Recap: Making Art pay - yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to Sfgate.com the Academy of Art University trains more students, and makes more money off them, than any other art school around.

The red neon flickered "No Vacancy" - the Academy of Art University had staked a beachhead on the Marina.

At the same time, the for-profit school quietly acquired the Rincon Lofts to billet the overflow. As the school runs its morning transit system, Academy of Art University President Dr. Elisa Stephens will start her day at her "Jewel Box" on Nob Hill, three blocks upslope from the Sutter Street dorms. Elisa, her father Richard A. Stephens and her brother, Scott Stephens, own the company. Their customers are the students, and there are never enough of them. They are charged $600 per unit ($700 for graduate students) for a full-time tuition of $14,400 a year. The Academy says 80 percent of its graduates find work "for pay" in their artistic disciplines.

Once in San Francisco, the students need a place to study, so the Stephenses keep buying commercial and industrial real estate. The students need housing, so the Stephenses buy or lease apartment buildings and hotels and rent the rooms to their students. The Academy employs 2,203 people, not counting the bartenders, baristas, burrito-stuffers and security guards who service the student body.

"There is no art school as big as this. The Academy architecture department at Fisherman's Wharf has bigger and louder signs than any chain hotel down there. Even the name, the Academy of Art University, is a redundancy. It was more tolerable as the Academy of Art College, but it would probably be more popular if it had stuck to its original name - Academy of Advertising Art.

Now 82, Richard was 4 when his father started the Academy of Advertising Art in a loft on Kearny Street. Running the Academy was a part-time pursuit while Richard S. worked as a creative director for Sunset magazine in Menlo Park. Richard A. graduated from Burlingame High School, class of 1943, volunteered for the service and was a corpsman at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland for the duration of the war. He attended Stanford on the GI Bill and got his degree in art in 1951, at the very moment his father had decided to sell the art school. Enrollment had shrunk from a high of 200 to 35 students, and he had a buyer lined up. Richard A. had worked there summers and assumed he would work there winters, too, so he confronted his father.

"The school was downsized for me. The school was headquartered at 740 Taylor St. in a leased brick building that had once housed the French Consulate and later a Benihana Japanese restaurant. Stephens wasn't thinking investment. Seated on a couch in her living room one morning, Elisa, 48, discusses her home life. The only art she collects and displays at home is that of her students. According to a list the Academy submitted to the city, 22 of 27 properties, and all 13 owned residences, have been bought during her tenure as president. The Stephenses buy buildings in their own names through a variety of trusts.

No building is owned by the Academy as an institution. If there is an advantage, tax-wise, to owning real estate as a family and using it for a family-owned school, "we haven't found it," she claims. Academy buildings are not receiving property tax exemptions, according to assessor's aide Katie Muehlenkamp, who checked a sampling of the largest holdings. As to the buildings being owned by the Stephenses, not the institution, Elisa says that is to protect the Academy.

One building was purchased under the name 701 Chestnut Street, LLC. It is the old Gap store that was annexed by the San Francisco Art Institute, one block uphill. In 2002, the downtown club sought to replace a parking garage with a new building that is adjacent to an Academy dorm at 655 Sutter St. Judging its dorm unsafe during construction, the Academy vacated the dorm for two semesters, 150 students decamping for the Cathedral Hill Hotel (which the Stephenses do not own) at a net loss of $1.6 million, according to Neil Eisenberg, attorney for the Academy.