Who’s to blame for the broken elevators in San Francisco SROs?

An audit released by the San Francisco controller’s office on Thursday found that dozens of single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, that receive city funding for providing low-income housing have non-working elevators, sometimes trapping seniors or residents with mobility issues in their apartments for days.

The Details

According to data reviewed by the controller’s office, 311, San Francisco’s non-emergency line, received approximately 600 complaints regarding non-working elevators from 2018 to 2023 — 45 percent of which were related to SROs.

Fixing this problem, read the report, requires change at the state and local level — or the city taking over responsibilities that currently lie with the state.

The audit began in 2023 after the Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $10 million to modernize elevators in SROs that receive city funding. The audit’s role in this grant is to figure out how to best apply that funding towards fixing the problem.

Of the 225 SROs in San Francisco that have an elevator, the audit found that between 2018 to April 2024, 34% had received at least one notice of violation for malfunctioning elevators from the city’s Department of Building Inspection, with the majority of violations occurring in SROs that are funded by the city.

Currently, the audit found, the city doesn’t keep an accurate record of the more than 500 SROs across the city, and the over 300 elevators within them.

But the ultimate power to enforce elevator safety lies with the state. While the city’s department of building inspection is responsible for enforcing building codes, authority over the city’s elevators, including its permitting, upkeep, maintenance, and safety issues lies with California’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency, which is part of the state Department of Industrial Relations.

That means that when a building is cited for failing to repair or maintain an elevator, the city’s responsibility is over once it files a report about that elevator with the state. Reports of elevator issues submitted to the state can go unaddressed for years.

The extreme delays in state safety inspections, the report states, means that nearly 8,000 elevators across the city— over 200 of which are in SROs — currently do not have up to date permits.

Over the course of the audit, the controller’s office visited 20 elevators in SROs. All had expired permits, and most had design or installation flaws that made them dangerous for seniors and people with disabilities to use due to manual and narrow doors, a gap between the elevator car and the floor and no emergency button to call for help if the elevator gets stuck.

The audit supports

Mission Local’s prior reporting in August, which found that of the 2,800 buildings in San Francisco with only one reported elevator, more than one third haven’t recorded a state inspection in more than three years. California law requires that most elevators be inspected annually. At the time that article was published, a spokesperson for the state department of industrial relations confirmed that delays were frequent, and said that the department prioritizes inspections of elevators with permits that have been expired the longest.

Broken elevators have been a problem in San Francisco’s SROs for years. Nearly 94% of the city’s SROs were built prior to 1930, and over a quarter of the elevators in SROs that have them were installed before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Older elevators are costly to maintain, because they require antique parts that can be hard to find and difficult to install. Some SRO elevators, read the audit, “are so antiquated that repair companies may hesitate or decline to work on them.”

Out of 27 SRO owners surveyed by the controller’s office, 11 responded that they had to repair their elevators at least 10 times in the year 2023 alone. A building manager for an SRO quoted in the audit shared that the cost to repair one worn elevator reached nearly $40,000, and that modernizing an elevator completely cost between $100,000 and $300,000, though the upgrade usually paid for itself within 4-7 years through lower repair costs.

In order to fix the issue, the audit concluded, legislative change may be necessary. Nearby, Oakland and Berkeley, have adopted legislation to require landlords to maintain their elevators, and provide protections for tenants, like mandating that landlords find or reimburse tenants for alternative housing if an elevator outage lasts longer than 24 hours. Los Angeles has done away with the state’s role altogether. Under a special state provision, the city has independent authority to inspect its own elevators and issue permits.

Similar legislation could be in San Francisco’s future. The controller’s office recommends that the city’s office of disability work with the Board of Supervisors to amend city law that is similar to that of Berkeley or Oakland. It also recommended that, in the meantime, the Department of Building Inspection, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Disability Assistance, the Mayor’s office of Housing, and the Planning Department develop a shared, comprehensive list of all the elevators in SROs across the city, as well as information about technicians who are qualified to work on them.