The Downside of the Presidio

Regular readers know that I'm renting a duplex in The Presidio, the old Army base located in (sort of) San Francisco. It is a beautiful place to live, a national park in the middle of the most beautiful city in the country (IMHO). This is what I look at when I walk out my back door every day to get the newspaper. That's right: my house, built in 1917, backs onto a beautiful grove of cypress trees (as best as I can tell, given that I don't know much about trees). My house is the closest residential building to Crissey Field, which is a habitat for birds that's right on San Francisco Bay and where you can walk or ride your bike to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I could go on and on, but it is a remarkable place to live.

Except for one big problem. The Presidio Trust is both the best and the worst landlord you could imagine. Technically, The Presidio is now owned by the National Park Service (after being transferred from the Department of Defense in the mid-90s). But, except for the coastal parts of The Presidio, the entire property is managed by a not-for-profit organization called The Presidio Trust, which was chartered to figure out a way to manage the property without costing the US Government anything. In other words, the trust had to make the property self-sustaining without developing it or selling any of it off. Remarkably, it has already done that, primarly by renovating and renting the former officers quarters, like the one I live in. (I figure it was a captain's residence, so just call me Captain Alsop.)

The Presidio Trust can be a great landlord. It has an extensive staff that manages the operations of the property, one of which is called The Work Order office (for reasons I can't fathom); I can call this office and report any issue with my house, including that a light bulb has gone out, and someone will show up to fix the problem, usually the same day I call. Other staffs manage the public areas, which are beautiful and manage the roads and telecom infrastructure and even excavate old sites.

The problem is that The Presidio Trust appears to view the actual residents of The Presidio (people like me) as a liability that needs to be minimized, instead of as customers who pay the freight for the rest of the park. I moved into my house in November, 2004 under a sublet and then signed a new one-year lease last April. In that time, The Trust has decided to rewrite my lease twice (making one wonder what the point of having a lease is in the first place), removed most of the extra parking on the street I live on (making it much more difficult to invite people to visit me), engaged in constant construction on the street in front of my house (with the equipment getting going at 7:30am as though no one actually lives here), and then decided to renovate my basement regardless of whether I wanted it renovated. While renovating it last week, the contractor caused a power surge that blew out all of my consumer electronics gear (see last post).

The reason the Trust wanted to rewrite my lease is that they had experts review the state of the renovated residences and decided that some of them could create potential liability for the trust in the case of fire or gas leaks. The experts said the basements didn't have the right venting and egress for anyone sleeping in the basement (which my son was doing at the time). Then they wanted to rewrite it a second time because they decided that, if they renovated the basements, that would relieve the liability. In both cases, these decisions were made and then communicated as done deeds, with no recourse or negotiation. That, of course, is a landlord's right, I guess. (It's been a long time since I rented my residence.)

I could go on in a litany of the small and sometimes larges injustices visited by The Presidio Trust on its residents. But the most interesting part of all this is the realization that The Presidio Trust is a government that does not need to answer to its residents. The Presidio is federal land, owned by the government of the United States. The City of San Francisco has no jurisdiction over the land; indeed, if you get a ticket from the Presidio Police, you have to go to the Federal Courthouse in downtown San Francisco to pay the ticket and deal with the federal district court if you want to contest it! So this isn't your typical landlord that's subject to regulation by the city; this is a non-profit organization chartered by the federal government to manage the property to make money. There are no elected officials, no representative form of government. It's effectively a totalitarian system allowed to exist inside a democratic political system.

I keep wondering if, by writing this post, I have put at risk my opportunity to sign a new lease on this house come April. Perhaps I'm getting paranoid in my old age....

Comments

[David Tommela]

Now let me get this right. You live in the Presidio which I agree is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live. You are approaching geekhood with many computers and other gear in your historic residence. You drive a Mini (which needs to be replaced by the supercharged one). You have even learned to appreciate fine California wines. And yet you find time to complain!

I suspect the Work Order Office manages all maintenance work at the Presidio. A work order is the vehicle to track the work. It is also a way for them to track how many complaints you have submitted.

As for dealing with a totalitarian government there is precedence. There could be WMD's hidden on the grounds of this former military base. I have friends who might be up for nocturnal skulking to investigate. :-)

[Jim Forbes]

Stew,
buy a fishing license with a two-pole stamp and a striper stamp. get some frozen anchovies or some ghost shrimp, use a foure ounce weight and heave your rigs into the water at slack tide off Fort Point. There are some really huge stripers right there. Or you can take up salt water fly fishing for stripers there.
Be well, Stew

Jim Forbes