In the living room of Bobby Sisk’s $2.2 million Nob Hill condo, floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the Transamerica Pyramid and Yerba Buena Island. The dining room windows face south; from the 15th floor, the vista stretches from Twin Peaks in the west to the bay in the east.
What you can’t see from the tower are the Thomas Paine Square Apartments two miles away, where Sisk, the 76-year-old steward of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, calls the shots as board chair and president of the church-run nonprofit that owns the complex.
Over the last three decades, Sisk has become the chief officer of Bethel AME Church’s growing real estate portfolio, which includes the Thomas Paine Square Apartments and three other low-income housing complexes with more than 360 total units in the Fillmore.
Residents at Thomas Paine complain of mold, asbestos, violence, sexual harassment from maintenance staff, and a culture of denial and neglect. They know that their building receives millions of dollars in federal rent subsidies every year and are left wondering where the money goes.
Their complaints all have one name in common: Bobby Sisk. While many of the church’s tenants languish, Sisk sits atop a structure that controls and services its real estate portfolio through an intersecting web of nonprofit and for-profit entities. Those entities have awarded security contracts to Sisk’s own company, W.S.B. & Associates, for 30 years.
Sisk also leads boards for each of four nonprofit housing complexes owned by the church, including Thomas Paine, as well as the church’s endowment board.
This network, which overlaps directly with San Francisco’s oldest Black church, has amassed tens of millions in assets and receives millions in annual grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A 2022 (opens in new tab)article (opens in new tab) in The Christian Recorder identifies Sisk as the church’s “business development manager.” On LinkedIn (opens in new tab), Sisk describes himself as “eager to maintain an organization engaged in the housing development industry.”
A UPS delivery person at Thomas Paine Square Apartments in January. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
As evidenced by a brutal hammer attack in January that left one Thomas Paine tenant hospitalized and maintenance staff’s alleged theft of residents’ packages (opens in new tab), the complex’s security arrangements have failed to keep residents safe. Tenants say guards spend their shifts sitting and scrolling on their phones, rather than patrolling the grounds.
Over the years, Sisk’s complicated network of business relationships has been investigated by public agencies and even the church’s own leadership, but little has changed. Meanwhile, tenants say their letters go unheeded, their calls go unanswered, and their demands go unaddressed.
“His day is coming,” said Anona Lee, a 30-year resident of Thomas Paine.
The many houses of God
Sisk is tall and bald with a white beard, thick-frame glasses, and a politician’s steady cadence. In public appearances, he dresses in suits and silk ties and often wears a luxury watch.
The first time Lee spoke with Sisk, she was optimistic that he could help her. She had never met Sisk but knew of him as the person who held the purse strings on improvements at the complex.
In 2022, Lee and other residents sent letters to Sisk requesting brighter lights in the Thomas Paine parking lot and more active security. Sisk agreed to call her. He was cordial and polite, Lee said, but the requested improvements never came.
She hasn’t been able to get him on the phone since.
“He doesn’t come over here,” Lee said, adding that in her three decades at the complex, she has never seen Sisk in person.
Sisk did not respond to requests for comment by phone and email. The Standard visited his security company’s office and Bethel AME, where staff said they would pass along a reporter’s message. A supervisor at the WSB office said Sisk was seldom around. The church did not respond to requests for interviews with its board of trustees.
Sisk served on Bethel AME’s board of trustees between 1970 and 2014, according to court documents (opens in new tab). He’s currently the church’s steward, meaning he’s a lay leader who handles practical matters like managing finances.
One former Thomas Paine tenant, who served on the complex’s advisory board with Sisk and requested anonymity, said many tenants didn’t like Sisk because he ignored their concerns, a sentiment echoed by five other current and former residents.
They described how he carried himself as the boss.
“Bobby was a presence,” the former board member said. He was charismatic and dressed in fine suits. He was genteel but wanted everyone to know he was in charge. “I can see how he could intimidate many people.”
Sisk was already in a leadership position when the church started acquiring property in its neighborhood in the 1990s. The effort was a response to mass displacement caused by the racist urban renewal process that tore the Fillmore apart in the 1960s.
His colleague at the time, former Bethel AME pastor J. Edgar Boyd, said the idea was to keep the church’s community rooted in the area.
“The commitment was made that we’ll get involved, this ministry, to preserve housing for people in our communities,” Boyd said. “Ministry means taking care of your congregation’s needs.”
The needs were widespread. In the ’60s and ’70s, San Francisco razed and redeveloped huge swaths of the Fillmore using eminent domain to force out homeowners who didn’t want to sell. The process ultimately displaced some 20,000 residents of the historically Black neighborhood. Most couldn’t afford to return to the new buildings that rose where their homes had stood.
“The average Black resident in that area felt totally hopeless,” recalled Boyd, who left Bethel AME and moved to Los Angeles in 2012.
As a salve to that legacy, Congress in 1990 passed the Low-Income Housing Preservation and Resident Homeownership Act (opens in new tab), which funneled federal money to nonprofits that wanted to buy property and convert it to affordable housing.
Leadership at Bethel AME tapped in. The church had built Fellowship Manor, a low-income senior housing complex at 1201 Golden Gate Ave., in 1980. Using the federal funds, the church purchased the Prince Hall Apartments at 1170 McAllister St. in 1996, the Laurel Gardens Apartments at 1555 Turk St. in 1998, and Thomas Paine at 1086 Golden Gate Ave. in 2001.
Residents of the Thomas Paine Square Apartments say security measures have failed to keep them safe. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
In 2015, the church bought a hillside house in Golden Gate Heights, which property records show was once the residence of former pastor Robert Shaw, and in 2021, a market-rate Pacific Heights apartment building. Shaw declined to comment and said he left his position as pastor in 2023. A cleaner who opened the door Thursday at the Golden Gate Heights property said she had never heard of Shaw.
Sisk controls the entity that owns the 11-unit market-rate Pacific Heights apartment building at 2655 Pine St.
Paul Haynes served on the Thomas Paine board between 2001 and 2015, and said Boyd appointed him in part because of his professional background as an accountant and auditor. But when Boyd moved to L.A. and Sisk took over, the church stopped providing financial and governance training for board members, and Haynes got the impression that the church was making decisions about the property without consulting the board. Suddenly, his financial skills didn’t seem relevant.
In 2013, Haynes said, the church approved the creation of an “asset manager” position for Sisk with a six-figure salary. “I had not been informed of this, so we were kind of surprised,” Haynes said. He added that the Thomas Paine board did not have financial oversight of the church.
Haynes said the church and its organizations need stronger internal financial controls and more transparency.
“It’s a pretty closed organization, and Bobby Sisk pretty much runs it,” he said.
The church’s housing portfolio includes around 360 units with a total assessed value of more than $60 million. (Assessed value is often dramatically lower than the market value, due to California’s Proposition 13, which limits how much assessed values can rise annually.)
When the church began acquiring property, Boyd created a nonprofit called Allen Community Development Corporation to manage Prince Hall and Thomas Paine. Sisk is now Allen CDC’s president — and controls the nonprofits and LLCs responsible for receiving and managing the federal dollars that flow to those properties.
Those dollars are substantial. HUD provides nearly $3.5 million in annual rent subsidies to Thomas Paine alone, according to a 20-year contract signed in 2019 and obtained by The Standard. HUD confirmed that all four properties carry active contracts, though details on the other three were not available.
A third-party organization, California Affordable Housing Initiatives, oversees all four complexes on HUD’s behalf. Despite persistent resident complaints about mold and asbestos, there are no active complaints at any of the properties, according to HUD and CAHI, which say all have been resolved.
For profits at nonprofits
Allen CDC spends more than a half a million dollars every year on security contracts for the church’s affordable housing properties. This money goes to Sisk’s company.
W.S.B. & Associates provides security at all four affordable housing properties, as well as for the church itself. In 2023, Allen CDC listed more than $650,000 in security contract expenses on its tax filings. The contracts accounted for about 8% of the nonprofit’s total expenses that year and were its biggest individual line item after salaries. All the while, tenants have consistently complained about poor security.
By comparison, the affordable housing developer Chinatown Community Development Corporation spent approximately 4% of its portfolio budget — approximately $2 million — on security last year. CCDC manages 3,200 low-income units, compared with Allen CDC’s approximately 190, meaning CCDC spends approximately $600 per unit, while Allen CDC spends approximately $3,400.
Security guards working at the church’s complexes last week had no idea their employer was receiving such robust contracts while paying guards near the minimum wage.
“They get all that, and they can’t pay us overtime? That’s a slap in the face,” said one guard, who added that his pay is just above San Francisco’s $19 minimum wage. He and other guards who spoke with The Standard asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs.
W.S.B. & Associates provides security at Thomas Paine and the three other low-income complexes owned by Bethel AME Church. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
A guard at a different complex said he has worked for WSB for 15 years and earns $25 per hour. He said the company’s contracts were none of his business. But one of his coworkers at the site said 2026 would be his last year on the job.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said, getting into his car and pulling up a rideshare app. He explained that to supplement his income, he picks up one or two passengers on the way home from work.
Boyd said the church selected WSB as its security contractor through a competitive bidding process — and confirmed that Sisk was already a leading member of the church when it selected his company. (A contested 2015 audit (opens in new tab) attached to a lawsuit found no evidence of a competitive bidding process.) Boyd added that HUD is aware of the arrangement.
“We always sought out African American vendors,” Boyd said. “If we’re going to make the playing field anywhere close to level, and undo the injustices and atrocities that were done through the invoking of eminent domain, then we had to be very focused about that.”
Sisk leads a separate nonprofit and board for each property, as well as the church’s endowment board. That means the same man who contracts for security at the buildings also controls the nonprofits that hire his company. Joan Harrington, a nonprofit ethics expert at Santa Clara University, described the arrangement as a clear-cut conflict of interest.
“You should not be gaining a benefit from your association with a nonprofit,” she said.
Questions from within
Over the years, Sisk’s activities have attracted some scrutiny. A 2013 audit of the San Francisco Housing Authority (opens in new tab) found that the agency in 2009 gave Sisk’s security company a one-time contract not to exceed $1 million. Between 2009 and 2013, however, WSB received nearly $4 million in city funds while paying its guards a maximum of $29 per hour.
“SFHA has allowed these contractors to continue providing services beyond their contracted terms and in excess of contracted award amounts,” the audit reads. “In addition, there has been no formal monitoring of the performance of these contracts.”
Still, SFHA granted WSB another contract in 2017, this one for two years and more than $350,000, to guard three sites, including SFHA’s office. It opted to extend the contract for another year after the initial two-year period; that ended in 2020. SFHA has not contracted with WSB since then; a spokesperson said the agency shifted to a system in which private management companies, rather than the agency itself, hire security firms.
In 2016, Sisk filed a defamation suit in San Francisco Superior Court against an auditing firm called Elevate Independent Services and former Bethel AME pastor Philip Cousin over an audit the church board commissioned the previous year. The 85-page audit report (opens in new tab), attached to the lawsuit, tracked Sisk’s control of the various property nonprofits and found a series of unexplained or poorly explained financial transactions.
Sisk filed the defamation suit in response to the audit on the grounds that the consultant who conducted it, Irella Blackwood, was not a licensed auditor. He accused Blackwood and Cousin of mounting a smear campaign against him in an effort to “usurp greater control over the properties.”
Contrary to what Boyd had said, the audit found no evidence of a competitive bidding process. It found more than $200,000 in payments from the church to Sisk and WSB over 10 months between 2013 and 2014 that couldn’t be explained by existing contracts. And it found that in 2013, a church nonprofit sold the Prince Hall apartment complex to Allen CDC for $8 million, but there was no record of the church ever receiving that money.
The church nonprofit’s 2013 tax documents list only about $1.5 million in revenue. “It appears the proceeds of the sale were diverted,” the audit says.
In his lawsuit, Sisk disputed that he diverted the proceeds and said he was not a party to the sale, although his signature appears on the sale document as president of Allen CDC. Sisk said Blackwood and Cousin knowingly propagated false claims against him to damage his reputation.
In a court declaration (opens in new tab), Cousin gave his version of events: “In August of 2014, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of Bethel, the then-treasurer, Deborah Taylor-Ford, stated that she felt the church should have an audit conducted because no one understood what was going on with Bethel’s finances or why it was always short of money.”
Boyd signed the Prince Hall sale contract as a representative of the seller. He says he had already left San Francisco at that time.
“I just signed off to complete the sale,” he said, adding that the law firm Goldfarb & Lipman assisted with the sale and could perhaps explain. An attorney from the firm who was named in the audit did not respond to a request for comment.
Blackwood settled the defamation suit with Sisk outside of court in 2016, and the claims against Cousin were dismissed. Neither responded to requests for comment.
In February, the Thomas Paine Tenants Union emailed Bethel AME’s lawyers asking for the building management company at the complex to be removed.
The lawyers, the church, and Sisk have not responded.