As Twitter Moves In, Rats May Finally Be Stamped Out
Empty lot next to company's new headquarters has long been infested with rodents
As Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media companies, prepares to move into its new headquarters in San Francisco’s mid-Market district, it has some unsavory new neighbors: rats.
The company plans to relocate its offices into the historic San Francisco Mart building on Market between Ninth and 10th Streets by next June. The highly publicized move has proven to be a magnet for other development to the downtrodden area.
But at 1411 Market St., right next to Twitter’s new building, is a crater-sized rat hole that the city’s health department has labeled a “vector” for vermin. Debris on the site — crumbling concrete from a razed former structure — has become an inviting habitat for the rodents.
Neighbors say they have complained about the infestation for years, to no avail. Now some want to enlist Twitter — or leverage the attention surrounding the company’s move — to finally deal with the rats.
“It’s a real problem,” said Richard Lynch, a resident on nearby Natoma Street whose excitable three-legged Dalmatian Stormy discovered the rodents a couple of years ago. “Dalmatians are bred to hunt vermin,” he said.
Lynch has sent out alarms about the infestation since 2009 in a series of verbose emails to a long list of residents and city officials, often accompanied by videos and photos of the rats. (As a former Natoma Street neighbor, I was copied.)
The rats at the site are brazen. When I visited last week, two shoe-sized rats scurried from the crater up to the sidewalk, passing inches from my feet. Others frolicked and roughhoused in the pit. As I videotaped them, and my focus was trained on the camera’s viewfinder, one rat quietly made its way up to the curb just two feet away from me. I looked down, we made eye contact and I decided one of us had to flee. (Hint: it was not the rat.)
“We’ve had several complaints,” said Richard Lee, the city’s director of Environmental Health Regulatory Programs. “We don’t allow conditions where rats are allowed to live.”
The empty lot, surrounded by a chain link fence, is owned by Crescent Heights, a developer based in Miami, which said it acquired the property about five years ago and planned to build a residential tower. The land is valued at nearly $27 million, according to assessor-recorder records.
Lee said earlier this month, after Lynch’s latest complaint, that his office ordered Crescent Heights to bring in pest control. The debris is allowed to stay since it will be used as fill during construction, which might finally begin this fall.
Explaining why the site has been empty for the past few years, Brian Duchman, a spokesman for Crescent Heights, said a combination of the recession and the city’s permit process had slowed plans to develop it.
But “when we have a complaint we take it seriously,” Duchman said. “We have done everything we’ve been told to do.”
Indeed, in recent days, for the first time in years, there is activity at the crater: a backhoe has arrived, as well as what appears to be rat bait.
Jim Meko, chairman of the SoMa Leadership Council, a neighborhood group, said the city should not have allowed the lot to sit vacant for so long, leading to what he called blight.
“Eventually the whole neighborhood becomes demoralized by it,” Meko said.
He would like the city to force owners to create temporary uses for empty lots to prevent problems like vermin.
Lynch would go even further — he wants the city to revoke Crescent Heights’ building permits and turn the land into a neighborhood park.
To gather support for this idea, Lynch recently started a Twitter group, @MidMarketGreen, which immediately tried to enlist the help of Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive.
“I’m hoping there’s a lot of activity in the area resulting from the renovation of that historic building,” Costolo tweeted back to a group member on July 17, referring to his company’s plans, though not endorsing the park idea.
Sean Garrett, a spokesman for Twitter, would not address the rat issue specifically, but said in an email that the company was “very aware of the perennial issues” in the area and planned “to collaborate on improving the neighborhood for both new entrants and longtime residents.”
So, one way or another, it seems the rat hole is doomed. No one apparently wants to see #TwitterRats as the day’s trending tweet topic.
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
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