Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (20 page)

This co-existed, however, with inhumane treatment for animals
not kept as pets. The phrase “dog days of summer” took on new meaning as
city-dwellers systematically hunted down dogs in return for bounties to prevent
the spread of rabies. Manhattan’s stray dogs were caught, locked in a cage, and
lowered into the East River to be drowned on a daily basis. Americans generally
justified this cruelty as part of the “natural order.” Man had dominion over
animals, and could treat them as he saw fit. The majority of Americans, even
pet owners, saw no reason to afford any protections to a stray or working
animal.

The first puppy mills arose after World War II. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to breed puppies as a new “cash
crop” for the burgeoning pet store market. No oversight or laws existed on the
practice. Unsurprisingly, farmers that had been devastated by the Great
Depression, survived World War II, and used
animals
as
tools did not prioritize the comfort of the dogs. They remained locked inside
refashioned chicken coops, without access to veterinary care or “socialization”
with humans and other dogs.

While puppy mills had poor conditions, the view of dogs as a
commodity meant that they were euthanized and discarded in large numbers. In
the words of one president of a New England animal shelter:

"In the past, it was acceptable to throw an animal away,
the way you would an old television set. You would just bring them to the
shelter and dump the old dog you don’t want anymore… For a long time, it’s just
what you did. [Animals] came in; you killed them. No one thought that was
wrong"

Pet owners felt no qualms over abandoning unwanted dogs, while
pet stores dropped off puppies that grew too old to sell and
breeders
discarded old animals. By 1970, overcrowded shelters euthanized over 20 million
animals.

Four
Decades of Change

In
2011, the number of animals euthanized stood at approximately three million
— an incredible decrease from the 20 million mark in 1970, especially
considering that the number of pets, according to the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has doubled from 80 million dogs and cats to
160 million.

The movement to spay and neuter dogs and cats began in 1971 when
a Los Angeles shelter opened a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. It framed sterilization
as an issue of compassion. In its first four years, spaying and neutering
increased from 10% to 51% in Los Angeles among licensed dogs. Crucially, the
clinic and its followers not only spread spaying and neutering as a norm (both
among shelters and through outreach programs), but also subsidized the cost of
the procedure — a crucial point for low-income pet owners as
sterilization costs several hundred dollars.

States and local government also began mandating the practice of
spaying and neutering. The laws are not uniform, but 30 states have some form
of spay/neuter laws. As a result, 78% of pet dogs are now spayed or neutered,
and sterilization is considered, in the words of Inga Fricke of the United
States Humane Society, “a standard practice of care.”

The improving lot of pets can also be linked to the
establishment of responsible pet care as a norm. Whereas pets were once a
commodity or tool, a myriad of organizations now publish manuals that sternly
lecture owners on the responsibilities that come with the “privilege” of pet
ownership. Online searches on “where to buy a puppy” return hundreds of
articles on the evils of puppy mills and retail pet stores. Anyone posting to
an email list or online forum asking where to give up their pet can expect to
face a horde of self-righteous, finger-wagging pet advocates.

With increased care for the welfare of pets came increased
resources to improve their treatment. The amount shelters spent on animal
protection increased from roughly $1 billion to $2.8 billion from 1975 to 2007,
accounting for inflation. Rescue and advocacy organizations have proliferated.
Petfinder
, a database of adoptable pets, offers links to
nearly 14,000 adoption groups.

Increased legal attention has focused on puppy mills in addition
to spaying, neutering, and animal cruelty. Many local governments have placed
more stringent conditions on dog breeding than the federal minimum, and a
number of cities have banned the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores outright
to prevent the sale of puppy mill pups: LA became the biggest city to do so in
2012, joining 27 other major cities.

The past four decades have seen dramatic improvement in the lot
of America’s pets.
Euthanization
has fallen
dramatically thanks to legal action, increased resources, and the norms of
responsible pet care, which have also taken aim at puppy mills and animal
cruelty.

The recession has, however, reversed some of these gains. When
we visited the San Francisco Department of Animal Care, which is mandated to
accept any dog in San Francisco for any reason, employees described a
significant increase in the number of dogs dropped off by owners who could not
afford to buy food for their dog or pay for veterinary care, as well as people
who tried (and failed) to make cash by breeding Chihuahua and
pitbull
puppies.

A Dog’s Life

America’s relationship with pets is a mixed bag. People clearly
love their pets; we also kill millions of them each year. But the number of pet
euthanizations
keeps dropping as more pets are
sterilized, more people adopt, and fewer people treat pets like commodities. If
1970 marked the high-water mark in pet cruelty, massive strides have been made
since then.

But focusing only on
euthanizations
misses part of the story. Hidden behind a cloak of respectability, pet stores
and brokers continue to sell puppies that came from exploitive “puppy mills.”
Pet-loving Americans are mostly ignorant of the plight of the cute, cuddly
creatures that they love to croon over. Americans don’t know much about the
factories where their phones, shoes, and computers come from. Perhaps it’s not
surprising that the same is true of our beloved pets.

18.

EVICTED IN SAN FRANCSICO

I
n March of
2014, 75-year old
Inge
Dhillion
was evicted from her San Francisco residence; her possessions were forcibly
moved into a storage unit, and she was left without a home. She now sleeps in a
brown 1997 Volvo station wagon with her cat, Queenie, parked in front of her
old home in the Mission District. She steals ice from motel machines to chill
her daily insulin shots, and relies on the goodwill of social workers to help
her through daily life.

Within a few weeks of the eviction, the landlord put the
property on the market for $1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering
he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002.

What follows is the story of one eviction in San Francisco, as
recounted by both
Inge
and her landlord.

A Free
Spirit

Inge
Dhillon
was 24
years old when she snuck on a cargo ship in Rotterdam and embarked on a 10-day
journey bound for the United States. She’d fallen in love with a beautiful
woman, and decided to go find her in Philadelphia.

She grew up in post-war Germany, working odd jobs to get by:
delivering flowers to prostitutes,
hostessing
on a
first class train across the countryside, butchering hogs in dingy back rooms.
With the promise of a better life, she had set her sails to the sea.

When she arrived, the Philadelphia love affair didn’t pan out
— her mistress had “gone straight” — and
Inge
made a second impulsive decision: she’d embark for San Francisco to find the
“dyke that dreams are made of.” When she arrived, she recalls being popular
with the ladies — "I was passed around like wildfire!" —
but also remembers a fairly hostile recognition by the police as a gay woman in
the 1960s:

"I used to go to this little bar somewhere on Harrison
Street. It'd be packed with women, and the police would operate these 'queer
raids.' You'd hear a blaring noise, and the warning light would flood the room.
They'd round up the broads and throw them in the paddy-wagon.”

She joined the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters and
drove a Yellow Cab around the city for the next 27 years, holing up in a
variety of rooms and apartments. In 1994, she settled in an illegal in-law unit
on Rosemont Street: she’d call this home for 20 years.

Her living space was quaint: A 350 square foot illegal in-law
unit attached to a garage, with a small kitchen and a half-bath. For a retired
taxi driver trying to cut it in a tough San Francisco housing market, a $480
monthly rent was hard to beat.

Illegal
In-Law Units in SF: A Brief Note

An
in-law unit is a small additional dwelling to a main property. There are three
stipulations that may make an in-law unit illegal in San Francisco: no separate
PG&E bill (gas and electric bill is shared with or paid by landlord);
ceiling height is lower than 7’6”; and, most commonly, the unit has no
independent front entrance, or secondary egress (for example, a unit where the
only entrance/exit is through a garage).

Usually, illegal units exhibit at least two of these tendencies;
in
Inge’s
case, her unit exhibited all three. She
paid no gas or electricity bill, lived in a unit below mandated size, and had
to enter and exit through the main unit’s garage.

City officials estimate that there are over 40,000 illegal
in-law units attached to San Francisco properties, and they account for about
ten percent of the city’s housing stock. Most of these units were constructed
during World War II, when workers flooded to the Bay Area to take wartime
industrial jobs; today, property owners often choose to rent them to
lower-income tenants under the table. Historically, San Francisco has had a
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding illegal in-law units; when they are
reported, the city takes serious action.

Leading up
to
Inge’s
Eviction

Inge
began renting the illegal unit on Rosemont
Street in 1994, from “an old German man” who’d owned the property for years and
was willing to help out a fellow national. When the current owners, the
Withrington
brothers, purchased the property in 2002,
Inge
came with it.

In San Francisco, a landlord can’t evict a current tenant just
because they are selling or buying the property; by the time the unit was
purchased,
Inge
had already been living there for ten
years, and she had no intention to go anywhere. Since
Inge's
unit was illegal, her landlord had even fewer options in the way of legal
recourse.

“Pretty much everyone we talked to advised us not to buy it,”
says Jon
Withrington
, with a defeated chuckle. “We
probably should’ve listened.” What ensued was a drawn-out sticky situation that
pitted him against his senior citizen tenant.

At first,
Withrington
accepted
Inge’s
presence; her unit was fairly disconnected from the
main two-story unit. He and his brother, who had co-invested in the property,
each occupied a floor with their respective families. But over time, he came to
realize that
Inge
was a destructive tenant and “came
across as a victim, but was her own worst enemy”:

“I could send you transcripts of a phone message where she said
she will burn the house down if we didn't fix the leaking roof. Or show you the
rent increase letter that was returned to me unopened and defaced with 'Fuck
You’ written on it. We tried to help her.”

He also claims that
Inge
made enemies
with many neighbors over trite things like “turning the sprinklers on near her
cat.” In December 2011, one of these conflicts led to an anonymous report filed
with San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection (DBI), in which someone
“ratted on”
Inge’s
illegal unit. Since the claim was
completely anonymous, it technically could've been made by anyone —
including the landlord.

In the following weeks, the DBI contacted
Wingrington
,
told him the nature of the complaint, and conducted an inspection of the
property, deeming that the unit was illegal. The DBI offered the landlord a
choice: he could either retrofit the in-law unit to make it legal (this would
require him to rip out the garage and extend an independent entrance, at a cost
of around $150,000), or he could remove the unit (this would entail converting
the unit into a workshop at a cost of about $4,000). He chose the latter.

But in order to convert the unit into a workshop,
Wingrington
would have to do two things: acquire the
necessary permits to do so, and then evict
Inge
.

He described the eviction process as "hellish." To
convert the unit, he had to get electrical, plumbing, and building permits; he
started with the building permit, but
Inge
—
with the help of social workers and lawyers — appealed it. He took the
matter to the Board of Appeals, but
Inge
made the
compelling case that she was elderly, sick, and had nowhere to go; a hold was
put on any construction work for three months, and
Inge
was ordered to make a concerted effort to find alternative housing.

***

In
San Francisco, there exist a number of housing resources for seniors facing
eviction.
Openhouse
, a housing service specifically
for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi/trans-sexual) seniors like
Inge
,
helps community members find affordable housing by providing resources in
weekly housing clinics and by setting them up with services for eviction
defense, housing rights, employment, and mental health counseling. The program
also plans to open a 110-unit apartment complex with rooms ranging from $589 to
$1000 per month, or 30% of a tenant’s income (usually social security, SSI, or
disability pay).

The problem, according to
Inge
, is
that most housing options like this have extremely long wait lists. Ellyn
Bloomfield,
Openhouse’s
social service manager,
confirms this:

“On any given day in San Francisco, there are about 15,000
elderly looking to be placed in affordable housing. The average wait list time
is five years; for many, this is just too long. They need something more
immediately.”

Bloomfield, who was a gerontologist before going into social
work, also says that eviction is a common dilemma faced by San Francisco’s
elderly. She adds that laws like the Ellis Act — which makes it legal for
landlords to evict tenants as long as they don’t rent the property for five years
afterward — are especially painful for tenants to go through, and that
landlords often single them out as high-maintenance roadblocks:

“Older
people are forced into exile by their landlords, under a variety of eviction
laws — almost like post-war refugees. Many actually even have
post-traumatic stress disorder. What other business exists where there is an
adversarial relationship between a client and a manager?”

There are other options, like single room occupancies (SROs),
which are often used to house the homeless community as well. But in San
Francisco, the majority of these are in the Tenderloin (one of the city’s most
dangerous neighborhoods), and for an elderly woman, this isn’t the safest
environment.

According to
Inge
, she pursued some of
these options, but was turned off by the no-guarantee nature of the wait-lists,
and felt she was entitled to stay where she was.
Withrington
says the tenant was “in denial of the impending eviction,” and, despite his
efforts to set her up with resources,
Inge
did little
in way of seriously considering outside options.

“I personally went out and found stuff — my own mother
personally went out and found stuff. We put
Inge
in
touch with multiple social workers and housing agencies. The problem is that a
lot of these places come and check where you’re living and only take you in if
you meet their standards.
Inge
is a hoarder, a
smoker, and has a cat. The smell in her unit was
absolutely…just...unbelievable. That didn’t work out well for her.”

Over the years,
Inge’s
rent had
gradually increased from $480 to $560 per month; in late 2012, in the midst of
the permit debacle, she decided to stop paying rent altogether.
Withrington
says he “couldn’t do a damn thing about it,”
since he was renting an illegal unit. In addition,
Inge
refused to contribute to gas, water, and electricity bills.
Inge’s
landlord says that, in all, this cost him over $10,000 in utilities and lost
potential rent.

The landlord was caught in a legislative catch-22: he faced
immense fines from the DBI if he didn’t remove the illegal unit, but the Board
of Arbitration wouldn’t grant him the necessary permits to do so. But removing
the legal unit would also prove to be a loophole to legally evict
Inge
and pave the way for a more lucrative property sale (properties
with 'squatters' don't sell for nearly as much).

In early 2013, after the
three month
stay on construction was up,
Inge
and
Withrington
were summoned back to the Board of Appeals;
this time,
Inge
didn’t even show up. By default, the
landlord got the permit. To begin converting the illegal in-law unit into a
legal workspace, he’d need to evict
Inge
.

The
Eviction and Aftermath

Under
Rent Ordinance section 37.9(a)(10), once a landlord has obtained the applicable
permits to “demolish or otherwise remove the [illegal] rental unit from housing
use,” the tenant can be legally evicted. Armed with the necessary paperwork,
Withrington
began the eviction process but, according to
him,
Inge
was still in denial of the process:

“I told her, okay look
Inge
, we’re
going to start this process now. Are you going to find a place to live? She
essentially told me to [stick it where the sun doesn’t shine].”

First came the arbitration hearing, where
Inge’s
lawyer and the landlord’s lawyers tried to strike a deal to avoid any type of
elongated legal dispute. This ended somewhat peacefully:
Withrington
agreed to pay
Inge
a settlement of $14,000 in
resettlement fees, and she signed a contract agreeing to vacate the property
within 60 days. The first eviction notice was issued.

The 60 days came and went, and
Inge
was still occupying the property. A second eviction notice, known as an
“unlawful detainer,” or the act of occupying property without legal right, was
issued. This time,
Inge
had five days to appear
before the Board of Appeals to argue her case. Again, she failed to show up.