Central City SRO Collaborative's bedbug battle
Armed with a stack of bedbug surveys and wearing thick plastic glasses that say "Don't mess with me," Karin Drucker walked into the Winton Hotel on O'Farrell Street to meet with a client who called earlier in the week about a severe infestation.
Before knocking on Richard Mahn's door on the fourth floor, Drucker pointed out the unit next door.
A mattress, with no sheets, on a simple bed frame, was surrounded by stacks of paperback books.
[...] he was worried about his cat's safety with getting the treatment done, so I offered him the suggestion that someone could talk to him about making him more comfortable and keeping the things that are more important to him.
When they go into the city's residential hotels, they're looking for tenants who need help getting the landlord to do something about bad plumbing, mold, nonworking heaters and other indicators of a bad living environment.
Drucker, 26, is a community organizer with the Central City SRO Collaborative, an arm of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic nonprofit.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she tackles problems in some of the 150 or so privately run hotels in the Tenderloin and South of Market, many of them filled with formerly homeless people now being housed at city expense.