actual housing. there is one kitchen in my building with 75 people. that allows approximately three minutes per meal, do the math, to cook a meal. you cannot cook a meal in three minutes. they will not allow my caregiver is to come in. they have continuously discriminated and retaliated against me because of me speaking my rights as a disabled. when the power elevator goes out, there is no emergency procedure. i would starve to death in my room if it were not for my neighbors helping me. you cannot allow this kind of system to continue. you're discriminating against the disabled, and you are right before a lawsuit. you have to set up a system where the owners are fined $75 per day per tenant for everyday the elevator is out of service, or they are required to provide at least two meals a day if they do not have cooking facilities for every person in the building, where they are

required to eventually destroy that building for proper housing. if you do not set up a system that eliminates the discrimination inherent in the substandard housing that we are suffering under, i believe you deserve a lawsuit, and that is basically it. supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon. my name is vivian, would self- help for the elderly. under a program, we have case management and housing counseling, and we are also part of the transitional care network. our clients are fearful to speak in coming today, some of the issues i will not repeat, because they are repetitive, but there are some issues which have not been mentioned, which is that the space is very limited with sro's, so when we work with people who have been discharged from hospitals, we cannot put

the items that they need even temporarily in their room, even a commode or a walker. there is less than the required ada 3 feet of space after they put in their bed. for home delivered meals, attracted by the city, we could all lead provide one meal per day per client. a lot of those you are transitioning, they will not get a second meal from a city contract, so on less than a funding that can go purchase the grocery or hire a health worker to do that, they will be at home, eating only one meal a day, it may be dried foods for breakfast and simple dinners, and then it while we work with clients to help them do the appeal process or apply for different things, they do not get their mail in a timely manner or even get it at all, so it makes it very difficult even if case managers help appeal an advocate to them.

supervisor mar: ms. wong, what are the reasons they do not get their mail in a timely manner? >> most do not have mailboxes, so what will happen is they will stop by the common area or put it in a box, where all of the sale will be mixed in for the tenants, and some depending on the route that they are on, here they might wrap them up in rubber bands per tenant, but that does not stop the mail from getting lost or mistakenly picked up by other tenants or even stolen. supervisor mar: thank you. [no audio] if there are any more comments, please line up, and we will close public, in a few minutes. >> i want to thank you for holding this hearing. it is certainly long overdue. second, i want to think christina from the senior action network for the survey and their recommendations.

i urge you to follow the recommendations. i dissed want to highlight some of the points in the survey. 27% of the seniors have no working elevators, and the survey was based on the better nonprofits vs semiprivate sro's. certainly, the statistics would be higher if there is more investigation into profit with the sro. the waiting list for affordable housing for seniors, 15% of your seniors have been waiting 6 to 20 years for affordable housing. shame on you. seniors should not be living in sro's. because of your lack of code enforcement, seniors should not be living in sro's. you need to prioritize and allow them into affordable housing. if your parents knew that you treated seniors in sro's, it

would be very unhappy with you. one other thing. when a senior begums age 62 in the city, he or she is forced off of general assistance and has to receive early social security retirement. what that does is, that senior loses thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by being required to take early social security retirement, but the senior also loses the housing subsidy, so you need to change that policy. they should remain on general assistance until they are 65, when they can get their full social security. thank you. supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker. the last card i have is -- >> my name is carol. i am from -- my name is carol,

and i am from the senior center. i am a participants. a problem right now is finding things for seniors. there does not seem to be enough. i am having a problem with getting a 90-day ban and going to the shelter, being told, "we can take you today, but we have to drop you in 90 days, because somebody dropped somebody else's bed, and that is yours." this happened twice, so i took it to the committee. there is something wrong there. it is affecting my health. maybe this happens to a lot of people. i think something needs to be done about more housing for seniors.

i am having problems doing that, too. i am still trying to get it. it is the issue of housing for seniors. they have sort of mix it altogether. we have let seniors have less opportunity to have jobs and to have money to get some of the housing. i can only pay 30% of my small income, so i feel i am sort of in a box. housing seniors and a rate we can afford. supervisor mar: thank you. supervisor cohen? supervisor cohen: when you say that things are politically

inspired or that it is politics, what reason? >> it is a long story, but to make it short, i lost property. i was a property owner and lost property, ok? across from me was one of the biggest drug houses. not only users, but they were dealing drugs. even the ladies in the community said they closed all of the halfway houses except for the one across from your house. i got that house closed within two weeks of going to a community meeting. supervisor cohen: this is in alameda county? >> al liby account. i am in san francisco because i exhausted my ability to get housing there in the shelters, so i am over here. i can mention this one center, the one i complained about recently. the woman was really nasty to me. i have never seen her before in my life.

maybe it is part of that group. i have worked for the federal government. if any of them or their relatives are here and following the around, i have to work harder. supervisor cohen: thank you. supervisor mar: i believe this is the last speaker. please line up. you would like to speak. >> hi, i am colleen, and i work at st. anthony's. i wanted to talk about a few things related to hunger and people who live in sro's. i think people oftentimes when they think of this, it is all on house people, but we have a lot of people who have houses and incomes. a lot are in sfi, who are eating

in our dining room, and we have seen huge increases in the number of people who come in our senior hour. that is the part of time at the beginning of the day when seniors and people with disabilities can eat first in the dining room. it is about 30% of our dining room guests are seniors and people with disabilities, and we serve around 3000 meals per day. for a lot of the guests who are seniors or people with disabilities, many of them live in sro's. i think it is important that for many of them, one form of income that they have is ssi. in the state of california, those are ineligible for what used to be called a food stamp benefits, cal fresh, said this very important nutrition benefits is not available to them. at the same time, many of them live in places where they do not have access to cooking facilities. so there is a huge barrier, and

living on low income. ssi is about 90% of the poverty level and not having the ability to receive federal nutrition benefits and not having the benefit to cook at home, so oftentimes the only options for eating is eating in congregants settings or getting home delivered meals or having help from a worker if you have kitchen facilities for someone to do meal prep and shopping for you if you cannot do it on your own. we are seeing a huge increase, and we wanted to come and talk about that as related to people living in sro's. supervisor mar: i will make sure to follow up with you about the hunger and the food insecurity. >> and the recipients, who do not get cal fresh, if you are wondering why. >> hello, my name is and when. i am here because i am disability.

i am staying at an sro hotel. the people with hiv and disability people, we do not know if it is not proper or private, and we get subsidized from the federal government. there is a lot of bling in going on, right in front of staff. how can you believe in case management when you left people call you -- when you let people call you "punk," "fag." you cannot even say that you are gay, because other tenants say you do not have a right to show your gayness, and to have this in san francisco -- i am also here to tell you that we have language barriers.

things happen in front of staff that they do not say you cannot do that. people tied things to their doors to make sure if someone has been in or out. all of this was three years ago. it seems that this is actually keeping us on the side. people you never know who are on the street. it would be free if it is a shelter. we pay money. we really hope this is the moment where we can come together and have a different

type of case management. supervisor mar: thank you so much. thank you. so i would just like to ask if commissioner olague can come back up and wrapped it up. i know there are a number of recommendations. i know be closed public comment, but if you could kind of comment and especially move towards recommendations of the report. >> thank you for taking all of the time. we will start with josh. >> oh we have broken down -- again, i am josh from the housing collaborative. the way it is broken down in the report, the first section is about enforcement.

this is one of the top areas that needs attention that will dramatically improve the quality of life form lot of tenants here in san francisco, and under that, there were just some brief things i wanted to say. the first one was about working telephone jacks, which is required. each needs to have a working phone jack, and it is not because of age or disability status. they need to read that channel to the outside world, to make appointments with their doctors, to be able to check in with family members that they are ok. there is a huge component that did not get talked about today. there is not an integrated plan.

these are all situations, and folks will need to get on the phone, and i just wanted to give a ps of anecdotal evidence. out of the people that i personally interviewed for this survey, 57% of those people have a phone number that could be reached at. the others did not. when it came time a couple of weeks ago to bring people up, that number dropped from 57% to 26% of the people that i personally interviewed, his number was still functioning. supervisor mar: so they lost their service some now. >> yes, or they had their number changed, and some of them i do not know what happened. this is an easy thing.

i pull this out which is especially important for seniors and people with disabilities. they spoke about placements, really bad living conditions. and taking the time to inspect the place, in the building, not just looking at it on paper. some of the buildings i have been in actually look fantastic from the street. supervisor mar: the department of public health and the department of public health? >> it would come from which department? >> i would also assume from the fire department. these were fire code violations,

as well. the third was talking about the difference between contract compliance and code enforcement. a lot better conditions according to the codes, with some of the nonprofit hotels. i do not want to diminish that fact. we are able to get better conditions through specific contract language. this is using it as a tool, and i think it is very difficult to get people to participate in code enforcement because it is so complete driven. and just because there is mold on the wall, and there is a leaky sink, you have to remember that there are a lot of things competing for people's

attention. is an unhealthy to have more on your wall? absolutely, but believe it or not, in may not be someone's number one problem that they have to deal with a in a specific day. it means they may not have the best information for what is happening, including folks with disabilities and seniors. and then the last one we wanted to include was an enforcement structure that is efficient and responsive. that includes time the consequences. rosemary spoke earlier about the dbi process. there is a city department that you can look all this information up. buy a dress or by blog and line number.

it seems to be working. this is briefly about enforcement. i will just say that when it comes to city hall, on behalf of tenants, it really is enforcement. people tell us all of the time that if they would just enforce what is on the books, we have a lot of protections. it is not like i am on the peninsula or in another part of the country where we do not have these protections. on paper, they are there. what tenants are looking for, what the collaborative are looking for, our solutions to the process. supervisor mar: supervisor wiener has a question. supervisor wiener: i am glad you are looking at that. there is not a day that goes by where we have all of the world

was -- rulees on the books. whether it is recreation and parks have been very few people, so they cannot enforce things, or the department of public works. unfortunately, we have this bad dynamic in the city, where we are not devoting enough resources towards enforcement generally it could be spotty depending on the situation. it is really a major thing we have to grapple with. we have rules, and we have them for a reason, and the impact people's life or their quality of life. >> sure. just real quick before i pass this back to christina, i know there were some questions earlier about bedbugs, and i have been working with another group that has been looking

specifically at the issue of bedbugs. the department of public health, they are getting between 505 flandres 50 complaints of bedbugs in sro's, and if you do the math, that is about 1 per building -- 550 or 500 complaints of bedbugs. for all certified pest control to report this, you would be able to see the scope of the problem and how often the bedbug eradication is a parallel process. so with that, i will pass it over to christine to talk about some of the new policies. supervisor mar: thank you much for your great work, too, sir. >> in five, that is where there

is more detail, but just for the sake of time, i am going to breeze through it. and you have heard many of them during the public comment period. the new policy that we were proposing would be to enforce the use of putting grab bars in bathrooms. on lower floors or in buildings with working elevators. one of the things i did want to kind of repeat is some of the seniors you have heard from seem pretty satisfied with their living situation. there are two that our senior only buildings, and one is direct access to housing building. another will definitely be able to answer more to that. adequate security, access to nutritious food, which is a very broad statement.

we could get more specific over the next few months. desk clerks, present in each sro, and they apparently haven't eight week program that trains people to be desk clerks, and their curriculum includes strategies used in support of housing, professional boundaries and harassment law. it includes harassment issues, a universal safety technique. it seems they have a pretty comprehensive program. as you heard from some of the speakers, it is hard to sometimes access these residents who live in the private sro's. it is sometimes hard to get in

there. off-site options. home supportive services. affordable housing. we talked briefly about service and about coming up with some kind of an outreach program, working collaboratively. hopefully they can engage in something with seniors. and local access to community mental health, unfortunately we did not have the time to survey the case management, but we did do this with the tenderloin. many of them wanted to come to speak. they are on the frontline. a lot of them had a thanksgiving dinner today, so they could not

make it out, but some of the issues, again, public safety. they measure -- mentioned mental health issues around the depression, isolation. some singers, issues with dementia. those are some of the issues that came of that the case managers raised, and food access was another one, i believe it was in the survey where it is mentioned that sro should really be incorporated into the city's disaster planning. again, these are really huge things. the senior action network, we are totally committed to continuing this work and to get to more of the detail to make some of these things happen with the folks that are here.

briefly, before closing down, i wanted to thank karen babbitt for creating this report. there were a lot of late-night hours, because i think there were a lot of sloppy hours. thomas who spoke, in the senior action board, who were really helpful in pulling this together, as well. i wanted to bring up commissioner walker real quick, because finding is obviously an issue that we have to look at. how do we pay for this. >> supervisors, think you for putting your attention to this important and vexing issue, when i have been dealing with for 10 years on the building commission. in collaboration, the sro collaboration is funded completely by the department of building inspection.

it was initially with public health, but we now find this every year for the code enforcement. the issue was complained driven. i have always been a fan, and we have problematic buildings. we know where they are. i sit on the litigation committee. we send our inspectors out. they sort of fix it, to the point where it is a result case. the next week, the problems are back, so the issue of having inspections on a routine basis would be good. we have, however, at least as far as i know right now, five housing inspector positions on

hold. we have a need for many more. we have a need for training. we have a need for better collaboration between dbi and the health department on who is leading and the protocol, and we also need more money for this, for all of our enforcement efforts and for increasing participation by our collaborative. i think a good idea would be a targeted sr. outreach program through our collaborative and in addition to what we have. i think that the problem is only going to accelerate, and i think we have to get our arms around it. i would also point out the seismic and mitigation issues and preparing for an earthquake. we had a bond on the ballot-year that was going to fix 38 of these residential hotels out of the 50 that need to be seismically strengthen. we still need to do that. i encourage you to