Over the last 20 years, Amparo Vigil has felt the hot days get hotter in her Mission District home.
“They used to be tolerable, but now it’s unbearable,” said Vigil, who lives in the four-unit building with her family and is the landlord, renting two units to tenants.
Her father bought the Bryant Street house decades ago, and it has no cooling system and little insulation. When a heat wave hits, she and her tenants fight it together. They share ice, folding the cubes into bandanas to make cold compresses, and she makes big batches of iced jamaica to share. When it gets too hot to be inside, they sit in the yard, take a walk or go for a drive because the car has air conditioning. Two years ago, she bought fans for the bedrooms, but they just blew the hot air around.
Soon they may all get relief. Vigil is participating in a pilot project run by environmental justice organization PODER to decarbonize her home, a process that will add a new heating and cooling system and insulation, among other retrofits. The setup should allow Vigil and her tenants to stay inside comfortably.
Sign up for our free weekly newsletter for local journalism on environmental issues.
The renovation, finally underway after years of planning, will test what it takes to make San Francisco’s multi-unit apartment buildings more eco-friendly. Scaled up, the retrofits would shrink the city’s carbon footprint and reduce indoor pollutants, improving the health of residents. But many tenants and their advocates fear that the work could end up displacing renters if landlords hiked rents to recoup retrofit costs and evicted people who couldn’t pay.
“Low-income tenants are in a precarious position, and we don’t want upgrades to lead to ‘reno-victions,’” said Antonio Díaz, PODER’s organizational director.
PODER is leading the initiative with funding from the San Francisco Department of the Environment. In this early stage of construction, the organization is soliciting contracting bids from local companies owned by women of color. Decarbonizing Vigil’s building will entail installing solar panels, new electric stoves and windows to rein in energy consumption.
Díaz estimated that construction would begin in a month and a half and last up to six months. A similar pilot project is in motion on Sycamore Street, managed by Emerald Cities Collaborative, a nonprofit that creates green jobs for women and people of color. Each organization received $100,000 from the city, with $50,000 earmarked for the retrofits.
Fear of ‘reno-victions’
San Francisco has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, and decarbonizing its buildings will be a key step. In 2022, 44% of the city’s emissions came from buildings, according to the Department of the Environment.
Low-income renters and people of color disproportionately suffer from indoor air pollution from gas stoves, and stand to benefit from electrification.
But the retrofit work will also put them at risk, tenant advocates warn, because landlords have a financial incentive to use renovations to push out longtime residents.
City Hall allows only meager annual rent increases for pre-existing tenants of rent-controlled buildings — in the most recent year, landlords could raise rents up to 3.6% — enabling people with modest incomes to afford living in San Francisco by staying in the same apartments for many years. But landlords can reset apartment rents to the market rate for new tenants, potentially making much more money.
Advocates point to a recent mass reno-viction — a retrofit that would also evict tenants — in West Los Angeles as an example of how bad things could get in San Francisco. Following a fire that killed one person in their massive apartment building, corporate landlord Douglas Emmett Inc. issued eviction notices in May 2023 to their property’s 577 occupied rent-controlled units, arguing that it would be easier to comply with the city’s mandate to upgrade the sprinkler system if the building were vacant — the Los Angeles government denied the sprinklers were mandated. Renters organized to file wrongful eviction cases, and this June a judge ruled that the nearly 100 tenants still living in the complex could stay. An estimated 480 people had already accepted relocation fees and left.
Risk of pricing out tenants
But there are other, subtler ways that retrofits could hurt and possibly displace tenants.
In San Francisco, rent-control landlords can legally hike rents to help them cover the costs of renovations that benefit their tenants and raise the property value — including decarbonization upgrades like replacing windows or improving insulation.
Landlords regularly bump up rents through these so-called capital improvement pass-throughs, said Lupe Arreola, executive director of Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups.
The risk of retrofit-driven rent increases “is real, because it’s already happening for basic repairs,” she said, even those that should not qualify for pass-throughs. Arreola added that she has also seen landlords illegally use tenants’ safety deposits to pay for such repairs.
Tenants might move out if the renovations increased their rents beyond what they could afford.
They might also move out to avoid the commotion of the retrofits, or their landlords could ask them to leave temporarily in exchange for stipends to cover moving and living expenses while away. But stipends seldom make up the difference between rent-control tenants’ low housing costs and those of nearby market-rate units, Arreola said, so those people often leave the neighborhood or the city.
Renters displaced by renovations have a legal right to return when the work is done. But retrofits can drag on; Arreola said she had seen one project take 10 years. The more time that passes, the less likely tenants will come back, she said.
Read also: Bay Area Ferry Electrification Will Also Be Jobs Program for Local Latinos
Extensive, potentially invasive repairs may be necessary in many of the city’s older buildings, where lower-income residents tend to live, before decarbonization upgrades could begin, Arreola said. A whopping 70% of multi-unit housing was built before 1950, and all rent-controlled housing was built before 1979.
That’s why “we need to put in safeguards. It’s going to require legislators doubling down,” Arreola said. She would like to see evictions outlawed in buildings during decarbonization upgrades, and for a limited time after the work finished.
Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a Los Angeles-based tenant advocacy nonprofit, made policy recommendations in its 2023 report, Decarbonizing California Equitably: Pass-throughs should be banned for retrofits, with minimal annual rent increases regulated by the government for between five and 15 years after construction wraps up.
San Francisco’s Department of the Environment is aware of the risks that low-income renters face. It is in ongoing conversations with the Rent Board, which enforces the city’s rent-control laws, and community-based organizations in an effort to make sure decarbonization does not drive displacement.
“We need more education about rental protections,” said Cyndy Comerford, planning director of the Department of the Environment’s Climate and Health Program. She said she does not believe rental protections need to change to mitigate risks to tenants.
State pares back retrofit funding
Decarbonization is expensive, and for many building owners it’s only doable with government subsidies.
But in May, Gov. Gavin Newsom slashed funding for the Equitable Building Decarbonization Program, from $922 million to $525 million. The cuts dismayed policy advocates and local officials.
“It’s going to mean less money going to low-income San Franciscans,” Comerford said.
State funds can come with strings attached for recipient building owners and protect against renter displacement. California’s Low Income Weatherization Program, which funds energy-efficiency measures and solar installation, mandates that property owners sign contracts promising to keep rents affordable for low-income tenants for at least 10 years following retrofits. The state also provides the subsidies up front — that better encourages retrofits than federal funds, which are often paid as rebates following the work and best serve building owners who already have the money for a retrofit in hand.
Back on Bryant Street, Vigil said she looks forward to improving the comfort and health of her family and tenants with the coming retrofits. Just as much, she wants the pilot to be useful to the Mission District, providing a template that others can follow to decarbonize.
“I see this as a small project starting here with me, but then growing out into the community,” Vigil said. “I want to use the resources I have, and this building is one of them.”
