Jury Speaks: Hugo Hotel Must Go, for $4.6M

Say bye to the Hugo Hotel, and all the crazy furniture stuck sideways in its walls; say hello to affordable housing. A jury sided with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in its eminent domain suit against the owners, who turns out are a California family that owned the site through an Oregon-based corporation. The family gets $4.6 million for the property, the very same amount that a developer had offered (and the family had asked) in 2005, though a transaction never happened for lack of motivation on the owners' part. Perhaps a far cry from the profit that would have come had the property been zoned for a high-rise, but a far cry also from the $400,000 the family purchased the property for back in 1964. Notes the SF Appeal: the owners were paying only a $7,000 tax bill on the hotel, and so could more or less wait forever to sell. A building owners association guy says: "Finally. No responsible property owner is going to let their building become a blight on the neighborhood, and — I'm sorry to say it — that's exactly what [the Hugo] was."
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