Debbie Brown spent 20 years working at San Francisco General Hospital and decades more calling the city home, but this past spring, she became homeless for the first time in her life. The 72-year-old was evicted from her longtime SRO apartment on Valencia Street on May 13, and by mid-August, she was boarding a red-eye flight out of San Francisco International Airport, her belongings mostly given away, headed toward family she hadn’t lived near in years.
Brown’s eviction and the months-long scramble that followed were detailed in a report from The San Francisco Standard. Her landlord cited nuisance due to hoarding, and San Francisco’s civil court granted her two stays before refusing a third, clearing the way for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office to lock her out of the apartment she’d lived in for years. Under San Francisco Administrative Code Section 37.9(a)(3), landlords pursuing nuisance-based evictions must show that a tenant’s conduct causes interference that is severe, continuing or recurring — a legal threshold Brown’s case ultimately met in court.
What followed for Brown was two months of moving between cheap hotels and a friend’s car. She stayed briefly at her former son-in-law’s studio apartment in SoMa and later began sleeping at her brother’s house in the Bayview, where she lost her dog, Noah. She has two chihuahua mixes, Noah and Jeremiah, and she visited San Francisco Animal Care and Control on August 12 as she worked to locate the missing dog before her flight. Brown told the Standard her months of homelessness were physically exhausting, and she admitted she often bought things she did not need — a habit tangled up in the hoarding complaint that led to her eviction.
A Hotel Room Cleared Out While She Was Away
Brown’s housing situation grew more precarious in early August. According to Brown, the Amit Hotel kicked her out on August 3, and the following day the hotel manager cleared her room and discarded her belongings. The hotel manager told the Standard that Brown could not stay because she was filling the room and the hotel had received complaints — a version of events Brown disputes in describing how her possessions were disposed of. Her granddaughter, Ashley Bell, who lives in Berkeley and has a 2-year-old daughter, paid $97 for an additional night at the Oak Hotel to keep Brown off the street while the family arranged a longer-term plan…