Length: 1:42 Estella Habal, Emil de Guzman, and Bill’s children recall the role Bill played at the International Hotel

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The International Hotel was a 170-room SRO on the corner of Kearny and Jackson Streets. Bill said, “It was truly the INTERNATIONAL Hotel,” filled primarily with working class men: Filipinos, Chinese, Brazilians, Portuguese, Albanians, African Americans, and Latinos.

When the property owner posted the eviction notice in 1969, the I-Hotel became the center of a fight for community preservation and affordable housing for poor people and seniors. Bill said, “The center of the movement was Kearny Street and the Asian American movement. And from there it grew into the African American community, the Chicano community, the Native American community, the labor movements, and churches. We began to appeal to people that lived in all different parts of San Francisco that understood that our fight was just.”

After the eviction in 1977, Bill played a critical role in keeping the memory of this struggle alive. And in 2005 the new International Hotel opened, with 104 units for low-income seniors.