Even The Puppies of Dogpatch Are Being Priced Out of SF

The Dogpatch is one of San Francisco’s hottest neighborhoods. Over the last decade or two, a ton of new apartments shot up like poppies on the side of the road. As recently as 20 years ago, it was largely working class and industrial, but these days a lot of tenants are young biotech and healthcare workers. 

Even these people, with solid careers in well-paying jobs, are struggling to make their rent every month. To make matters worse, the rent bubble means some are getting notices from their landlords: The rent is about to skyrocket by as much as 50%.

We spoke with Dogpatch neighbor and dog park lover Gayle Maccia, who lost her dog last year around this time. She got a puppy in October and started going to the local bark park. “Most adorably, 5 other people in the neighborhood all got puppies at the same time. So our puppies are a pack,” Maccia laughs. 

Almost immediately, Maccia’s puppy bonded with the others (and so did she with their human companions, other renters in the neighborhood). “They've grown up together. They protect each other from the big dogs because they're all little dogs,” she says. 

But as time went on, many of the owners shared a distressing common theme. Their landlords were all raising the rent, and not by a little. One of Maccia’s new friends is a nurse who works the night shift in the surgery for a children’s hospital.  “Her rent's going up from $3750 a month to $5700. Everybody at the dog park can tell you a story like this. It's just gotten so crazy.”

Maccia caught a 7 On Your Side story about a family with a little one and the landlord who is doubling their rent. She explains that it’s similar to how her puppy pack formed. “They got to know all the other parents in the neighborhood,” she says. Now, with an unimaginable rent hike, the people they imagined their little boy Henry would grow up alongside are all getting displaced, just like Maccia’s little pup Darla.

Maccia patiently explains: “Well, not for newer buildings, that's for sure. Anything that's under 15 years old is not under AB 1482, which is the state law, and San Francisco itself doesn't have anything to protect its residents other than buildings older than 1979. So there's this whole loophole and gap that's happening.”

It’s not isolated to any one neighborhood, but because Dogpatch is particularly new, there’s a lot more of it. Maccia explains, “Once UCSF was built, then the entire area became less warehouses and more livable. And now there's businesses and parks and people thrive there.”

Maccia says she’s been advocating for months, even reaching out to the Mayor multiple times. “I've written him, I've tried to call him. Other people have written him, tried to call him. I slam him on social media. I can't get a response.” She hopes the Mayor will consider an emergency measure. Other big city mayors, like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, have worked with tenant advocates to freeze the rent. But Mayor Lurie won’t call the Dogpatch neighbors back.

“There aren't enough people who can pay $8 and $9000 a month rent,” Maccia worries. “And there's eventually going to be a bunch of empty apartments. Once all these landlords realize there aren't enough of these tech kids to fill all of these apartments, they're gonna be sorry.” The dog park, too, will be eerily silent. 

“50%. Who could handle that?” Maccia asks. Especially for people on a fixed income, that kind of change can be disastrous. “This is a tidal wave about to hit.” 

“This is affecting a lot of people,” Maccia says. “If I know 10 people from a park that are going through this, there's a lot more.” If you are struggling with a sudden rent increase or the threat of eviction, reach out to resources like the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition or the San Francisco Tenants Union. 

Maccia wonders if cruelty is the point. “If they did it in a reasonable manner, [people] might be able to stay for a while and it wouldn’t have to be so traumatic,” she reflects. “They're inflicting trauma on people and families unnecessarily, and it's just so parallel to the Trump administration.”