Homes Not Jails Pays Taxes,
Files For Ownership of
715 Page Street Under
Adverse Posession Law
What Is Adverse Possession?

  Back in 1988, Alice Jones, the then-owner of 715-717 Page St., died. She left a will, but it never was executed by her relatives, who all lived in Texas. The two unit apartment building she had been living in soon became vacant and sat there for years.
 In 1993, Homes Not Jails—which had just been formed in November of 1992—found the building vacant and abandoned and began moving in people who were homeless to live there.
 For the next six years, a dozen HNJ squatters lived there, some for just a year or so and others for three or four years. One formerly-homeless couple had their first child while living there. Another formerly-homeless family moved in with their two-year old daughter and stayed for almost three years. These families and other single men and women lived in Page Street for years and typically moved on to more permanent housing after finding jobs. One, for example, became a firefighter and another is now a UPS driver. Interestingly, when HNJ filed the court papers claiming ownership and then had to track down some of the former squatters people were tracked down at their morning workouts at Nautilus, not at the soup lines.
 Some people might think that if a group of people who were homeless found an abandoned, tax-defaulted building and then they began living there, fixed up the building and paid almost $6,000 in back taxes on it that they would be lauded for their self-initiative and their up-by-the-bootstraps effort to turn rundown and empty housing into sorely-needed affordable housing.
 And when told there's actually a state law—adverse possession— which rewards people for utilizing vacant property and returning it to the tax rolls by giving them ownership of the building, most people would say, "they deserve it."
 But this is San Francisco, where housing exists—not to be lived in—but for real estate speculators' profits. And where people who are homeless are to be arrested and jailed, not housed.
 So when Homes Not jails filed court papers to secure ownership of 715 Page Street after having squatted there for almost six years and after paying all the property taxes for those years, the city decided to fight them tooth and nail. First, it had all the squatters arrested—when they proudly announced that they had paid all the taxes due on the property and had filed the required paperwork at court and now owned the property.
 After arresting everyone in January—and charging them with felony trespassing—the city then made sure that the formerly-homeless people living there were made homeless again and padlocked the building, devoting vast resources to make sure no one lived in the home they had lived in for the past 5 years and the home they had paid the taxes on.
 Then—not satisfied by making housed people homeless again—the city went to court to fight Homes Not Jails' claim of ownership, apparently to make sure this building is never used again for affordable housing. But in May, the city lost its first round when Judge David Garcia ruled against a city motion to toss out HNJ's adverse possession claim (the city had alleged that HNJ's tax payment was insufficient and that HNJ did not have standing to file the suit).
 But having lost the first round in court, the city found itself in a bad position—fighting Homes Not Jails's claim and fighting the deceased owner's relatives. Finding himself being questioned by the media, Public Administrator Ricardo Hernandez threw in the towel and ended any city opposition to Homes Not Jails's claim.
 It's not over yet, though. Whether or not Homes Not Jails will get the property at 715-717 Page Street via adverse possession is now in the courts but with significantly less opposition than there was a month or so ago. At this point, the opposition is one of the deceased owner's relatives in Texas (who Hernandez gave all of his and the city's responsibility and authority to).
 So now it's matter for the courts. But having had to first fight off the city, HNJ knows the fight remains as political as it is legal. And the courts—which exist more to uphold property rights than human rights—will be searching for eveyr loophole to avoid awaring a San Francisco apartment building to a bunch of squatters. Even squatters who cared for it, fixed it up and paid the taxes.