Spike Kahn is also a community advocate, supporting organizations that:
- provide safe and accessible abortion healthcare
- build affordable housing in the Mission District of San Francisco
- fight for immigrant, refugee and asylum seekers'
- and fight for civil rights
Spike tries to walk the walk, not just talk.
Retired after 20 years as a Union organizer with AFSCME, SEIU, and IFPTE, Spike has continued to serve her community. Her current work is as Trustee of her Charitable Trust, which funds abortion clinics and organizations supporting women's right to choose. She co-founded ARMS-SF, a group of dedicated individuals raising funds and convening educational talks on abortion access, clinics, financial, practical and legal support.
History:
Back in the 1990s, when the middle class could afford to buy their own home, Spike purchased a residential building. Over the years she purchased other rental properties, and made efforts to be an ethical landlord, providing safe housing with reasonable rents. Spike received a Good Samaritan commendation from the SF Board of Supervisors, when she took in a family displaced from a fire in their Mission District home. She also provided discounted rents for a homeless SFUSD math teacher, after reading of her plight in the press.
Spike has testified at the SF Fire Commission, advocating for landlords to take greater responsibility to provide fire extinguishers as well as CO2/Smoke alarms, and has lobbied public officials to require this by law, pushing local government to provide incentives for owners to install sprinklers in rental properties. She advocated to bring the SF Fire Commission to hold a hearing in the Mission District after the neighborhood experienced several devastating fires.
After the Ghost Fire tragedy in Oakland, Spike organized a community meeting to teach artists how to make their spaces safer, even if not legal. Spike invited experts from the SFFD, Planning and Building departments to answer questions and distributed hundreds of smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and other safety devices for SF artists.
As an ethical landlord, Spike has called for greater tenant protections from arbitrary evictions, increased inclusionary housing requirements, restrictions on airbnb, and she also filed an ethics complaint against the Mayors Office of Housing, resulting in the exit of an employee due to a potential conflict of interest (she was married to a developer lobbyist for a luxury condo project, called the Beast on Bryant; the developer was in negotiations with MoH over the percentage of community benefits that MoH would require of the developer.) Spike lead a community effort to halt the Beast, uniting Labor, artists and Mission activists to stop the development. In the end, 40% of the property was gifted to the City by the developer for 100% affordable housing to be built on the site, with affordable arts space on the ground floor.
Spike's pet project is the Neighbor-to-Neighbor (N2N) fund, providing bridge funding to preserve and build 100% affordable housing. To date almost 1000 affordable units have been saved from the speculative market or will soon to be built on land banked and designated for new affordable units.
Spike is the founder of Pacific Felt Factory, a non-profit arts organization in the Mission District, providing space to a diverse group of artists. The space is a result of community activism protesting a luxury condo development on the site. After a battle, the developer provided the space as a community benefit, to give back to the Mission artists who were displaced. PFF's deed requires that it will forever be arts space, and the artists will never be displaced or turned into tech office space.
Spike has called out several art professionals for what she describes as "artists behaving badly." Don Soaker, a gallerist next door to PFF, dumped water down on a homeless woman from the roof of his building, and blamed roofers. He later admitted he did it himself. And Spike led the arts community to protest local arts philanthropist Carlie Wilmans' eviction of a senior Asian family from her property to create an artist residency connected to the David Ireland house. The eviction was stopped. In talks within the arts community, Spike has brought up the gentrifying elements of the arts on marginal neighborhoods, and the ability for community activists to protest and win against large developers.
In 2019, Spike started donating her real estate holdings to a Charitable Trust, creating an endowment to support affordable housing, abortion access, and civil rights organizations worldwide.
Currently, Spike volunteers with the S Brooklyn Sanctuary, which assists asylum seekers with Legal advocacy, Food, Housing and Clothing.
