The San Francisco Tenants Union was formed in 1970 as a radical collective. While not a union in the traditional sense, the organization is run with a collective ethos and praxis. The organization is run primarily by volunteer members, and membership dues help fund the 1.5 paid staff positions that are in charge of office management, administration, and political organizing. The staff are hired through a process facilitated by the steering committee, which is made of up volunteers.
Becoming a Core/Steering Member
The Tenants Union is collectively run, and we are always looking for new core members to help run the organization. Core members are volunteers that want to contribute more to the functionings of the organization itself. Important tasks include administration/finance, policy/legislative advocacy, fundraising, media, and organizing/outreach. If you are interested in helping to run this organization, email info [at] sftu [dot] org for more information.
Staff Members
Jennifer Fieber
Political Campaigns and Member Communication
Jennifer Fieber began volunteering with the Tenants Union in 2011 and is our newest staff member. She is a founding member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a tech-savvy activist collective that produces analysis and data visualizations of social justice issues. Jennifer has been involved in coalitions that advocate for policy changes, including Ellis Act reform and short-term rental policy. She has experience with cartography, fundraising, and facilitating skillsharing and crowdsourcing.
Jennifer moved to San Francisco in 1990 and lives in Bernal Heights.
Andrew Szeto
Tenant Organizer
Andrew Szeto has been the part-time Tenant Organizer at SFTU since 2014. Andrew is in charge of recruitment, placement, and ongoing trainings and events for volunteers and tenant counselors, and he is responsible for managing the daily drop-in counseling clinic and coordinating SFTU research, web site, social media, and outreach projects. He also works on SFTU’s legislative and electoral campaigns.
Andrew is born and raised in San Francisco and went to Abraham Lincoln High school in the Sunset, where he still resides today. His writings on housing justice have appeared on sites such as Truthout and Young{ist}. He identifies as an anarchist and an abolitionist.
Ted Gullicksen
(Office Manager, 1988-2014)
From 1988-2014, Ted Gullicksen was the Manager of the San Francisco Tenants Union. The SFTU has a membership of over 3,000 tenants citywide and is the city’s main tenant advocacy organization. The SFTU provides counseling services for tenants having landlord problems, publishes a comprehensive Tenants Rights Handbook, and operates comprehensive tenants rights website, www.sftu.org.
Besides directly helping tenants with their problems, the Tenants Union also develops and advocates for legislation expanding the rights of tenants and expanding rent control coverage. Ted was the organization’s main legislative point person and wrote numerous pieces of legislation and organized a number of initiative campaigns to adopt much of the legislation. This includes Proposition H in 1992 (which eliminated a guaranteed 4% annual rent increase), Proposition I in 1994 (which expanded rent control coverage to 2-4 unit landlord-occupied buildings), Proposition G in 1998 (which banned owner-move-in evictions of senior, disabled, catastrophically ill tenants), and Proposition H in 2000 (which banned most capital improvement rent increases). He developed a number of pieces of legislation at the Board of Supervisors, including legislation to provide for relocation benefits for owner move-in and Ellis Act evictions, legislation banning condo conversions after certain types of evictions, legislation including Tenancies In Common within the condo conversion law, legislation restricting owner move-in and Ellis Act threats and legislation providing for the identification and utilization of surplus city property for affordable housing.
Ted was also a co-founder of the homeless advocacy group, Homes Not Jails, which advocates for the use of vacant buildings to house people who are homeless and he was on the Board of Directors of Tenants Together, the California’s statewide tenants rights organization.
Board of Directors
- Jessica Alexandra, a graduate of New College School of Law, has been a tenant’s rights attorney for 10 years, defending tenants in unlawful detainers and bringing affirmative lawsuits to hold landlords accountable for wrongful evictions and maintaining uninhabitable units. Jessica has been a volunteer counselor at the Tenants Union for nearly 10 years and now serves as the President of the Board. She is affiliated with the San Francisco Tenant Bar.
- Jennifer Fieber
- Rebecca Gourevitch was the Tenant Organizer and Volunteer Coordinator for the San Francisco Tenants Union from 2011-2014, where she managed the tenants rights counseling clinic and worked on legislative, electoral, and organizing campaigns. She also organizes with Eviction Free San Francisco, a group that confronts landlords and real estate speculators through creative direct actions. Rebecca holds a BA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and has recently returned to pursue a Masters in Social Documentation.
- Roger Levin has volunteered at the Tenants Union for longer than he can remember (but he thinks since 1976). He is currently the President of the Board for Legal Assistance to the Elderly. He has a BA in Humanities with a Minor in Urban Studies from San Francisco State, where he helped start the Legal Referral Center to help students with landlord-tenant and other problems, and a JD from Golden Gate University. Roger also worked at the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, at Matthew-Bender (a legal publisher), and as a paralegal at the U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Enforcement Section.
- J. Scott Weaver is a long time San Francisco housing and tenants’ rights activist. He was deeply involved in the efforts to win rent control in San Francisco in 1979. Since then he has worked on numerous other campaigns advocating for greater tenant protections. In 1981 he co-founded West Bay Law, a private law firm that combined eviction defense and affirmative litigation. West Bay Law was a pioneer in using affirmative litigation to hold landlords accountable for wrongful evictions and slum landlording. He is affiliated with the California Tenant Lawyer Network, the San Francisco Tenant Bar, and the Plaza – 16 Coalition.