Vol. I, No. 18 · San Francisco — MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2026 · Price: one percent of the job
BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING DESK
Seventy-seven thousand two hundred forty-seven San Francisco parcels have drawn at least one complaint to the Department of Building Inspection since the file opens in the mid-1990s. One of them has drawn more notices of violation than any other in the city. It is a five-story brick building at 74 Sixth Street, put up in 1907, holding 167 single rooms across 33,952 square feet of residential floor area. That is about 203 square feet a room with the hallways, stairs and shared bathrooms counted in.
The department’s violation file runs to 515,561 line items citywide. One thousand two hundred fifty-eight of them, gathered into 166 separate notices, belong to this one parcel. The runner-up, 118 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin, has 972. On the complaint side the building ranks second of the 77,247, with 352 filings since August 1994, against a citywide average of 4.3 complaints per parcel. The only parcel ahead of it is Parkmerced, at 452, where a single lot carries an entire apartment complex and no one address accounts for more than 142. This one is a single building.
The complaints are also the only continuous account of what the building has been. Callers through the 2000s describe a residential hotel with shared bathrooms on every floor. A filing from December 2021 names the Tenderloin Housing Clinic as the party doing work in the building. A resident writing in November 2024 refers to “the sro i am staying at ‘baldwin house.’” By July 2025 a neighbor calls it the Baldwin navigation center. On 13 July of this year, the residents used the same complaint line to file a petition, and signed it as “the residents of the baldwin safe navigation center at 74 6th street.”
“For more than three (3) months, there has been no running water to the tubs and showers in this facility,” the petition reads. It names Five Keys and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and says the outage has run past ninety days “despite this facility being funded by san francisco taxpayer dollars.” The department closed the complaint the following day. A resident had filed on 22 June that the toilets were locked and that people were borrowing the restroom of the restaurant next door; that one closed in two days. Another filed on 27 July: “There is no running water at this access shelter for atleast a week.” Closed in two.
Nine complaints in seven months is not a large number for this address. It is a large number for this address lately. Between 2020 and 2025 the building averaged 3.8 complaints a year, down from 24.7 across 2017, 2018 and 2019. Measured over the same January-to-July window, the count has gone 3, 0, 4, 4, 1, 1 and now 9.
What has not come back is the paperwork. Two notices of violation issued in January. One required hot water at the taps between 105 and 120 degrees; the other required heat capable of holding 68 degrees in each occupied room for thirteen hours a day. Nothing since. The violation file is current through 31 July and the department issued 311 notices citywide during July, so the quiet at this address is not a lag in the data.
For three decades the building has failed in the same four ways: heat, hot water, the elevator, the shared bathrooms. The failures did not change. What changed is the paperwork that answers them. When the building was a residential hotel, a complaint tended to produce a notice with a housing-code section attached, and the repair permits that followed said so in their own descriptions, down to “to comply with nov 201766521 item 4 only.” A shelter operating under the city’s shelter standards of care is a different regulatory object, and an inspector sent to one may have no housing-code section to write down.
The file cannot confirm that reading. It records what was reported and how the department closed it, and a closure without a notice can mean an inspector found nothing wrong, found the matter outside the department’s jurisdiction, or could not get through the door. Confidence on the counts is high; they come from the department’s own two files, pulled this morning. Confidence on the explanation is moderate. Settling it takes a jurisdiction question put to the department, not another query. What the record already shows, without interpretation, is that the residents of this building went looking for a public docket their complaint would land on, reached for a thirty-year-old building-inspection line, and got a case number.
The City’s Largest Art Holding Is in Another County
San Francisco owns 1,038 civic artworks. The biggest single concentration of them, 158, hangs at the airport, which sits on city land in San Mateo County. Pacific Heights has one, and it is in Chinatown.
BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK
A city’s art collection ought to be a map of the city. San Francisco’s is not. Of the 1,038 works in the Civic Art Collection, 158 are at San Francisco International Airport, on land the city owns down the Peninsula in San Mateo County. No supervisor district holds as many. The city’s own file knows it, after a fashion: those 158 rows carry no supervisor district and no neighborhood, because the geocoder cannot place them inside San Francisco.
Of the 826 works the file can place in the city, an even share would be 75 to a district. District 3, which takes in Chinatown, North Beach and the Financial District, has 147. District 10, running from Potrero Hill through Bayview Hunters Point to Visitacion Valley, has 138. District 7, west of Twin Peaks, has 128. At the bottom, District 11 has 15 and District 2, covering the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights, has 12.
District 2’s twelve are short enough to read as a list. The Wave Organ at the end of the Marina jetty, 1986. The Joseph B. Strauss memorial by the bridge approach, 1940. A Frog and a Seal at 900 Beach Street, one from the 1930s and one dated 1935 to 1940. The Grail, 1988, on Lombard Street. Three sea creatures at Laguna and Bay, among them a leatherback turtle and a pink short-spined starfish. Three panels of Points of Departure at Masonic and Geary. And a 1952 relief, 100 Years of Progress of Chinese in America, filed under Pacific Heights at 965 Clay Street.
That last one is the district’s only entry for Pacific Heights, and 965 Clay Street is in Chinatown. Small geocoding slips like that are why these counts are worth reading as a shape rather than as a census. The shape holds anyway. Bayview Hunters Point alone holds 53 works. Pacific Heights, the Marina, Russian Hill, Japantown, Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury and the Presidio hold 30 between the seven of them.
The likeliest explanation has nothing to do with taste. The collection tracks construction. San Francisco funds public art as a percentage of what it builds, and DataSF keeps a separate file for the 1% for Art program. The airport is the largest continuous building program the city runs, so the airport accumulates the most art. Districts where the city has put up clinics, libraries, schools and transit accumulate the next most. Where the city builds least, it hangs least. This is a reading and not a finding: the collection file carries no funding source on any individual work, so nothing in it confirms the chain.
Confidence on the counts is high, with one date attached to them. The file’s snapshot is 17 April 2024, so every number here is a 2024 count read in 2026, and anything installed, moved or deaccessioned since is missing. Confidence on the construction reading is moderate, and it is testable against the 1% for Art file on a future morning.
One almanac note while the ledger is open. The oldest object the city owns is an 1814 marble William Shakespeare by George Bullock, standing in Golden Gate Park at 335 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. After it come Lotta’s Fountain, 1875, at Market and Kearny; Gustave Doré’s La poème de la vigne, 1877, by the Tea Garden; and Rodin’s Thinker, 1880, at 100 34th Avenue in Lincoln Park.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. DataSF, Land Use with Active Parcel Information (h5vv-2u24), block 3703 lot 028: restype SRO, resunits 167, residential floor area 33,952 sq ft, zoned SoMa Neighborhood Commercial Transit, District 6. Year built 1907 from Historic resource status by parcel (3tsw-4idn), which also carries the parcel at CEQA code A, a contributor to a National Register and California Register historic district. 2. DataSF, Notices of Violation issued by the Department of Building Inspection (nbtm-fbw5), 515,561 items citywide, grouped by block and lot: 3703/028 = 1,258 items across 166 distinct notices, 22 Nov 1996 to 30 Jan 2026; 0340/012 (118 Taylor St) = 972. 3. DataSF, DBI Complaints, All Divisions (gm2e-bten): 333,837 complaints across 77,247 parcels, mean 4.32; parcel 3703028 = 352, first filed 23 Aug 1994, last 27 Jul 2026. The one parcel above it is 7335001 (Parkmerced, Lakeshore) at 452, spread across the complex’s many addresses, the largest being 355 Serrano Dr at 142 and 405 Serrano Dr at 92. By single street number the city leader is 516 O’Farrell St at 306 filings against that spelling (parcel 0318007, 331); 74 6th St is second at 304. Re-run and confirmed by the editor, 3 Aug 2026. 4. gm2e-bten complaint text, in order: filed 16 Dec 2021 (Tenderloin Housing Clinic); no. 202431379, 26 Nov 2024; no. 202540258, 16 Jul 2025; no. 202659255, 13 Jul 2026. Operator and building names are quoted from what callers and residents told the department; the file is not independent confirmation of any contract. 5. Complaints 202659255 (filed 13 Jul 2026, closed 14 Jul), 202658174 (22 Jun, closed 24 Jun) and 202659999 (27 Jul, closed 29 Jul), all Housing Inspection Services, all status Not Active. Text quoted verbatim, including its spelling. 6. gm2e-bten, complaints per calendar year at parcel 3703028, and per 1 January to 31 July window, 2019 through 2026. 2020–2025: 5, 2, 6, 5, 3, 2 (mean 3.83); 2017–2019: 26, 28, 20 (mean 24.67). 7. nbtm-fbw5, notices 202650371 (29 Jan 2026, hot water 105–120°F at taps, 505d(3)) and 202650472 (30 Jan 2026, heat 13 hours daily capable of 68°F per occupied SRO room, 701c HC). 8. nbtm-fbw5 max date_filed 31 Jul 2026, data_as_of 2 Aug 2026; distinct notices issued citywide by month in 2026: 414, 379, 368, 401, 351, 331, 311. 9. DataSF, Building Permits (i98e-djp9), block 3703 lot 028, permit filed 26 May 2017, $5,000. All queries and full response digests in editions/2026-08-03/receipts.json.
2. DataSF, Civic Art Collection (r7bn-7v9c), data as of 17 Apr 2024: 1,038 works; by current location, 719 on public display, 159 held by a city agency, 158 at SFO, 2 unrecorded. All 158 SFO rows return under a query for null supervisor_district; 157 of them carry ZIP 94128. 11. Same file, grouped by supervisor district: D3 147, D10 138, D7 128, D5 102, D6 66, D8 61, D9 58, D4 57, D1 42, D11 15, D2 12; 826 works carry a district, an even share of 75.1. The 212 without one are the 158 at SFO, 24 held by city agencies and 30 on public display whose address did not geocode. 12. Same file, all twelve rows where supervisor_district = 02, with creation_date and street address as filed. 13. Same file, grouped by analysis neighborhood: Bayview Hunters Point 53; Pacific Heights 1, Presidio 1, Haight Ashbury 1, Marina 5, Russian Hill 6, Japantown 7, Nob Hill 9, summing to 30. Mission 102 and Tenderloin 76 lead the neighborhood table. 14. DataSF carries Public Art (from 1% Art Program) as a separate dataset, cf6e-9e4j, not queried for this piece. r7bn-7v9c has no funding-source field. 15. Same file, all rows with creation_date before 1900, sorted ascending. The field is free text and holds ranges and the string “Unknown,” so it does not sort as a number and no per-decade count was attempted. Queries in editions/2026-08-03/receipts.json.
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