A Mission District surfer-carpenter-mother is a study in the paradoxes of Bay Area living.
by Carol Lloyd, special to SF Gate
She lives in a 10-by-10-foot room in the basement of a six-unit apartment house in the Mission. No running water, no stove, no toilet. She brushes her teeth at a faucet at the side of the building. At night, she waits until it's dark so the tenants don't see her standing naked in the breezeway, soaping herself with a washcloth. Inside the little room, she gestures to different corners and laughs. "There's my kitchen, my closet, my office, my bedroom." She points to a covered paint bucket outside her door. "And there's my toilet." We've all heard tell of that poor person who has finagled his or her way into a garage, a storage space, a tool shed. San Francisco's Mission District, home to many recent immigrants, is full of these threadbare souls who have sacrificed hearth and home to get across the border to a new life. But for Sue Tate, appearances are deceiving. Despite her sensitive, craggy features that bespeak a past filled with physical labor and emotional experience, the border she crossed to come to San Francisco was from the north -- that is, the Canadian one. And her reasons for living tucked into a dark corner of a basement are not the usual ones of poverty or even misfortune, but one of those classic Bay Area housing paradoxes in which the cost of getting your dream house is to live in a hovel. Tate is not a homeless person or a tenant or even your run-of-the-mill homeowner. She's the landlord of this six-unit building on Bartlett Street, where a handful of Latino families live. Back in Victoria, B.C., in Canada, she still owns a 17-unit apartment house. But for nearly two years, she has been living in the basement of her San Francisco building in order to accomplish the ultimate remodeling project: She's gutted a derelict one-story cottage at the back of the property and raised it up one story and is turning it into a three-bedroom villa with hand-plastered walls tinted the color of sunshine, new oak floors and giant picture windows. In short, she's going to be living in just the kind of place the rest of us dream of -- but not now. For now, she's in construction purgatory. Building a dream house with your own hands is an esteemed tradition of the American way. In 1919, poet Robinson Jeffers built Tor House, his famous stone home on Carmel Point, one rock at a time. Henry David Thoreau constructed his own cabin on Walden Pond, then immortalized the experience in literature. Although performing manual labor for others has long been considered wage slavery, handcrafting on one's own behalf is more often the purview of a special kind of privilege -- the person with the skills of a craftsperson, the leisure time of a person of substance and the desire to fulfill the old canard of American self-sufficiency: If you want something done right, do it yourself. But in the process of building one's dream home (or doing the ultimate remodel job), it's almost a rite of passage that the crafty homeowner live through a period of deprivation. During the construction, the homeowner/builder may live almost happily for months or even years in a setting he or she would never tolerate otherwise: in a trailer on the property, or in one tiny room of the house under construction -- or in a basement without a bathroom. After meeting many people who have willingly endured this type of trade-off, I've come to see these folks as impassioned housing experimenters. Yes, living near to or on the work site saves money. But I don't think cost cutting can fully explain their motivations. They won't stint on their home when they decide they need an antique fixture or radiant heat or custom-built windows. These people love and appreciate beautiful houses, sure -- but, for them, building one's home is ultimately not about the end product. It's about the process. And dwelling for a time in construction purgatory intensifies the whole experience. But rarely does a stint there prove so compelling as it does for surfer/carpenter/mother/real estate mogul Sue Tate. By living in substandard housing for the past 18-plus months, and for four years before that in the unimproved derelict cottage, she's ended up gaining things she never would have experienced had she rented a nice apartment up the hill. She's experienced firsthand how people who don't have money to afford decent housing make their lives rich anyway. But when she and her girlfriend arrived in the City from Victoria in 1998, doing years of housing penance wasn't what Tate had in mind. "Not in a million years," says the handsome, shorn-headed woman in the sunny living room of her as-yet-unfinished home. "I was looking for a duplex in Noe Valley," she adds. "But I couldn't afford them." Instead, she found an apartment house on Bartlett Street whose six one-bedroom apartments were packed with literally dozens of immigrants from Mexico and Honduras -- sometimes 12 to an apartment. For four years, she and her girlfriend lived in the dilapidated, foundationless, pre-1906 earthquake cottage, while Tate saved her money for the work she knew would need to be done. When her girlfriend up and moved back to Canada, Tate relocated to the basement and began the remodeling job that would soon subsume her life. But in the process of living in this building, Tate experienced a way of being a different kind of landlord. "In the past, I've done everything with a property manager," she said with a happy shrug. "Everything is very clear cut, and no one bothers me. But here it's different. I have no control." Sometimes, she says, tenants decide to barbecue in their kitchens; others hold séances in which they speak in tongues. Sometimes, the mother of the 5-year-old boy with Down syndrome needs to be reminded not to leave her son unattended. In becoming a hands-on, on-site landlord -- and probably in part because she is living so frugally -- she didn't just get a piece of real estate, she's gradually become a part of a community in which her role is as paradoxical as the mustache on her girlish grin. Here, life is messy. Sometimes, literally messy. She is the janitor who each month ends up cleaning out the sewers overflowing with paper towels because many of her tenants are not accustomed to the limitations of flush toilets. She is the assistant who, when some of the tenants, who run a flower business, need help on Valentine's Day, is up at 4 am, renting cars and moving flowers. She is the substitute parent who helps 6-year-old Javier with his homework and takes him to swimming classes once a week, and poses in formal family photos with her goddaughter. And, finally, she is the landlady who evicts one girlfriend-abusing drug addict for failure to pay rent and leases at market rate to a single white professional. "I'm torn," she says candidly. "Financially, it doesn't make sense for me to rent to people like my current tenants, who will put three families in a one-bedroom. On the other hand, when the Mexicans and the Hondurans move out, I'm outta here." Why? "I'm just not interested," she says of living in a nice, upscale building full of high-wage professionals. "It's like how some people say that they are working their way out of a job. Well, I feel like I'm sort of working myself out of a home." Despite her appreciation for the community she's found, she says living in a basement without running water is wearing thin. She often visits her mother, once a real estate mogul herself, who now suffers from Alzheimer's. "She lives in this beautiful house with all these luxuries: this view of the ocean, toilets, kitchens," Tate says. "I come back here and I get a little ...." She trails off, looking for the right word. "The first year it was great, but now ...." Still, her house project goes on. And when does Tate expect to move in? She tells me about how difficult it is to do finish carpentry on an old house in which everything is off-kilter and idiosyncratic. But in her eyes there's that gleam of professional pride I have seen before. When one's home becomes one's art project, a convenient lifestyle takes a backseat. Tate shrugs and adds, "I never put a date on it. I just say, 'I'm getting there.'" In the meantime, Tate sometimes contemplates how finishing her home will affect her status as the landlord who lives like she's not a landlord. "I think it's going to be weird," she says, sitting in her little carpenter's cell. "I mean, a lot of my tenants want to know if I can rent this room to them when I move out. They think this is nice." She looks around her room. "I wonder what it's going to be like when I move into this huge house all alone. The class differences -- it's something that's going to change things."
