City employees say they can't afford to live in S.F.

Claudia Flores, who makes $77,000 per year working for the city, is trying to find an apartment she can afford in S.F. Claudia Flores, who makes $77,000 per year working for the city, is trying to find an apartment she can afford in S.F. Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close City employees say they can't afford to live in S.F. 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

(04-28) 11:03 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Claudia Flores has had to move twice since October when landlords nearly doubled her rent in San Francisco. Now she's crashing with friends and trusting a space will open up in another friend's apartment next month.

If she earned more, Flores says she could have been able to stay in a smaller room at the Mission District condo she shared. Instead, the whole place was rented to "two guys in their 20s who work for Apple."

Flores is not a twentysomething fresh out of college making a go of it in the big city. She's a 36-year-old professional who has worked in the City Planning Department for eight years.

Even some San Francisco public employees - whose pay and benefits are often the envy of peers in government and the private sector - say the city has become too expensive for them during this tech boom. They are looking for raises after years of givebacks during the recession.

Mayor Ed Lee's administration is negotiating contracts for about 24,000 employees from 27 different unions or groups - all of the city's unions except for police and firefighters - as he tries to juggle San Francisco's long-term financial stability amid uncertainty about the tech surge's longevity.

"While there's plenty of hyperbole in politics, it's actually difficult to overstate the complexity and consequence of these high-stakes negotiations," said Alex Clemens, a political consultant and veteran City Hall watcher. "The decisions being made on both sides of the table have long-lasting financial effects on our city and for our workforce - effects compounded by the economic upheaval taking place right now."

Maintaining middle class

Complicating matters is the mayor's effort to keep middle-class residents in a city with astronomical housing costs, and, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, the fastest-growing gap between rich and poor in the nation.

On top of that, Lee faces re-election in 2015. The unions, with campaign accounts and varying amounts of political weight, have requested raises, typically 5 percent in the first year, and other compensation.

The bulk of the raise requests, covering about 20,000 workers, would cost the city an extra $279 million over the life of the contracts, which range from one to three years, according to the city's Department of Human Resources.

That figure doesn't include things like premium pay for longevity or holding multiple professional licenses, which would add millions more to the total, city officials said. One proposal by Service Employees International Union Local 1021 to make all employees full time would cost the city $18 million a year alone, according to Lee's administration.

Those figures are on top of the almost $2.5 billion in wages and benefits that the city currently spends for those employees involved. The figures don't cover raises sought by Municipal Transportation Agency workers.

Lee has countered with smaller raise proposals and is pushing back on requests like the one from SEIU to pay for all health insurance costs for employees.

"We are offering fair wage increases, but we need to balance that with the needs of the city," said Christine Falvey, the mayor's spokeswoman. "We have to make choices that don't hurt the city's bottom line in the long run, but also compensate the good work by our city employees."

The city is in arbitration with its main unions over their contracts. The outcome of the first one, possibly next week, will probably be a template for the remainder.

City workers already earn more on average than their counterparts at other Bay Area governments, Falvey said. The city, with a $7.9 billion budget in the fiscal year that ends June 30, is facing a $66 million deficit in the next fiscal year and $133 million for fiscal 2015-16 unless next year's budget is balanced with more than one-time fixes.

Wages lagging, union says

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21, whose members include city planners like Flores, contends its workers' wages have fallen behind the cost of living increase in the Bay Area by 11 percent over the last 10 years. SEIU Local 1021, San Francisco's largest, most liberal and most politically active public employee union, says its members have given back $122 million over the past four fiscal years.

With city revenues growing at a healthy clip amid soaring property values and a thriving local economy, public workers say they deserve to share in San Francisco's success after years of givebacks, like pay cuts and furlough days, during the last recession.

The city controller's budget update in February found a citywide revenue surplus of $48.5 million over what was projected. But costs are rising faster than revenue, and the biggest expense in the budget, at 49 percent, is personnel, says the city's Human Resources Department. City workers made concessions during the downturn to balance the budget but have since received raises, said Susan Gard, chief of policy for the department.

"Everyone has come back up to the level they were at when the recession started," she said.

Getting back to that point hasn't been enough for Claudia Flores, who makes $77,000 a year working about 32 hours a week as a city planner on long-range development.

She was booted in October from a three-bedroom condo at 25th and Valencia streets, where she rented a room for $1,000 a month. The rent for the entire place, which is not covered by rent control, was going up to $6,300 a month.

The owners said, "We would love to keep you because you're a wonderful tenant, but we don't think you can afford that rent," Flores recalled. They added: "Maybe you could find somebody who works for Google or YouTube, and they could take the larger room and that would allow you to stay."

It didn't happen.

"The big irony is not being able to afford to live in the city you work for," said Flores, whose projects include the plan to build 1,600 housing units at the former Schlage Lock site in Visitacion Valley.

"We joke," she said, "that we could write a housing unit for Claudia into one of those projects."