San Francisco’s Pier 24 Photography Museum Is Facing Eviction After an $18,000-a-Month Rent Hike

San Francisco’s Pier 24 Photography, a free nonprofit
art museum perched on the waterfront below the Bay Bridge, is being
evicted. The Port of San Francisco has given the private
Pilara Family Foundation, which operates the museum, 30 days to
leave the space, citing a long-running rent dispute that has left
Pier 24 owing $1.33 million in arrears and late fees.

Pier 24 opened in the 27,300-square-foot space in 2010 as a
showcase for the 20th-century photography collection of Andy
Pilara, a former investment banker who began collecting photographs
in 2003. It was hailed as being unprecedented in scale and ambition
for a dedicated photography museum. But the museum’s lease expired
in 2017, and that’s when the port hiked its monthly rent up to
$48,321—about $18,000 more than it had previously been paying,
according to the San Francisco
Chronicle.

Other nonprofit port tenants, such as the Exploratorium, pay
comparable rent, which is priced at the going market rate, port
representatives argue. “[T]he Pilara Family Foundation wants
special treatment. The port can not grant them an exception,” port
spokesman Randy Quezada, told the Chronicle. “After two
years of good-faith negotiations, the Pilara Family Foundation has
essentially stopped paying rent and have not agreed to pay fair
market rent going forward. We have to exercise our right to end
this lease.”

Pilara tells a different story, insisting that Pier 24 has
continued to pay rent throughout the negotiations, according to the
terms of the initial lease, with the agreement to pay back the
difference once a new lease was signed. The foundation also
renovated its warehouse structure—which had been abandoned for
three decades—repairing dry rot and termite damage to the tune of
$11 million. Prior to the lease’s expiration, it was receiving a
$4,000 monthly rent credit in exchange for that work.

Pier 24 did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Should the eviction proceed apace, it would bring an abrupt end
to the first of two planned anniversary shows celebrating the
museum’s first decade, “Looking Back: Ten Years of Pier 24
Photography.” The exhibition is currently scheduled to remain on
view through April 30, 2020.

The Pier 24 collection is worth tens of millions of dollars—on
its most recent state tax return, it reported $38 million in
assets. It is open to the public, but only with advance
appointments that accommodate 30 people at any given time. As a
result, it only welcomes 25,000 visitors annually.

In a 2015 investigation led by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of
Utah, the Senate Finance
Committee investigated Pier 24 and 10 other private
museums to see if they were providing enough public
benefit to warrant tax-exempt
status. “Despite the good work that is being done by many
private museums,” Hatch said, “I remain concerned that this area of
our tax code is ripe for exploitation.”

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Facing Eviction After an $18,000-a-Month Rent Hike appeared
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