Ben Jiang retrieved a key from a locker and worked to unravel a mass of chains securing the front gate of his home.
Inside, raunchy graffiti covered several walls and doors, fixtures remained broken, rodent droppings littered the gross carpet, and a strange stench filled the air. He bought the Fixer-Upper in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood in October 2020, envisioning the dream home it could one day become.
Instead, it has turned into a nightmare.
“Welcome to the House of Secrets,” Jiang said to me. “Or the house from hell. Whatever you call it, we don’t want to live here.”
Squatters have left a mess at a home in Bernal Heights. It cost the homeowners $3,000 to remove their belongings.
Courtesy of Jennifer SunI told you nearly a year ago about the quintessential San Francisco experience that Jiang and his wife, Jennifer Sun, have had since they bought the home for a whopping $1.75 million. The endless search for permits for a conversion. The squatters who turned the house into a drug den. The shrug of the police, who let all but one go without consequences. The city’s inability to fix its own disruptions and provide basic services to its residents.
All these months later, nothing has changed about the house.
“We are still without a permit,” Jiang told me, adding that the squatters keep coming back, too.
Life at the Bernal Heights home hasn’t gotten any better, but it has changed significantly for Jiang and Sun. They’re expecting a baby in May — and they’ve given up San Francisco.
They bought a house in Millbrae, quickly obtained permits for a similar conversion and have already started work. A place where city governments seem to serve residents and where property crime is taken seriously, San Mateo County will forever be family home.
“Millbrae welcomed us,” Jiang said, contrasting that warm feeling with San Francisco. “The city is telling us to leave.”
Shortly after purchasing the Bernal Heights home, the couple hired architect Serina Calhoun to design a remodel and submitted their plans in May 2021. They continued to live in their apartment in the south of the market and assumed that the conversion would proceed quickly. You thought wrong.
Nothing in their plans was very grand, but they encountered the idiosyncratic Bernal Heights “Special Use District,” approved by the Board of Supervisors in 1991, which governs even the smallest modifications to homes in the neighborhood — down to the allowable widths of curbs and garage doors .
Even Department of Planning officials find the code confusing, but changing it will require another vote by the Board of Supervisors.
The couple revised their project enough to receive planning department approval in August 2022, said Dan Sider, the department’s chief of staff.
The project then went to the Building Inspectorate, who provided comments to the couple in November, prompting a back-and-forth between DBI and Calhoun, who disagreed over whether for the slope the home sits on.
“It’s not just because we’re being careful,” said Patrick Hannan, a spokesman for DBI, adding that the law requires it because the couple wants to lower their basement floor.
The couple are proceeding with the required soil surveys. Jiang said he understands the issue but doesn’t understand why the city didn’t mention it until recently since his project has been on officials’ desks since May 2021.
Calhoun said the project was one of the worst she’s ever dealt with – calling it “a really muddled mess” – and she’s not surprised the couple fared so much better in Millbrae.
“Doing an addition in San Francisco is excruciatingly difficult,” she said. “I’ve worked a lot at Millbrae and it’s really easy.”
She said the process there — as in many Bay Area cities — is straightforward. You submit your plans, they either meet the code or they don’t, and staff are on hand to answer questions to troubleshoot issues so permits can be issued quickly.
“I just get a hard no in San Francisco,” Calhoun said. “And then, ‘Oh, I spoke to my manager, and they said no, too.'”
While San Francisco’s allowing troublesome neighbors to ruin projects is often to blame in cases like this, it was not the case with Jiang and Sun. Ted Hildum, who lives across the street, said neighbors wanted the unattractive home, which continues to attract squatters, to be approved and repaired.
“I want someone to live there,” he said. “It’s bad for the neighborhood.”
It’s not just the allowable delay that frustrates Jiang. The police have earned their scorn, too. In November, people stacked concrete blocks to build a ladder to climb the back fence, moved into the home’s crawl space, and started a fire inside that got so out of control that three fire engines had to respond, Jiang said.
He’s installed security cameras that have been destroyed by vandals, boarded up the crawl space so he can only access it with an ax, and fortified the house to keep people out. He said police have responded to reports of squatters in the house four times but have never arrested anyone for squatting, only shooed them away.
Police arrested one of seven squatters living in the house in February 2022 – but only because he had warrants for stealing a vehicle, possession of stolen property and theft. It’s unclear what happened to his case after that; A request to the prosecutor’s office was not immediately answered. Despite causing significant damage to the home and leaving behind many drug paraphernalia, the others were allowed to leave.
I asked the police department spokesman to respond to Jiang’s complaints, but received a typical response: none at all.
Jiang and Sun continue to spend vast sums of money on their apartment rent, mortgage and property taxes on their two homes, permitting fees, and the cost of securing their home in Bernal Heights. Of course, having the money to buy a home in the Bay Area, let alone two, is a privilege. But the couple said it would drain their bank accounts and cause major stress at a time when it should be a happy time to be expecting a baby.
“We’re not in a good place financially, and we’re not in a good place from a peace of mind standpoint,” Sun said.
The couple are excited to move into their Millbrae home, but they’re unsure what to do with the one in Bernal Heights. Jiang said he’ll likely try to sell it after he gets his permits — and if he can’t break even, he might do the remodeling work and then try to sell it again. But the real estate market isn’t as hot as it was when he bought the house, and he’s not sure he’ll find takers. (Redfin says it’s worth $70,000 less than what the couple bought it for.)
When asked if he regrets ever buying the House of Horrors, Jiang said, “Definitely. 100%.”
“I really envisioned a home here,” he said, taking in the beautiful view from his large rear windows and the small shops on Cortland Avenue, which he thought he would walk to regularly.
“It’s heartbreaking, you know?”
Heather Knight is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf