spotlight : sfexaminer – excerpt (includes audio track)
Several months after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged a half dozen red-tagged South of Market warehouses and SRO’s beyond repair, The TODCO Group’s President John Elberling and Deputy Mayor Brad Paul went to Mayor Art Agnos with a shocking proposal: “Let’s make Sixth Street an Earthquake Recovery redevelopment area to replace all the lost housing and build new neighborhood facilities for its 2,500 SRO tenants and the longtime SOMA Filipino-American community.” “Are you sure you want redevelopment on skid row?” asked the surprised mayor. “We have to,” Elberling replied. “If we don’t start to build our future Sixth Street community now there will never be one.” “Ok,” Agnos responded, “but responsibility for the consequences will be on you.”
TODCO was the community nonprofit housing company founded by “TOOR,” the strident opponents of the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Project and its bulldozer demolition of thousands of SRO units for the Moscone Convention Center 20 years before. Since then, TODCO had built three senior replacement housing residences in Yerba Buena nearby, two named after those founders, Woolf House and Mendelsohn House. That’s why Mayor Agnos was so surprised to hear TODCO’s bold proposal to use the intimidating powers of redevelopment for SOMA community building instead of downtown expansion and commercial development as usual. 33 years later the results of the two decade “South of Market Redevelopment Area” project, which ended suddenly when Governor Jerry Brown halted all redevelopment statewide, are the foundation for SOMA’s lower-income communities today…
To begin with, over the next 25 years 1,018 units of permanently affordable housing for the lower-income SRO tenants and families of South of Market were built in 17 nonprofit projects in the Project Area with Redevelopment Agency financial support. Two residential hotels that were damaged beyond repair by the earthquake were replaced with newly-built SRO’s with 246 total low-rent units, including first, TODCO’s own Knox SRO built on the cleared Sixth Street former location of the red-tagged and demolished Anglo Hotel, and later the new Plaza Apartments…(more)