April 28, 2025

Read El Tecolote’s feature on tenants at three different buildings who are taking on their landlords with the help of San Francisco’s groundbreaking Tenant Right to Organize legislation. Learn more about the Union at Home legislation at sfadc.org/rights/.

 

Immigrant tenants lead rent strike movement against San Francisco’s largest landlords

by Beatriz Johnston Hernández

April 26, 2025, Updated April 28, 2025

Johana Ramírez has lived in her tiny Tenderloin studio for 17 years. The walls are cracked, the kitchen is infested with cockroaches, closet doors hang loose, and broken tiles litter the floor. Still, she sweeps, scrubs and does her best to keep things tidy — because it’s home.

For the past two years, Ramírez has been on rent strike with her neighbors at 434 Leavenworth, demanding basic repairs, pest control, and compensation for unlivable conditions. Instead, they received eviction notices. Now, the remaining tenants are taking their landlord, Ballast Investments — the city’s largest residential landlord — to the Rent Board, San Francisco’s arbiter in conflicts over fair rent and evictions.

Lea esta historia en español.

“I fight for myself, yes. But we have to set a precedent to protect others like me,” Ramírez said, seated inside her 370-square-foot home in the building known as the Rainbow Flag Apartments. “This landlord has hundreds of apartments.”

Around the corner, another tenant association is also on rent strike. The 781 O’Farrell strikers are preparing to meet their landlord, Veritas Investments, in eviction court later this month.

Backed by private equity, both Ballast Investments and Veritas Investments have amassed huge shares of San Francisco’s rent-controlled housing stock, especially in the Tenderloin.

This neighborhood is home to thousands of non-English-speaking, working-class immigrants who have lived in their rent-controlled apartments for many years.

“The neighborhood’s Latinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian residents — we’re all screwed in the same way,” Ramírez said. “We’re all too poor to afford anything better.”

Since corporate ownership took over, long-term, non-English-speaking tenants like Ramírez have become prime targets for displacement in favor of higher-paying tenants. Language itself, tenant advocates say, is being weaponized.

At both buildings on rent strike, Veritas removed bilingual onsite managers, posted critical notices only in English, and instructed staff to speak English only.

 

“Tenants have been hit with fees after being left in the dark about rent changes,” said Lizzy Kramer, spokesperson for the Housing Rights Committee, a San Francisco nonprofit organizing renters into building-by-building tenant associations like Ramírez’s.

San Francisco law requires all landlords, public and private, to provide housing free of garbage, cockroaches, rats, and vermin. Plumbing and gas facilities must be in good order and must provide hot and cold running water.

Tenants have the right to report landlords to city agencies, to withhold rent, or to “repair and deduct.” Landlords are prohibited from retaliating against tenants for exercising these rights; any eviction or rent increase within six months of a tenant complaint can be scrutinized as potential retaliation by a judge.

However, San Francisco’s Language Access Ordinance (LAO) only requires public landlords to provide translation and interpretation services for important documents and notices — not private landlords like Veritas and Ballast.

Some landlords openly celebrate the loophole. “Do you know how many languages we’d have to translate?” one Veritas employee told El Tecolote anonymously.

 

A rising tenant movement

The rent strikes are the most visible edge of a growing tenant movement fueled by the Union-at-Home Ordinance, a 2022 city law that mandates landlords negotiate with tenant associations formed by a majority of a building’s residents.

“Tenants have always formed associations,” said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, lead tenant organizer at the Housing Rights Committee. “But Union-at-Home has solidified and sped up the process of tenant associations being formed.” Within a year of the ordinance passing, 55 buildings had organized associations.

“To have a process that’s clear and written out has been amazing,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “Some landlords, just at the sight of a tenant association, start obeying the law. But others, like Veritas, are hard to get to the table [to negotiate].”

In response, tenants are increasing the pressure on corporate landlords like Veritas and Ballast.

 

Coordinated campaigns — and small victories

In mid-April, Ramírez joined a citywide call-in campaign coordinated by the Housing Rights Committee, targeting Veritas, Ballast, and Ballast’s management company, Brick + Timber. Every day, tenants called a different landlord or manager, delivering the same “business is not as usual” message to show their strength.

Tenants from 11 Veritas buildings also protested at the city’s Rent Board in solidarity with the 781 O’Farrell tenants, Sherburn-Zimmer said.

Drawing on their labor organizing experience, tenants have signed petitions, occupied landlord offices, recruited political allies, and, at the most extreme, waged rent strikes to force landlords to negotiate and make repairs.

In some cases, tenants won more than they bargained for.

At 320 14th Street — a 16-unit building once owned by Veritas — mostly Latinx tenants endured years of mold, cockroach infestations, and broken floors and windows. In 2022, they joined a citywide rent strike against Veritas.

Later that year, Veritas defaulted on $1 billion in loans tied to more than 95 residential properties — including 320 14th Street and Ramírez’s 434 Leavenworth building, which Ballast later bought.

Shortly after acquiring 320 14th Street, Prado Investments met with the tenant association, forgave tenants’ rent debt, made critical repairs, and sold the building to the nonprofit San Francisco Community Land Trust.

Under Land Trust ownership, rents were recalculated based on income. Luis Zenón, a bakery worker, and his partner, Sandra Martinez, a McDonald’s employee, saw their rent drop from $2,100 to $1,650 a month for a one-bedroom — a 21% decrease.

Still, given San Francisco’s soaring real estate prices, it’s unlikely that the Land Trust — which operates similarly to a worker cooperative — will be able to expand much beyond the 16 residential properties it currently owns.

The high cost of fighting back

Despite small victories, the cost of organizing remains high.

At Ramírez’s building, only six of the original 30 rent strikers remain — all of them monolingual immigrants.

“I know they made agreements with the landlord out of stress,” Ramírez said. Her depression has worsened throughout the ordeal, but she says she cannot leave San Francisco because she depends on the city’s LGBTQ health services.

“This has been very difficult for me, but the situation is just not fair,” she said.

Her struggle is coming to a head. The Rent Board ordered Ballast and the 434 Leavenworth tenants to meet before a decision is rendered on Wednesday, April 30. Meanwhile, tenants at 781 O’Farrell are preparing for trial in eviction court on Monday, April 28.

“The stakes for Tenderloin residents are huge,” said Sherburn-Zimmer. “These tenants are fighting for the heart of the city right now, at a point when people need San Francisco like they’ve never needed it before.”

For Ramírez, the fight continues — not just for herself, but for tenants citywide who, like her, refuse to be pushed out quietly.