SF hotel removes sprinklers allegedly used to harass unhoused people

The Best Western Red Coach Inn in the Tenderloin removed a sprinkler system attached to the building’s exterior on Thursday, the same day the San Francisco Examiner published a report alleging the hotel had been using them to deter homeless people from camping on a sidewalk behind the hotel, SFGATE has found. 

On Friday, a reporter visited the alley and found no visible sprinklers. But Damien Quioz, who regularly stays in the alley, told a reporter that he’d seen sprinklers turned on at least three times, as recently as three weeks ago. Another man, Rigo Trejo, provided SFGATE with a video dated Sept. 15 showing more than a dozen sprinklers attached to the hotel, spraying down the alley and soaking someone on the sidewalk. 

Ken Patel, the general manager at the Best Western Red Coach Inn, told SFGATE he had taken the sprinklers down on Thursday, after receiving a notice from the city warning that the sprinklers had been installed without proper permits. Patel denied that hotel employees had been using them to harass homeless people encamped on a sidewalk along Willow Street, which runs directly behind the hotel. 

“It’s not true,” he said of the claims published in the San Francisco Examiner. “I’m not turning my sprinklers on for hours and hours. No, we never do that. We don’t want to turn it on. We know it’s illegal to soak people.” 

When presented with the video clip, Patel said he had been unaware of the incident previously, and that employees were not supposed to turn the system on. Instead, Patel said, when hotel employees want to clean the alley, they use a siren wired to loudspeakers outside, before spraying the sidewalks down with a hose. Patel demonstrated the siren to a reporter, which was similar to a police siren, and said that if people don’t move when the siren is used, the hotel’s policy is to call 311 and report a sidewalk blockage.  

However, in the video taken on Sept. 15, more than a dozen nozzles attached to the building’s exterior can be seen showering the sidewalk for the entire 48-second clip. One person can be seen in the video being soaked by the sprinklers.

A complaint listed in a database operated by the city’s Building Inspection Division shows that the hotel was issued a notice on Oct. 5 for “Sprinkler heads installed at exterior of building on willow street without proper permit.” Patel said the hotel had obtained a permit for building sprinklers in 2018, and believed that permit allowed them to install sprinklers on the building’s exterior. He said he had no future plans to obtain the proper permit or reinstall the system. 

The allegations of harassment are emblematic of an ongoing struggle throughout the city. Business owners, frustrated by conditions around their stores, are resorting to more hostile methods of deterring homeless people from congregating outside their businesses, including blasting music and installing heavy planter boxes.

Speaking about the sprinklers at Best Western Red Coach Inn in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Eve Garrow — a senior policy analyst and advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union — said using water to deter homeless encampments is not a minor annoyance, but can actually be dangerous to unhoused people, who are often already medically vulnerable. 

“When you’re soaked, and it’s nighttime in San Francisco, and it’s cold, you can become very ill from hypothermia, and oftentimes people who are living in outdoor locations are incredibly vulnerable,” Garrow told the Examiner. “These practices are dangerous to unhealthy people as well as annoying and disrespectful.”