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It’s hard to be evicted from the only home you’ve ever really known, as was the case for the younger members of the Carcamo family (and, considering the 32 years they’ve lived in 1268 Hampshire, even some who aren’t that young).
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But sadly, in San Francisco and the Mission, it’s nearly impossible to write a full story about every Latino family kicked out of their old home so they can sell it, for an astronomical price, to someone lured by its “Fabulous location, just steps from area restaurants, entertainment, MUNI/BART and freeways.”
But, four years ago, we made write about the Cárcamos. The Ellis Act eviction of the Cárcamos “wasn’t particularly cruel,” his attorney David Tchack told us in 2018. “This is what many contemporary San Francisco homeowners do. These speculators come in and buy properties. They have no intention of owning, and the Ellis Act turns the tenants around and sells the property. … It happens all over the city.”
But even then, the details of his ill-fated odyssey were unbelievable. Now, they almost feel like a parody of the San Francisco condition.
The Cárcamos not only had four generations of a Salvadoran family living in some old crumbling Mission house, beset by decades of neglect and unwarranted construction, and owned by a dodgy landlord (who was, in fact, a federal criminal). His former home, at 1266-68 Hampshire, has a claim to be the oldest house in San Francisco, dating to at least 1855 and possibly earlier.
It was built by John Treat, brother of George Treat, the namesake of Treat Avenue. The Treat brothers, at one point, owned a race track and large tracts of San Francisco. So big that, after the Cárcamos were finally evicted in 2017, they ended up in an apartment on land that also belonged to the Treat brothers’ properties.
That was the story in 2018. Four generations of a Latino family, including a nonagenarian grandmother, his retirement-age son and his wife, their 30-year-old daughter Sarah Carcamo and their two children were evicted from the “oldest house” in San Francisco so it could be subdivided into four luxury condominiums.
But, four years later, it turned out that there was room for this to get even more amazing, even more direct.
The Carcamo family was evicted from the “oldest house” in town, which was subdivided into four luxury condominiums: which were then used as potentially illegal Airbnbs.
“The host indicates that he/she lives in Oakland CA on the AirBnB listing, thus violating the requirement of Chapter 41A of the Administrative Code for permanent residence,” reads the notice from the Office of Short-Term Rentals.
That case was recorded as open on March 30 and remains open. But unless the host was inexplicably telling stories on his profile page about residing in Oakland, it’s hard to see how this wasn’t a violation of city rules, which don’t allow people to flog units like Airbnbs they’re in. They do not live. 275 nights.
So yes, that would be even plus on the nose, even more a parody of today’s San Francisco. Four generations of a Salvadoran family were evicted from their home of 32 years so it could be subdivided into four luxury condominiums, sold, and then converted into a questionably legal tourist flop.
“The people coming in and out now are younger and clearly not working-class people like Sarah and her family,” says former neighbor Arnie Warshaw. “Put people out so other people can come here on vacation? Caramba. That is the story of San Francisco.”
It is, and that is the story that Sarah Carcamo and her family have reluctantly become a part of. But, in the last four years, her own stories have taken several turns. Some of them are good and some of them are not, but, in particular, these are still San Francisco stories. The Cárcamos endure.
The pandemic led Luis Cárcamo, Sarah’s father, to do something that the eviction and advanced age – he is 80 years old – could not do. She retired. What about her government retirement gift? She stopped paying him unemployment.
Luis’s wife, Norma, 77, is a paid caregiver for Maria Fuentes, Luis’s 98-year-old mother. They live near La Raza park in a house owned by the mother of a cousin’s daughter—it’s complicated; she is separated from the cousin.
The street abuts the high wall next to the highway and is secluded like a dead end. This leads to a high level of isolation. And, in the big city, rarity. Strangers have tried to talk her visiting elementary school age daughters into answering the door. Sarah Carcamo fears for her elderly relatives who live there.
Luis’s mother used to sit among the trees and plants in the front yard on Hampshire Street. She was cultivated by her son, Luis, who was known as The Lord of the Plants. Now Fuentes is essentially confined to his home and deeply unhappy.
Luis keeps walking back to the old neighborhood to buy groceries and see everyone he knows. These walks sometimes last three hours and the family gets nervous. More than once, Luis has fallen. Not long ago, he was hit by a van as he was backing out of a parking spot.
At a concession, Luis will now take the bus instead of walking. But the service is down. Now that he needs it, the bus doesn’t come.
As for Sarah Carcamo, she won the housing lottery. It has been a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.
She, her boyfriend and their two daughters were among the lucky few who made it into an affordable housing project at Eddy and Taylor. They have a three-bedroom apartment and the rent is positively from 1994. “We love it.”
The neighborhood, though: It’s less cute.
Sarah Carcamo is not a naive person. The Mission she grew up in was a violent and dangerous place. “But I’ve seen things here [in the Tenderloin] I never saw in my life growing up in the Mission,” she says.
But the things you see now in TL are not so much dangerous as chaotic and anarchic: abject misery and drug use in the streets and senseless robberies in stores. “It makes me sad to see all these young and old people emptying the shelves,” she says. “They go in there like it’s their home and take what they want.”
This is a difficult place to raise daughters. He’s not as bad as things were in his youth, but he’s still bad, bad in his own way.
Meanwhile, despite his luck in finding a place to live, Carcamo has had enough setbacks that his mother wonders if someone gave him the evil eye.
Her daughters still go to school at Bryant Elementary in the old neighborhood. A couple of years ago, while taking them to school in an Uber, the car rear ended. Cárcamo suffered knee and back injuries; there are days when he can barely walk. They have all had covid, and his children have had other illnesses, some of which required emergency hospitalization.
Because of her children’s school, Cárcamo is often in her old neighborhood. He is between jobs and, as his father, has time to talk to the people who populated his past. And the house is still there too, playing a changing role in a changing neighborhood in a changing city.
Carcamo, now 38, often thinks back to a night at the old house when he was around 10 years old. The place was in such disrepair that the wall and ceiling literally collapsed on her and her sister as they lay in her bed doing homework.
But the Cárcamos were hard-working people who did not think about litigation. The landlord had someone Carcamo’s cousin knew come in and do plaster and paint and that was it.
“I ask my mom why we didn’t do anything about it,” says Sarah Carcamo now with a wry laugh. “We could have sued that owner. We could have owned that building.