Eichler in the Tenderloin: Experiments with New Housing for New Households in 1960s San Francisco

In "Eichler in the Tenderloin: Experiments With New Housing for New Households in 1960s San Francisco," historian and housing scholar Matthew G. Lasner tells the story of one of San Francisco's iconic but overlooked apartment complexes in three acts.

In the early 1960s, amid a burst of optimism about the future of downtown, leading Bay Area developer Eichler Homes, a pioneer in architect-designed suburban tracts, built "Eichler Central Towers" on Turk and Eddy near Leavenworth as a new kind of walk-to-work community for a new generation of young white-collar workers. In contrast to older Tenderloin buildings with their economic layouts and Murphy beds, the Towers' twin high-rises offered walk-in closets, well-equipped kitchens, spacious private balconies, parking, and stylish furniture by Herman Miller. Overextended, however, Eichler sold shortly after completion, then filed for bankruptcy. 

Over the next twenty years the "Central Towers Apartments" struggled to remain full, passing from owner to owner as neighborhood conditions frayed. By the 1980s, it became the centerpiece of German slumlord Guenter Kaussen's vast real estate empire. When Kaussen's misdeeds caught up with him, the complex was bought by local hotel operators Charles and Neveo Mosser. As "Mosser Towers" it attracted new kinds of tenants including many families. It also became a center of grassroots resistance to the physical and social decay that surrounded it, with management and tenants partnering with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic to hold absentee landlords accountable for street crime.

Singular in its design, scale, and ownership for more than sixty years, the Towers offers a new lens for exploring the history of the Tenderloin and San Francisco—and the meaning of home in postwar America.

Lasner is author of High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century and editor of Affordable Housing In New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City. His next book, Apartments: A Postwar American History, focuses in part on Eichler Homes. He was formerly associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College-CUNY and now lives in the Bay Area.