The Academy of Art University in San Francisco was founded in 1929, and has over 9000 enrolled students. Many of these students are solely registered for its online courses, but the school also owns 14 office buildings throughout the City where students take classes. In addition, the school has acquired 13 different apartment buildings and dormitories (mostly in lower Nob Hill) that provide housing to over 1200 students. What concerns many residents, however, is the rate that the Academy has acquired these buildings, and that many of these buildings used to provide rent-controlled housing for low-income tenants. The Academy has acquired nine of them in the past ten years alone (according to online records at the San Francisco Assessor’s Office), and three are single-room-occupancy hotels that are subject to the City’s Residential Hotel Conversion Ordinance. On the 600 block of Sutter Street alone (between Taylor and Mason), the Academy owns two office buildings and three apartment buildings.

On its website, the Academy of Art proudly proclaims that it guarantees housing for all its students. Like any college dormitory, students can only live there while they are enrolled and must vacate at the end of the semester. Some of the buildings are restricted by gender, and others are restricted to students who are under 21 (or over 21). But unlike most schools (which normally construct new dormitories to provide housing for their students), the Academy of Art has purchased these pre-existing buildings – many of which provided affordable housing for tenants in the City who were living on a fixed income. For example, the Leonardo da Vinci Apartments at 1080 Bush Street was once an apartment building with working-class tenants who successfully sued their absentee slumlord. After the landlord foreclosed on the property, the Academy purchased the building in 2000 and it is has been converted into a dormitory.

Other student housing complexes include: the Auguste Rodin Dormitory at 1055 Pine Street, the Clara Stephens Dormitory at 620 Sutter Street, the Howard Brodie Dormitory at 655 Sutter Street, the Academy International House at 860 Sutter Street, the Fritz Lang Apartments at 560 Powell Street, the Edgar Degas Apartments at 680 Sutter Street, the Vermeer Apartments at 736 Jones Street, and the Coco Chanel Dormitory at 1916 Octavia Street. Three of these buildings are SRO’s that house a total of 124 residential hotel units that are protected and regulated under the Hotel Conversion Ordinance. It is City policy to preserve SRO housing as the most economical form of low-cost housing.

As the Academy expands and converts the City’s existing affordable housing stock into dorm-style housing, it decreases the availability of affordable housing for thousands of San Francisco renters. It is unknown if the Academy has evicted prior tenants upon acquiring these properties, but the shrinking availability of housing options exacerbates an already tight market.

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