I don’t remember the first time I met Miguel Wooding. It was probably at one of those many long anti-displacement meetings I attended in the late 90s. I became involved in tenant politics in San Francisco during the dot-com boom when rents soared and long-term tenants with AIDS who lived in my Castro neighborhood were suddenly being driven out of their rent-controlled apartments.

Miguel was a memorable figure. He had this sharp analytic mind that could, in a heart beat, turn a discussion in a better direction. I admit that I felt intimidated by him at first. He seemed to know so much and I knew so little.

Miguel was also the quintessential housing and social justice activist, everything about him was alternative: he lived in a co-op, biked to work and around town, and shopped at Rainbow Grocery, our local worker-owned vegetarian food collective. 

I came to know him well after I started my job at the Housing Rights Committee (HRC) 11 years ago. HRC is a tenants right group located in the heart of the Mission District, long a haven for working-class artists, queers, Latinos and immigrants. Wooding was director of the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC), a group that helps tenants who have received unlawful detainers, the court papers that propel a tenant into the legal eviction process.

At the time, EDC’s office was next door to HRC. We shared a common yard and garden in the back. Being that close to EDC and Miguel was a marriage made in heaven, I quickly discovered.

Many an afternoon, when I or another counselor was at a loss to figure out a solution for a particular problem a tenant had brought into the office, I would walk the short distance across the garden to EDC’s back door, which was always opened. Miguel never minded my interruptions. He was content in his role as the go-to guy. He usually had a good answer for me. If not, he knew where to look for the information. 

Over the years that EDC was next door to us, I came to see many sides of Miguel. He wasn’t just some cold theoretical person, he really cared about the work he did. He gave so much of his life to making sure that people didn’t end up on the streets. It was essential to his being. 

I served on the EDC board for a while, as HRC’s representative. There I observed Miguel the efficient manager who had the skill to hold together an organization that, like so many other non-profits, was always teetering on the brink of not having enough money to keep the doors open. 

But what I enjoyed most of all were those moments when we ran into each other somewhere and chatted about all sorts of things, from the state of the world to some television program one of us had just happened to see.  

Miguel died last weekend in an accident while snorkeling in Mexico. He was visiting his family at the time.

It’s difficult to imagine that I will never see him sitting across some conference table as we discuss a tenants rights ballot measure or strategy for defeating some awful landlord-backed initiative.

Or simply locking up his bike outside Rainbow.