Danelle Morton

In a few hours, I’ll be on the plane to New York City where I’ve been nominated for the American Society of Magazine Editors award in the Public Interest category for my investigative piece on the Lembi Family and the Citi Apartments collapse.  If I win, I get to take home the sacred elephant, the Elle, as they call it.

It’s a strange looking award. The elephant’s ears also seem to serve as its legs. I wonder how one is supposed to hold it if one wins.  I mean, it’s not like I could cradle it like an Oscar. It’s not the cuddly golden boy. Also, I’m not sure of its size.  Can I offer it up in the palm of my hand? or could I stand beneath it?

Anyway, I’m very nervous.

The other entries in this category are great, particularly the one by New Yorker writer Atul Gawande.  He wrote about two town in Texas within a few miles of each other  — McAllen and El Paso — that had roughly the same demographic but for some reason McAllen  had among the highest Medicare reimbursement rate in the country while the other was just below the national average.  The subject of the story was exploring  how that could be possible.  What he found was that in McAllen, the doctors owned the hospitals and the testing facilities and therefore had a huge motivation to charge more for tests. The piece was riveting in the way it explained disparities in the health care system through exploring these two towns.

So, what are my chances? I’m going up against The New Yorker, National Geographic, Technology Review and Boston Review. Strong competitors.  But, hey, my story is very strong too.

Tomorrow night at Alice Tully Hall, I’ll know

Andrew Ross in the SF Chronicle has been staying on top of the continuing dismantling of the Lembi real estate empire. Earlier this month, he noted that the Lembi group was about to be sanctioned $30,000 by the court for not providing their part of discovery in a law suit brought by former tenants who could not get their security deposits back. In February, the court fined the Lembis $50,000 for not meeting discovery requests for the suit brought by the San Francisco City Attorney’s office in 2006.

The other bad news for the Lembis was that Yvonne Lembi Detert, the daughter of Frank L who runs the family hotel business, was having a hard time making payroll. Her highly leveraged hotels haven’t been doing very well during the downturn. The company recently placed the hotels in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Lembi-Detert was able to make payroll in the beginning of the month but it was unclear if mid-month paychecks would be forthcoming. Sick days and vacation days were not being paid either.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/01/BU9D1CNTS5.DTL

When I was growing up in San Francisco, the part of Third Street near where I now live was the city’s industrial zone with steel foundries, ship dry docks and shipyards and the massive complex that contained American Can. That is all in the past now, with just the hulks of the buildings remaining.

Illinois and 20th Streets

I walked around this forlorn area a few days back and was struck by the blunt integrity of these old buildings.

The only active place was a metal recycling facility on the old shipping pier. Every few minutes, another small pick up truck filled over the top with busted appliances and discarded bed springs would come roaring past me headed for the dump some place in this wreck of a building.

Yesterday ProPublica, the independently funded investigative reporting organization featured my SF magazine story on its front page as the editor’s pick of the day.

Check out my newest piece of investigative journalism, the cover story for the December issue of San Francisco Magazine.

Eighteen months in the making, War of Values reveals how the city’s dominant landlords, the Lembi family of CitiApartments fame, bought up every building they could get their hands on, from the Tenderloin’s rattiest dumps to Nob Hill’s ritziest penthouses, with an audacious plan to drive up everyone’s rent. And their money came from the same financial geniuses who brought the world economy to its knees.

The buzz is growing. See the comments at local real estate blog Socket Site to see some of the commentary. For more discussion, take a look at Curbed SF.