By Julia Zrihen on July 20, 2026

Note: This article was originally published by Beyond Chron.

SRO Tenant Triumphs Over Drugs, Adversity

“One thing about being clear and sober. Can’t nobody do nothing to you.”

Candy Crawford, 73-year-old resident of the Mission Hotel, grew up watching her mom get beaten by whatever boyfriend she had at the time. Candy was one of 8 children, the children of 6 different men. “I don’t even know who my Daddy was.”

Candy’s own adult years have been marked by exploitation at the hands of men. “When you’re using drugs, there’s this underworld that recognizes that you’re one of them… they capitalize on women. You can’t leave because they’ll beat you up or kill you. Your check is their check. They’ll force their way into your house, they’ll come to your job and get you fired if you try to leave. Don’t quit, huh?”

For years, Candy’s husband and his friends used her house to deal drugs. They sent her out “boosting:” she would steal expensive clothes, usually from Nordstrom, and, dressed up in some of the stolen goods, return the rest for cash. The men would come over the moment she got a check and take the money.

But Candy did quit, and she did stand up to her husband. The Mission Hotel, Candy’s home for the last 29 years, “saved [her] life” – not least because the Modified Payment Program deposits her rent before her husband can get to it.

At 11 years old. Candy was taken out of school to work for her grandmother’s 24-hour answering service in San Carlos. Callers were met with her young voice, on call for 12 hours, 7 days a week. The work served as rent payment to her grandmother’s husband.

“All I know is I couldn’t go to school. I learned from listening to people talk.”

When she was 16, Candy saw an ad in the Examiner for June’s Answering Service in San Francisco. June, also a dropout, pretended to believe Candy when she said she was 18. Candy was paid $1.61 an hour and rented out someone’s garage in Visitacion Valley for $145 a month.

16-year-old Candy became pregnant after an encounter with a 40-year-old bus driver, who then shunned her. She would waddle to work or put a shopping cart under her belly and watch the bus pass her by without stopping.

Two days after giving birth, Candy was back at work, her daughter gone to live with her mom.

Though she had but little education, she knew how to work. “I learned what it took to get a job, what it took to keep a job, and what it took to get an advancement.” Candy worked for the next 25 years at law firms around the city, first as a receptionist, and later as a paralegal.

“II would volunteer to help out, that’s how I learned so much, that’s how I became a paralegal. Volunteering, you know how people love that. ‘Okay, you, you’re busy, I’m coming over to help you,’ and that’s what I did. And then by the time they looked up, I knew every department in the building.”

Candy first encountered drugs when she was around 27 years old. “Prior to that, I was always home. Go to work, come home. I bowled, went out with my mother.” But one night, “I went out with my girl friends, took a wrong turn, ended up at the wrong club, met the wrong guy.”

She was a functioning drug addict.

“I didn’t think I was a drug addict, because I would get my check on the 1st, pay my rent, go to Safeway, buy a whole month’s worth of groceries, take them home, cook for my daughter for a whole month and stick them all in plastic in the freezer, made sure all the bills were paid… and then Friday night I went in my room and stayed there until Monday morning, and she didn’t see me.”

When she was 40, Candy got Bilateral Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: the strain on her wrists from years of tapping on keyboards took its toll and put an end to her legal secretarial career. With casts on both hands, she went into a shelter.

But that wasn’t the end of Candy’s working life. One Thanksgiving, at her sister’s house in Concord, the property manager from her old apartment showed up. “He said, ‘You can’t pay. Want to work?’” He offered her a position as groundskeeper.

“It was the night before Thanksgiving, and we worked that entire weekend, and on Sunday of that same weekend, he, who was from Montana and never seen a black person till he got to California, drove me to San Francisco to Geary Street – with all them guys hanging out on the street corner and everything – to go get my stuff from the shelter.”

But the benevolent manager had no choice but to kick her out some years later. Her husband began using her room to deal drugs and told the other residents that she was going to use her master key to “have all the black folks get the white folks.”

“I understand [why they had to kick me out],” said Candy. “I mean, who wants that?”

That year, 1997, Candy moved into the Mission Hotel. There, she finally worked up the strength to tell her husband off, regain control of her life, and, eventually, quit drugs.

Five factors conspired so that Candy would quit drugs. First, she got her dog, Honey Bunny, who she wouldn’t dare scandalize with that sort of activity. Second, her doctor asked her: “Do you want to live?” Third, “you get sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fourth, she said, 20 years of prayers were finally answered (“thank you Jesus”) and she was given the strength to shake the habit.

“And slowly but surely I started remembering who I was, the same girl that watched my mother get her ass beaten, her money taken.”

Nowadays, 73-year-old Candy enjoys her room in the Mission Hotel with a full bed and TV, and takes her dog, wrapped in a bright orange “coyote jacket” with spikes, for long sunny walks.

When we finished talking I asked Candy if I could take a picture of her in front of the hotel. “In front of all these druggies?” She danced ahead of me and posed. “I have no shame! That used to be me out here!”

Julia Zrihen often writes about SRO tenants