,” Menchavez recalled her son protesting. She feared that her son, an engineering graduate at Devry University, could end up wasted in the hands of some nameless thugs. “They have no life, but my son has a bright future ahead of him.”

The familiar presence of homeless Filipinos contributed to the steady decline of Apartment 957, a war-time structure owned by a Filipino family, the Nocons. The building, like several other residential structures in the Bay Area, is managed by the American firm Meridian Management.

“They were smoking and drinking and scattering food all over,” Menchavez said in an interview at her apartment unit. “They would piss inside the elevator and write graffiti all over it. It was a total mess.”

Much of the problem of sanitation pointed to both the tenants and the building management—and the enduring apathy between them. Father Dura described it as a “You don’t care, so why should I care” attitude.

The result was revolting to the senses.

Garbage problem

Every day, the garbage depot at the end of each corridor was an overflowing heap of trash that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The disposal system was simple: shoot your bag in the hole and it’ll go straight down, where a garbage truck collects the pile regularly.

But old habits die hard for many of Apartment 957’s occupants.

Evangeline Nocon, 59, one of the building’s two resident managers and unrelated to the owner, couldn’t hide her dismay in an interview: “Sometimes you could even see used toilet and sanitary napkins scattered all over. It’s disgusting!
They seem to forget that they’re now in America and no longer in the Philippines,” she said, pointing to a supposed “Third-World” mentality that continued to influence their actions hundreds of miles away from home.

So how do you solve a problem like Apartment 957?

Over the years, tenants have developed a collective awareness of what was becoming of their building. It was dying, indeed, but hardly anyone exerted any concrete and effective effort at revival.

Their priorities lay elsewhere from turning their units into decent American homes. Understandably so, since many of them were saddled by day and night jobs to support families back home. Thus, a sacrifice or two in personal comfort wasn’t such a big deal.

Ferrer, for instance, works three shifts as a teaching assistant for special children, garments attendant at Macy’s and security guard at the nearby Bayanihan Center on Sundays.

But several others—like Platero, Menchavez, and 85-year-old war veteran Buenaventura Santos—didn’t share their neighbor’s passivity. They spoke up at an innocuous gathering initiated at St. Patrick’s Church by the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP) in June 2007.

Filipino dignity

The SFOP is a faith-based advocacy group involved in immigrant rights, violence prevention, healthcare and housing. St. Patrick’s became a member two years ago and the problem at Apartment 957 was the parishioners’ initial advocacy work with the group.

Convinced that the matter involved the basic issue of the “dignity of the human person,” Father Dura immediately threw his support behind his parishioners.

“As a church, we need to give witness to the people,” said Father Dura. “So we ‘conscienticized’ them and made them aware of their rights.”

In the June meeting, the SFOP gathered around 50 residents and asked them to tell their “housing stories”—meaning, list down complaints—about the apartment. The group, in turn, gave them a crash course on their rights as tenants under state laws.

Sarah Nolan, SFOP’s point person for Apartment 957, said many tenants were initially afraid to speak out, fearing that the building management might kick them out. Losing their place was apparently something they couldn’t afford—it’s cheap and very close to their workplaces.

Santos was just as worried in the beginning, especially for his son. The boy works for a care home and as a clerk at Ross department store, a walking distance from 957.

“If we moved out, he would have to travel far and spend more on fare,” explained the father, whose pension shoulders their unit’s monthly lease. “Of course, I’d like to find a better place, but I don’t want my son to suffer either.”

The SFOP allayed such fears, assuring tenants that building owners could not just drive them away, especially for airing legitimate concerns.

Father Dura said he also made it clear that the advocacy was not meant to drive a wedge between tenants and the management: “We were not encouraging them to make enemies out of each other, but to work as Christians, to understand each other and know how they can help each other.”

But not everybody embraced the priest’s message of Christian unity.

Shaming the tenants

The building management was initially defensive, if not hesitant, to deal with the SFOP-led tenants. Many residents themselves expressed discomfort at the involvement of “outsiders” like the SFOP in the internal matters of 957.

Among them were Ferrer, an erstwhile member of the group. He quit the SFOP soon after it dipped its fingers into the apartment controversy. What he saw in Nolan and company was a naive and one-track approach to a many-layered problem.

It didn’t sit well with Ferrer and like-minded residents that the SFOP brought the matter out in public. He said the effort achieved nothing other than shame both tenants and management while obscuring the real issues.

“The problem with the SFOP was that they mixed the essential with the non-essential struggles of the tenants,” he said, explaining that “on principle,” he too backed the need to provide residents with better living conditions.

An “essential” issue for him was sanitation and the lax security that allowed the presence of bums in the building. He said they could have been addressed “internally” by tenants and the management without the involvement of a third party like the SFOP.

A “non-essential” matter, to him, was the complaint that mildew had accumulated in the toilet and kitchen sink in an apartment unit of an elderly couple. He said it was an “isolated” case that had come to be, simply because of the tenants’ inability to clean their own place.

It was this image that permeated TV screens following a news crew’s visit of Apartment 957 in response to an invitation by the SFOP.

Building manager Evangeline Nocon sought to put this particular matter in perspective: “The main concern was molds. When they moved in, the apartment was clean, newly painted, with a new refrigerator, new carpet and new stove. Then came the molds later on because they weren’t cleaning their own units.”

Housing aberration

Apartment 957 can be considered an aberration in San Francisco’s housing system, with as many as five people were “allowed” to live in a single studio unit. The law set the limit to only two, but 957’s resident managers seem to have looked the other way.

What seemed to prevail was the managers’ affinity with their compatriots. Of the apartment’s approximately 500 tenants, all but six were Filipinos, according to Evangeline Nocon, who shares the resident management job with Jose Sarmogenes, also a Filipino.

All the while, Meridian knew nothing about the accommodation being accorded to many of 957’s occupants, she said.

“It’s a private family apartment building, not a housing place,” she justified. “To help, we allowed families to stay. You couldn’t just drive away the children of a couple staying in a studio unit.”

Among tenants, they had also developed a “scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours” mentality. Call it their own “omerta.”

Code of silence

This code of silence allowed several tenants to crowd into a room with impunity. Ferrer said his unit had as many as seven occupants before he came.

The obvious problem with space and personal convenience aside, the arrangement worked well for the residents. By splitting the monthly rent among them, they were able to save more money to send to their families in the Philippines, according to Ferrer.

Later, resourceful tenants came up with yet another idea. The unit occupant who had been there first “sub-leased” the room to two or more tenants. Ferrer said the “lessee” usually didn’t mind since he shelled out only around $200 monthly.

Despite its poor physical condition, Apartment 957 remained the best place for low-income Filipinos in the Soma area, especially newly arrived immigrants, said Ferrer. So much so that tenants usually gave up better housing offers that came their way.

In 2005, he qualified for a housing project by the Bayanihan Center, he said. The new unit, a renovated hotel room, was much better in appearance than his present space.

But ultimately let it go since he would have to pay a higher monthly rent of $495 for a space much smaller than his room at Apartment 957. The Bayanihan space also provided no individual toilet, unlike in 957.

Still, for tenants like Platero and her group, staying at 957 didn’t mean accepting everything bad about the apartment.

Addicts in the neighborhood

The empty space behind the lone window in Platero’s unit had become a repository of garbage disposed of by tenants living upstairs. On many occasions, she said, water also accumulated in the same space, instantly turning it into a filthy aquarium.

Menchavez also refused to take sitting down the constant threat posed by homeless Filipinos who had free access to the apartment. “I also pity them because they’re my kababayan,” she said. “But what can I do? Some of them have become drug addicts already.”

Like many of his neighbors, Santos was concerned about the apparent inefficiency of the apartment’s maintenance people to deal even with simple household problems like a broken lock. He recalled that a similar problem in his unit took all of 10 months to get fixed.

Evangeline Nocon said resident managers were well aware of the conditions at 957. “I’m also very concerned because I stay here,” she said. “I don’t want my own visitors to say that I, as resident manager, couldn’t even enforce cleanliness in my own apartment. Yes, the problem has long been there, but the tenants are also uncooperative.”

She said she had also brought up the matter to Meridian through regular memos, but got no reply each time. The building management’s apparent disregard of the conditions at 957 could be gleaned from a grossly inadequate maintenance staff.

Left to service all 116 units of the building were Filipino Leo Navarro, the 62-year-old lone janitor, and Spaniard Juan Guzman, 42, the lone handyman.

“Imagine how big the building is and there are only one janitor, one maintenance man, and two resident managers,” she said. “We really can’t get the job done without the cooperation of the tenants.”

But why, in the first place, did Meridian assign only four people for the tough job at Apartment 957?

Nocon surmised that the management simply didn’t want to spend more on personnel, noting that Guzman had been earning only $13 an hour over the last 30 years. She said Guzman, a Spaniard, was even more unfortunate with his $9 per hour salary. “Up to now, he’s yet to receive his raise of $9.36!”

Under threat from City Hall sanction, Meridian finally initiated key changes in the apartment.

Banned Filipinos

Gone are the vagrants in its corridors, mainly because of a lone security guard posted on night duty. Nocon said they were gone also because of the expulsion of a Filipino couple suspected of peddling banned substances in one of the units. It was believed that many of the loitering strangers were their clients.

The elevator has been cleaned of graffiti and the agonizing stink of human piss. It’s still old, but tenants and visitors no longer stay away from it.

On the downside, rent has been increased closer to the state standard. This means that newcomers will now have to pay $895 monthly for a studio apartment and $1,300 for a one-bedroom unit.

The amounts are still relatively cheap compared to the city’s unfriendly housing rates. But no longer can a multitude of tenants squeeze into a single room and share the rent. Nocon said rooms are now limited to a maximum of three occupants.

But some things don’t exactly change for Apartment 957. Many tenants still can’t shoot their garbage right, leaving small piles at the depot every now and then.

Father Dura looks at sanitation in the context of the Filipino identity and respectability in a culturally diverse environment such as San Francisco: “We will never be respected as a people if we do not respect ourselves and the law.”

In a community where cleanliness is still much to be desired, tenants like Menchavez hope that personal conviction—and example—would eventually rub on to their generally apathetic neighbors, and eventually, lead to their apartment’s resurrection.

“I am not rich, but I am not dirty,” she said. “That’s how I want people to see me.”

Editor’s Note: This story is an excerpt of an article the reporter wrote for the University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Fellows Program for Young Professionals in the Media.