Power = Legal assistance
“The most important
thing a lawyer can do is become an advocate
of powerless citizens. . . Lawyers should represent systems of justice.”
-- Ralph Nader,
public
interest lawyer (attorney)
This month’s Legal
Assistance to the Elderly (LAE) fundraiser was attended mostly by lawyers. In California
Ageism takes away power from older adults, who may protest that they’re not heard so
they seek “magical attorney letters” on law office letterhead to get attention,
or sue oppressors to regain control over their lives – whether it’s potential
loss of respect (elder abuse), home (evictions, habitability), standard of living (public benefits), independence (service dogs as reasonable accommodation), etc. As Gray
Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn noted, people go through more psychological
changes in the last 20 years of their life than they do in the first 60: “Older persons experience the traumas of
retirement; death of friends, spouse, children; lack of income, health,
mobility.” (Maggie Kuhn on Aging, 1977, p. 98)
San Francisco Main
Library’s exhibit, HEAL! Veterans and Their Service Dogs, is a photographic series about veterans with post-war
disabilities and their service dogs for hearing, psychiatric service, mobility
and medical alert provided through Operation Freedom Paws.
According
to David Solie, physician assistant and author of How to Say It to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders
(2004),
the “secret mission” of older adults is to maintain
control over their lives in face of almost daily losses (physical strength,
health, peer group, consultative authority, identity, physical space, financial
independence) and simultaneously to discover
their legacy. In trying to resolve this conflict (need for control
v. reflection to discover legacy), elderly will wander from subject to subject,
repeat stories we’ve heard, postpone decisions, go off on tangents, or describe
something in endless detail.
Solie
argues that older adults’ communication style is not a problem, but an attempt at problem-solving based on
developmental psychology to fulfill needs like self-esteem (associated with autonomy that is threatened by loss of
control) and legacy (a larger issue for consideration if one is not consumed by
focus on control). In the elderly,
attempts to resolve this developmental crisis propel them backward (v. forward) to reflect on what their lives have
meant. If this crisis is not resolved in
favor of generativity (creating legacy), then they experience stagnation.
Further, Solie theorizes
that what appears to be diminished
capacity in the majority of older adults is “slowing down” due to awareness
of their different developmental mission, which results in refocusing life’s
priorities from the goal-oriented productivity of middle-age years to reflective
activity. He explains that an aging
brain’s physiology changes to promote an older person’s need for reflection and
insight at the end of life: the prefrontal cortex (platform for working memory
capacity, processing information) takes longer to process multiple points of
information, so the external world may begin to fade, distraction sets in and
focus is compromised – but this lag time allows for wisdom to surface.
LAE Director Howard
Levy greets arriving guests at fundraiser.
Donations to LAE always welcome at http://laesf.org/#/donate/
“You teach yourselves the law, but I train your
minds. You come in here with a skull
full of mush; and if you survive, you leave thinking like a lawyer.”
-- The Paper Chase’s Law Professor Charles W.
Kingsfield, Jr.
While working with the
elderly seeking legal assistance in eviction cases based on nuisance claims, I
considered Solie’s ideas and wondered if any allegations of hoarding
and cluttering might be related to an older tenant’s need for control and
legacy: in the face of overwhelming losses, this creates a need to
“hang on tight” to a lifetime of collectibles (repository of memories), which
may represent one's legacy? Thus, we argue that nuisance was due to client’s mental health impairment
and request reasonable accommodation for additional time to clear out stuff to maintain tenancy? Yet, some clients will not acquiesce to a
defense that they find stigmatizing like a mental health disability, and might decide to pay for storage space rather than
their tenancy.
LAE’s staff attorney/lawyer
Tom Drohan plays stand-up bass with Shut-Ins, who play “Hulabilly,” a lively
amalgam of hillbilly, hula, folk and country music. Their CDs include Sing Songs of Pain and Joy and A Very Shut-Ins Xmas. Tom also plays “Roadhouse Swing” with ChazzCats,
and keeps his busy day job as housing lawyer.
“Lawyers know how to
apply law to power.” – Ralph Nader
In my visits to the
elderly living in SROs, what appears to be hoarding and cluttering is really a
lack of adequate physical space. Though
hoarding behavior seems to be more problematic (deferred maintenance, falls,
fire, pest infestation, etc.) as people age,
hoarding documents is empowering evidence!
For example, in determining a tenant’s lawful rent in San Francisco
Shut-Ins' drummer is LAE’s
tech guy. As landlords seek to take
advantage of rising real estate values fueled by the tech boom, low- and
moderate-income tenants including nonprofits risk losing their tenancies. Due to new building ownership,
LAE and other nonprofit tenants (including Eviction Defense Collaborative) are being
displaced from their office space within Twitter tax break zone (Market and 6th
Streets) next year while tolerating remodeling work this past year.
Legal assistance empowers the elderly by listening and working with them to honor their needs. In a case involving an elderly client who
faced eviction because he did not trust his building's management to perform bed bug control treatment in his rental unit, I was aghast hearing an Adult Protective Services worker
suggest a mental assessment for possible conservatorship or 5150 (involuntary
psychiatric hold). Fortunately, empathetic
LAE staff intervened to speak on behalf of client (too frail to be present at
hearing) who felt manhandled by property management team but could be persuaded
to agree to pest control when approached in a more respectful manner and with his input in making arrangements.
“It’s hard to avoid the ‘doing for.’ Some people are hungry
for attention and are quite ready to be cared for, well on the way to wrinkled
babyhood.”
–Maggie Kuhn
On Aging (1977, p. 23)
According to Robert
Butler’s Why Survive? Being Old in
America (1975), there was no public or private legal program for older people until 1968 when a
grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity funded Legal Research and Services for the Elderly under
sponsorship of the National Council of Senior Citizens. In 1972, National Senior Citizens Law Center
(NSCLC) was formed to be a national resource to protect the rights of low-income older
adults in America
In California
·
Alameda County
In contrast, San Francisco
County
Grammar lesson: “For” is used to indicate on behalf (e.g., do for seniors), while “to” is used to indicate directed action (e.g., do to seniors).
“Words are the essential tools of the law. In the study of law, language has great importance; cases turn on the meaning that judges ascribe to words, and lawyers must use the right words to effectuate the wishes of their clients. . . .”
At Books, Inc. in
San Francisco, Timothy Shriver introduced his new memoir, Fully Alive:
Discovering What Matters Most, about finding inspiration (overcome fear of
judgment) from his aunt Rosemary Kennedy and people with intellectual
disabilities he’s met as Special Olympics Chairman, collaborating with Farrelly
brothers in The Ringer film, campaign not to use r-word,
and his preference for using “diffabilities” (different abilities) to
rethink that there are multiple intelligences. When asked about Alzheimer's, he mentioned his late father Sargent with Alzheimer's demanded much compassion and his sister Maria's work with The Alzheimer's Project.
Elderly v. Seniors
“We are not ‘senior citizens’ or ‘golden
agers.’ We are the elders, the experienced ones; we are maturing, growing adults
responsible for the survival of our society.
We are better educated, healthier, with more at stake in this
society. We are not wrinkled babies,
succumbing to trivial, purposeless waste of our years and our time. We are a new breed of old people. There are more of us alive today than at any
other time in history.”
– Maggie Kuhn On Aging (1977, p. 14)
– Maggie Kuhn On Aging (1977, p. 14)
What do we call old people? How do we define an old person? Should laws treat older adults as a special
class “deserving” of special treatment due to ageism that makes them vulnerable
to discrimination and disadvantage?
·
In San
Francisco evictions based on owner or relative move-in (under rent control), older adults age 60+ or disabled (SSI eligible) tenants with 10 or more years
tenancy, or catastrophically ill tenants with 5 or more years tenancy have protected
status and cannot be evicted from a building of two or more units.
·
In San
Francisco evictions based on landlord removing building from rental market (Ellis Act, under rent control),
older adults age 62+ with at least one year tenancy are entitled to one-year notice (rather than 120
days notice) and additional relocation payment.
·
There are challenges in
representing older adults:
·
lack of capacity
due to cognitive impairment from dementia, stroke, depression or other
condition
·
sudden death
(LAE had sad case of elderly couple with more than 5 years but less than 10 years
tenancy, when catastrophically ill husband died leaving wife to fight owner move-in eviction without
his protected status)
·
frailty so older adult accompanied by relative (spouse, child) who may have conflicting interests
(always communicate directly to older adult as client)
In 1961, President John F.
Kennedy convened the first White House Conference on Aging. Four years later, his successor President
Lyndon B. Johnson included three bills to assist older adults as part of his
Great Society reforms:
- Older Americans Act (OAA), which established the federal Administration on Aging, to provide comprehensive services for older adults;
- Medicare to provide basic hospital and supplemental medical insurance to older adults and younger persons with disabilities; and
- Medicaid to provide health coverage for low-income persons of all ages and funding expansion of nursing home industry.
OAA’s Title III programs
(nutrition, community services) are not means-tested
and are not permitted to charge for
their services (though voluntary donations are encouraged), but expected to
target services to individuals with the greatest economic or social needs
(low-income minorities) and yet Congress has never appropriated sufficient funds
to make them universal in practice. In
fact, OAA expired in 2011, and we’re waiting for Congress to restart the
reauthorization process next year.
Though most OAA programs
are age-segregated,
they end up benefiting all ages; for
example, providing adult day care, meals and transportation frees mobile
younger adults from providing direct care or support to their aging parents. However, developing a coordinated long-term
care system remains a public policy challenge due to partisan politics and the
existing fragmentation of programs and services with different entitlements and
eligibility requirements.
Organizing around common concerns for social justice (Gray Panthers’ motto is
“Age and Youth in Action”) is the legacy of Maggie Kuhn, a proponent of
generational interdependence (v.
independence), cooperation (v.
competition), intergenerational
involvement (v. age segregation), public
interest (v. self interest)—for more Power to the People including Elderly!
Legacies
“ . . .the day of death is better than the day of birth . . . The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the stupid is in the house of rejoicing."
Legacies
“ . . .the day of death is better than the day of birth . . . The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the stupid is in the house of rejoicing."
-- Ecclesiastes 7:1, 4
Perhaps it’s my
introverted nature, but I prefer memorial services than other occasions for reflection and inspiration. This year I
attended two services that stand out: my
94-year-old landlord, who knew me for more than half my life; and a 61-year-old
tenant advocate, who never met me.
First, my landlord: a
retired County District Attorney
When my landlord got out of his pickup truck with toolbox, he passed as a handyman, a real do-it-yourself landlord who repaired my windows and often accompanied electricians and plumbers doing work in his multi-unit apartment building. Even after he retired from landlording, delegating duties to a property management firm, he continued to check on the building, which I saw as an opportunity to check on him – how was he and his wife doing in their retirement community inSacramento
When my landlord got out of his pickup truck with toolbox, he passed as a handyman, a real do-it-yourself landlord who repaired my windows and often accompanied electricians and plumbers doing work in his multi-unit apartment building. Even after he retired from landlording, delegating duties to a property management firm, he continued to check on the building, which I saw as an opportunity to check on him – how was he and his wife doing in their retirement community in
After my landlord died, I
attended a celebration of his life at the retirement community. As the only tenant present, I could say he
was the model landlord, embodying the fruitages of the spirit (“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control” from Galatians
5:22-23) along with being fair and responsive – the same qualities consistently
mentioned by his family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. I was inspired learning about my landlord’s
legacy in representing justice in his legal career. . .and doing so with
civility, which made a comeback with this year's California bar admittees who took
a new oath: “As an
officer of the court, I will strive to conduct myself at all times with dignity,
courtesy, and integrity.”
Second, the tenant
advocate: Ted Gullicksen,
director of San Francisco Tenants Union since 1988 until his sudden death in October.
Though I never met Ted in person, I admired his advocacy work from afar
so his memorial was an opportunity to learn more about his life and legacy from
his associates.
Just outside Mission High School auditorium was a wall papered with a collage of photos, posters and news
clippings of Ted's work to fight displacement and protect rent control; a table
held the tools of his trade—bolt-cutters (to get into locked abandoned buildings
to occupy in his Homes Not Jails campaign), bullhorn (to shout his messages), chocolate espresso beans (for sustenance) and SFTU Tenants Rights Handbook (given to members and updated annually
that often included legislation that he helped draft) among other items.
Prayer flags created by attendees and strung outside auditorium. Ted liked donuts so one flag had a picture of a donut with message, "I donut want a San Francisco without Ted." Ted spoke out against landlords making unilateral changes to leases, like one who evicted an elderly couple who had goldfish in their unit.
Upon entering the
auditorium, we received a 12-page booklet filled with photos and remembrances
about Ted’s lifelong commitment to social justice. Inside the auditorium, Brass Liberation Orchestra welcomed attendees: Housing is a human right!
Artist Hugo
Kobayashi wears his portrait of Ted and dog Falcor, who was adopted by
Sara Shortt of
Housing Rights Committee.
Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi in dark suit standing in back row. Sheriff’s
Office took a break from carrying out usual Wednesday evictions on Xmas Eve and
New Year’s Eve this year.
National Senior Citizens Law Center announces name change in email
ReplyDelete. . . On March 2, 2015, we’re changing our name and tagline to Justice in Aging: Fighting Senior Poverty Through Law.
As income inequality increases across the nation and the population ages, the number of seniors living in poverty is growing. Changing our name is part of a larger effort to connect more people and organizations to our work so that, together, we can meet this growing need. We hope our new name will help us strengthen current partnerships and develop new ones, because we need more allies – allies like you – to join our effort to combat senior poverty.
Our new name, Justice in Aging, and tagline, Fighting Senior Poverty Through Law reinforce our mission and highlight the larger problem we are working to solve. We hope they clarify the work we have been doing since 1972, explain why we have been at it for all these years, and inspire others to join us. And, of course, Justice in Aging is much easier to say and remember!
While our name is changing, our work will remain the same. We still envision a future where everyone can age in dignity. We still believe the best way to alleviate the stresses, harms, and indignities of poverty for aging Americans is to preserve and expand the social safety-net programs on which low-income seniors rely. We still serve as a resource for advocates on important programs like Medicare, Medicaid, LTSS, Social Security, and SSI. We still deploy innovative, strategic legal advocacy on behalf of our country’s most vulnerable seniors.
To us, Justice in Aging is packed with meaning. Justice in Aging is access to affordable health care. Justice in Aging is having enough income to meet your basic needs. Justice in Aging is fewer homeless seniors. Justice in Aging is what each generation owes to those who came before. . .
Thank you for your many years of partnership and support. Working together, we can improve the lives of older adults living in poverty. Stay tuned for new ways you can get involved!
Kevin Prindiville
The National Senior Citizens Law Center is a non-profit organization whose principal mission is to protect the rights of low-income older adults. Through advocacy, litigation, and the education and counseling of local advocates, we seek to ensure the health and economic security of those with limited income and resources, and to preserve their access to the courts.
http://www.nsclc.org/
How Do We Increase Empathy?
ReplyDeleteJAN. 29, 2015
By Nicolas Kristof
So what do we know about empathy and how to nurture it?
First, it seems hard-wired. Even laboratory rats will sometimes free a trapped companion before munching on a food treat.
“Probably the biggest empathy generator is cuteness: paedomorphic features such as large eyes, a large head, and a small lower face,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, tells me. “Professional empathy entrepreneurs have long known this, of course, which is why so many charities feature photos of children and why so many conservation organizations feature pandas. Prettier children are more likely to be adopted, and baby-faced defendants get lighter sentences.”
There’s also some research suggesting that wealth may impede empathy. . .
That may be partly because affluence insulates us from need, so that disadvantage becomes theoretical and remote rather than a person in front of us. Wealthy people who live in economically diverse areas are more generous than those who live in exclusively wealthy areas. . .
So how do we increase empathy?
Dacher Keltner, who runs the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley, says that having people think about suffering activates the vagus nerve, which is linked to compassion. He also cites evidence that uplifting stories about sacrifice boost empathy, as do various kinds of contemplation — prayer, meditation, yoga.
Keltner says that going out into nature also appears to encourage greater compassion. Feelings of awe, such as those generated by incredible images from space, seem to do the same thing, he says.
Professor Pinker, in his superb book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” explores whether the spread of affordable fiction and journalism beginning in the 18th century expanded empathy by making it easier for people to imagine themselves in the shoes of others. Researchers have found that reading literary fiction by the likes of Don DeLillo or Alice Munro — but not beach fiction or nonfiction — can promote empathy.
I used to be cynical about student service projects, partly because they seemed so often to be about dressing up a college application, and trips so often involve countries with great beaches. (Everyone wants to help Costa Rica!) Then there was The Washington Post’s report about the Mexican church that was painted six times over the course of a summer by successive waves of visitors.
Yet I’ve come to believe that service trips do open eyes and remind students of their good fortune. In short, they build empathy.
So let’s escape the insulation of our comfort zones. Let’s encourage student service projects and travel to distant countries and to needy areas nearby. Whatever the impact on others, volunteering may at least help the volunteer. Let’s teach Dickens and DeLillo in schools, along with literature that humanizes minority groups and builds understanding.
Above all, let’s remember that compassion and rationality are not effete markers of weakness, but signs of civilization.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/opinion/nicholas-kristof-how-do-we-increase-empathy.html
America’s Seniors Find Middle-Class ‘Sweet Spot’
ReplyDeleteBy DIONNE SEARCEY and ROBERT GEBELOFF
JUNE 14, 2015
WAXAHACHIE, Tex. — Most Americans suffered serious losses during and after the recession, knocked off balance by layoffs, stagnant pay and the collapse of home values. But apart from the superrich, one group’s fortunes appear to have held remarkably steady: seniors.
Supported by income from Social Security, pensions and investments, as well as an increasing number of paychecks from delaying retirement, older people not only weathered the economic downturn that began in 2007 but made significant gains, a New York Times analysis of government data has found.
As a result, America’s middle class is graying.
People on the leading edge of the baby boom and those born during World War II — the 25 million Americans now between the ages of 65 and 74 — have emerged as particularly well positioned in the nation’s economic timeline. While there are plenty of individual exceptions, as a group they are better off financially than past generations and may well enjoy a more successful old age than future ones, even those merely a decade younger.
…Older Americans’ ability to rise during the postrecession years when most households were falling reflects a broader trend that has unfolded in recent decades.
In the past, the elderly were usually poorer than other age groups. Now, they are the last generation to widely enjoy a traditional pension, and are prime beneficiaries of a government safety net targeted at older Americans. They also have profited from the long rise in real estate prices that preceded the recession. As a result, more seniors now fall into the middle class — defined in this case between the 40th and 80th income percentile — than ever before.
…More secure in their finances, many older Americans have congregated in traditional retirement communities.…
…As recently as the late 1990s, only one in five Americans in their late 60s had a job. Now, that number has jumped to almost one in three. And unlike in their parents’ generation, more women are earning paychecks than in the past, contributing to household income.
…substantial rise in median household income that seniors in their late 60s and early 70s have experienced since 1989, even as Americans in their prime working years have mostly treaded water or lost ground.
Not everyone, of course, can work later in life. Health problems and age discrimination present major hurdles. And many of those who find jobs consider them barely adequate.
…Still, for those seniors who manage to work longer, the benefits can be significant,…value of future Social Security payments rises by about 8 percent for each year of waiting, up to age 70.
Social Security benefits make up more than half the total income for a majority of the nation’s elderly — 52 percent of married people and 74 percent of unmarried people, …
Kathleen McGarry, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles…calls Social Security “the single most important tool in combating poverty among the elderly.”
…older Americans in general are significantly wealthier compared to previous generations.
The median assets of people ages 65 to 74 doubled between 1989 and 2013, a far greater gain than other age groups experienced. And while there has been a decline from the peak since 2007, largely because of the real estate bust, this age group lost less than others.
…Government data on consumer spending reflects the new reality. Adjusted for inflation, older Americans spent 18 percent more per household in 2013 than in the late 1980s, while spending for other age groups remained relatively flat. Higher health care costs, which fall more heavily on the elderly, accounted for a portion of the difference, but seniors spent 57 percent more on entertainment, and significantly more on a wide range of items, including homes, rental cars and alcoholic beverages…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/business/economy/american-seniors-enjoy-the-middle-class-life.html
Elderly Woman Saved from SF Mission Eviction
ReplyDeleteBy Joe Rivano Barros May 14, 2016
The eviction of an 80-year-old woman from her Mission District apartment was stopped on Friday just five days before the sheriff’s department was due to remove her from her home of 44 years.
Her landlord was attempting to evict her based on perpetual hoarding that sometimes made it impossible to enter the apartment.
Lawyers for Maria Pagan got a call from representatives of Joseph Galu Realty, the landlord of her three-story, 11-unit building at 3172 24th St., a little more than an hour after a demonstration brought out some 100 people to 24th Street to protest the eviction.
Pagan, who advocates said suffers from depression and anxiety, will be allowed to stay in her unit at her rent-controlled rate, said her attorney, Patrick Hill with Legal Assistance to the Elderly.
“They had received 30 calls and they graciously accepted to put her back in her place, and preserve her 40-year plus tenancy,” said Hill. “Everybody has come together, so this is a great moment.”
Frank Kim, an attorney with Eviction Assistance who represented the landlords, was mum on details of the settlement reached but confirmed that Pagan would not be evicted.
“She’ll be allowed to stay under certain conditions,” he said, without elaborating.
On Friday, a crowd filled the sidewalk outside the offices of Joseph Galu Realty at 3243 24th St., which were shuttered throughout the demonstration. Speakers called on the landlords to halt the eviction of the senior, saying
“The neighbors we need the most are our elders,” said Deepa Varma, the director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Varma said evictions are particularly taxing for elders on fixed incomes, who must often rely on social workers or tenants organizations to help them navigate the legal process. “This is something that the landlord could drop right now.”
Pagan received a 3-day notice of violation on December 10, 2015, for nuisance. Pagan hoards her stuff, and had filled her apartment with so many belongings that it was difficult for her to enter, according to Hill.
Her eviction was postponed after a settlement in February gave her 10 days to clean her apartment, but when she failed to clear out her belongings, the landlord proceeded with her eviction.
She didn’t organize her unit, Hill said, because she was reluctant to get help…
Pagan eventually received assistance from social workers and Hill’s colleagues to clean, but not in time to stop the ongoing eviction proceedings.
Sheriff’s deputies were scheduled to come by the morning of Wednesday, May 18, but a calling campaign by tenants rights organization Causa Justa and the demonstration on Friday seem to have pressured the landlords into a deal, Hill said…
Maria Zamudio, an organizer with Causa Justa, said she was particularly concerned by Pagan-Sanchez’s age. A number of high-profile evictions of seniors have captured Bay Area headlines in recent months, and Zamudio said evictions are dangerous for elders.
“We’re really concerned about Doña Maria’s health,” she said. “If she doesn’t have a place to live, she’ll have to spend a lot of time bouncing between friends’ places, and some of it on the street.”
Pagan said she has been living in her apartment for 44 years and pays a monthly rent of $469. She said her troubles began when the old landlord died two years ago and his sons began to manage the building.
“After that, they started to bother me a lot,” she said. The sons would pressure her to move out or ask her why she didn’t find a new place, she said, adding that she has trouble sleeping of late and saying the sons were “trying to kill” her by evicting her.
“How much longer am I going to be in my unit?” she said. “They can have my unit when I leave, but until then I need to be treated with respect.”
http://missionlocal.org/2016/05/elderly-woman-saved-from-sf-mission-eviction/
I have read your blog its very attractive and impressive.
ReplyDeleteCaterham Leasing & Prindiville Leasing
SF goes after city’s cruelest landlord, snatching away her rent payments
ReplyDeleteBy Joe Eskenazi
February 5, 2018
Dale Duncan…former Kihagi tenant who, last year, won a $3.5 million ruling against his erstwhile landlord after a fraudulent eviction from his family’s longtime Mission District flat — purportedly the largest such judgment in state history…
…the city, which has already secured a $5.5 million judgment against Kihagi regarding her mountain of tenant harassment and unpermitted construction violations, this month has commenced collecting on that debt. It is doing so by collecting Kihagi’s rents.
“I just got the letter from the City Attorney,” affirms Sheila Hembury, a decades-long resident at 1135-1139 Guerrero, whom Kihagi has attempted — and failed — to evict on multiple occasions. “It said that now we should send our rent checks to the City and County of San Francisco.”
She has; Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith confirms that, even by late January, the rent checks were trickling in. Now those funds — which he estimates as upwards of $100,000 a month and perhaps more than $123,000 a month — will no longer go toward Kihagi hiring a small army of attorneys to fight every last legal move from the city or funding various illegal construction projects. They’ll go toward paying off her heaping fine. Or, more accurately, they’ll begin to pay off the interest on that fine, which has been accruing at 10 percent yearly since mid-2017. That’s more than half a million dollars a year. That’s around $1,500 a day.
…For years, Kihagi and her family members, employing a tangled web of LLCs, bought up building after building in this city and, particularly, the Mission. Harassment of tenants, especially long-standing rent-controlled tenants, many of whom are elderly and disabled, followed thereafter, as did evictions and new, market-rate rentals. “The paper value of the building skyrockets, so there’s more to borrow against to make the next down payments on the next buildings,” Keith told me last year. It’s a lucrative business model — in the short-term. More to the point, it sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme.
…it was barely five years ago when she bought her first San Francisco property, followed in short order by at least 10 more — a $30 million whirlwind of acquisitions.
…one could install Kihagi as the poster child for the rapaciousness that has expelled long-standing tenants from this city (and, particularly, the Mission, her base of operations)…
The cartoonish excess of her behavior at times feels too on-the-nose for even a parody. But this is no parody. It wasn’t enough for Kihagi to attempt to hound elderly people out of her buildings or cut off their electric or water or leave the front door busted so vagrants could amble in and befoul the foyer. It wasn’t enough to point “security” cameras at residents’ doors and windows reducing life in a Kihagi building to time served in the panopticon; it wasn’t enough to wander, uninvited, into tenants’ dwellings; it wasn’t enough to disable the mailbox so elderly renters had to travel miles to the post office on the off-chance they were given a three-day eviction notice.
…That theatricality spilled into the courtroom, with onlookers describing Kihagi as blatantly micromanaging her attorneys. She sued three of them after failing to evict Hambury and her husband, Leonard Johnson, pinning the outcome on their “professional negligence” — and not her own unnerving behavior and testimony (or the facts of the case).
…It required a tremendous amount of time and effort and legal costs, but Anne Kihagi’s reign of terror has been checked. But remunerations have not yet materialized…
“I just keep saying that we have to trust the process,” affirms Duncan. “Three years ago, Kihagi was driving around town with that big smile buying up buildings and sending out eviction notices. Now she’s driving around town from trial to trial and losing. That’s the process.” …
https://missionlocal.org/2018/02/sf-goes-after-citys-cruelest-landlord-snatching-rent-payments/
Power to the elderly! Love this post. I work in the senior care industry in New Hampshire, providing assisted living services in Manchester NH, and I will absolutely be sharing this post with my colleagues. Keep the great content coming!
ReplyDelete- J.O.
The Forgotten History of the Radical ‘Elders of the Tribe’
ReplyDeleteThe Gray Panthers staged rowdy protests against ageism and found common cause with young activists on everything from health care to racial justice.
By Susan J. Douglas
Sept. 8, 2020
…Maggie Kuhn, the woman who, 50 years ago, founded the Gray Panthers, a movement to encourage activism — sometimes radical activism — among the country’s older people.
…issues facing older people be included in any social reform agenda. Her passion was to shatter every stereotype she could about older people and, as a lifelong feminist, especially older women.
Infuriated by being forced out of her job at 65 (and even more irked that her parting gift was a sewing machine), and outraged by what gerontologists in the 1970s championed as “disengagement theory”…she took on…ageism.
Kuhn was not one to “disengage,” or as she put it, keep “out of the way, playing bingo and shuffleboard.” She was a galvanizing figure, and by the late 1970s, the Gray Panthers had 100,000 members in more than 30 states.
Their tactics combined often-rowdy public protests, political lobbying and grass-roots organizing…
Their greatest achievement was getting Congress, in 1986, to ban mandatory retirement ages for most jobs.
…won greater accessibility in mass transportation, fought proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, exposed abuses in nursing homes and, ahead of their time, pressed for government-subsidized universal health care.
…railed against the rampant negative stereotypes about older people in the media, charging, in testimony before Congress, that “old people are depicted as dependent, powerless, wrinkled babies.” So the Panthers monitored how older people were portrayed on television — if they appeared at all — and then lambasted network executives for demeaning caricatures, and got some eliminated.
But crucial to the Panthers’ progressive agenda were intergenerational alliances to promote issues that remain of pressing concern today: affordable housing, better access to health care, racial equality in employment, economic justice and environmental protection. Their motto was “age and youth in action.”
…“We’re the elders of the tribe,” she said. “We are concerned about the tribe surviving.” Older Americans, she said, “are most free to transcend special interests and seek public interests.” She shared her home in Philadelphia with “panther cubs,” youthful activists, and argued against age-segregated housing that isolated older people from the young. She was especially perturbed by how the generations were pitted against each other in the media, with older people cast as getting benefits they didn’t deserve.
…Kuhn was such a charismatic leader that once she died, the organization began to drift…from activism on the part of older people and toward more institutionalized forms of political power… AARP…emphasizes self-actualization, not activism, a safer and often more comfortable message. It does not seek to unite old and young in the name of broader social justice efforts.
Today we’re seeing the limitations of that narrower agenda.
…fate of nursing home residents in the coronavirus pandemic — a true debacle — has revealed the persistence of ageism…narratives about the pandemic pit old and young against each other, with the old cast as “expendable” and the young as “irresponsible.”
…Trump administration’s cruel, destructive and divisive policies continue to expose great inequities in our country across multiple lines — race, gender, class and age. Kuhn’s activist agenda, both age and youth in action, is more relevant, and more necessary, than ever.
…broader vision of a just society…need for intergenerational alliances…to save Social Security…to achieve health care for all, to battle climate change, to combat race- and gender-based violence, to defy ageism and to push for a more equitable and humane economy is urgent…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/opinion/gray-panthers-maggie-kuhn.html