Ellis Act

San Francisco landlords targeted for elder abuse

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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76
San Francisco landlords targeted for elder abuse

Lisa Gray-Garcia, aka “Tiny,” led a press conference outside the San Francisco Hall of Justice Feb. 5 to announce that she and fellow activists were filing elder abuse charges against San Francisco landlords.

Clad in a gray pantsuit and flanked by activists and senior citizens who were facing eviction or had lost housing in San Francisco, the Poor News Network founder condemned landlords who’ve invoked the Ellis Act as “dangerous criminals.”

Gray-Garcia said criminal charges were being filed against the landlords in accordance with California Penal Code 368, which creates a special category for crimes – such as infliction of pain, injury or endangerment – committed against elders and dependent adults.

The theory is that carrying out an Ellis Act eviction against a senior citizen qualifies as a criminal act under that law, since an elder can suffer physical harm as a result of being turned out of his or her home.

The targeted landlords were taken from a list compiled by the San Francisco Anti Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-led group that published names, property ownership, and identifying information of 12 landlords who had repeatedly invoked the Ellis Act in San Francisco. Garcia read out their names as part of the press event.

Beyond that, however, the announcement was short on specifics. Gray-Garcia told the Bay Guardian she did not want to share the names of the affected seniors because she did not feel comfortable exposing the elderly tenants to potential backlash.

Joining the group of activists was an 82-year-old woman who used a walker and declined to share her name. She told the Bay Guardian she had lived in her Richmond District flat for more than 30 years, and had recently received a verbal warning from her landlord that if she did not move out, he would invoke the Ellis Act.

When Gray-Garcia and others filed into the San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon’s office inside the Hall of Justice, however, Chief Assistant District Attorney Sharon Woo first told them that they should complain to the police department, then scheduled a meeting with them at a later date.

Here’s how it went:

Guardian video by Rebecca Bowe

In order of appearance, speakers include Erin McElroy, a tenants’ rights advocate; Gray-Garcia; a District Attorney staff person whose name we didn’t catch; Woo, and Anthony Prince (there because he is campaign manager to Green Party gubernatorial candidate Luis Rodriguez, who spoke at the press conference).

The trouble with compromise

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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44

“It takes no compromise to give people their rights… It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” — Harvey Milk

OPINION As I sat in the audience at the Jan. 23 San Francisco Young Democrats meeting and watched the first debate between David Campos and David Chiu in their race to represent San Francisco’s 17th Assembly District, I was disturbed to hear the words “compromise” and “consensus” come out of David Chiu’s mouth more often than the words “eviction” and “displacement.”

During the debate, a line in the sand was drawn by the two candidates: Campos was on the side of the underdog, a voice to the voiceless; and Chiu, by his own admission, was all about compromise and “getting things done.”

Don’t get me wrong. True compromise can be a good thing. Unfortunately, what has been coming out of City Hall, from both President Chiu’s Board of Supervisors chamber and the Mayor’s Office, hasn’t been real compromise. It’s been a wholesale selling of our city to the highest bidder. The only thing that our leadership’s compromises have yielded is a compromised San Francisco.

Compromise gave corporations millions of dollars in tax breaks and it has forced nonprofits and small businesses out of our neighborhoods. Compromise has not resulted in any substantive action to curb Ellis Act evictions, instead serving to green light the building of luxury condo towers throughout the city. Compromise has allowed queer youth shelters and our parks to be closed to the people who need them as a last resort, as our bus stops have been opened up to billionaires for little more than pennies.

Chiu’s compromises have cost this city dearly. His compromise with developers on Parkmerced will lead to the demolition of 1,500 units of rent-controlled housing. His compromise on Healthy San Francisco allowed restaurant owners to continue to defraud consumers and to pocket money that should have gone to health care for their employees. His compromise on Muni killed a much-needed ballot initiative that would have resulted in an additional $40 million for the agency — a ballot initiative that he originally co-authored.

Please forgive me if I am fed up with compromise and am demanding actual leadership from my representatives.

Now is the time to stand with people of color, with members of the LGBTQ community, with our youth and elders, with artists and with small businesses, all of whom are being forced out of our city.

Thankfully, we have another choice. Sup. David Campos has shown that real change comes not from compromising your values but standing up for your principles. His legislative accomplishments include providing free Muni for low-income youth, protecting women’s right to choose at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, and preventing teacher layoffs at our public schools.

Campos has demonstrated that he, not Chiu, is the right choice to follow Tom Ammiano’s footsteps to Sacramento. Ammiano, who had 13 of his 13 bills signed into law this past year, is the perfect example of the success that can come from leading with your principles and not compromising your integrity.

San Francisco needs a leader representing us in the capital. Successful victories in reforming the Ellis Act and closing the Prop. 13 tax loophole will take a leader who can stand up to landlords and corporations, not a compromiser who will sit down at the table in a backroom with them.

That is why I will give my all to make sure that David Campos is our next representative in Sacramento. Pardon me if I refuse to compromise.

Tom Temprano is president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

Residents vs. tourists

Michael Redmond
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64

steve@sfbg.com

Evictions and displacement have become San Francisco’s top political issues, amplified by protests against tech companies that are helping gentrify the city. Yet Airbnb, which facilitates the conversion of hundreds of San Francisco apartments into de facto hotel rooms, has so far avoided that populist wrath.

Tenants use the online, short-term rentals to help make rent in this increasingly expensive city, a point that the company often emphasizes.

“For thousands of families, Airbnb makes San Francisco more affordable,” Airbnb spokesperson Nick Papas wrote to the Guardian by email, citing a company survey finding that “56 percent of hosts use their Airbnb income to help pay their mortgage or rent.”

But it’s also true that Airbnb allows hundreds of rent-controlled apartments to be removed from the permanent housing market — in violation of local tenant, zoning, tax, and other laws — something that has united tenant, landlord, hotel, and labor groups against it (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13).

“The problem is Airbnb is so easy and attractive that you can take a unit out from under rent control forever,” San Francisco tenant attorney Joseph Tobener told the Guardian.

“We’re getting 15 calls a week on Airbnb,” he said, describing four categories of complaints: landlords evicting tenants to increase rents through Airbnb, tenants complaining about neighbors using Airbnb, tenants being evicted for getting caught illegally subletting through Airbnb, and Airbnb hosts who can’t get guests to leave (city law gives even short-term residents full tenant rights, except in hotels).

There isn’t good public data on how many units are being taken off the market, but Airbnb generally lists well over 1,000 housing units in San Francisco at any given time, with its smaller competitors (such as Roomorama and VRBO) adding hundreds more.

The San Francisco Rent Board listed 326 no-fault evictions (Ellis Act, owner move-in, capital improvement) in its 2012-13 annual report. That number is almost certain to rise in the 2013-14 report due out in March, and it is compounded by an unknown number of buyouts that pressure tenants to voluntarily leave, all of it creating a displacement crisis that has galvanized the city.

“Isn’t it far more likely that more units are being lost [from the rental market] through Airbnb?” San Francisco Magazine recently quoted a UC Berkeley professor as saying in an article questioning whether Ellis Act evictions are really a “crisis.”

So Airbnb is clearly having a big impact on the city’s affordable housing crisis. Yet Airbnb is largely flying under the political radar in its hometown and ducking questions about its impacts.

“Airbnb has all the statistics we need to assess its impacts on the city’s housing market,” Tobener said. The company refuses to disclose such data. Airbnb’s customers need to consider their impacts to the city’s affordable housing crisis, Tobener added, because “there are social consequences to the decisions we make.”

 

STALLED IN LIMBO

Last year I discovered Airbnb was flouting a ruling that it should be paying the city’s 15 percent transient occupancy tax (“Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13), a nearly $2 million per year tax dodge.

Yet Airbnb, which has quickly grown from a small start-up into a company worth nearly $3 billion, has some powerful friends in Mayor Ed Lee and venture capitalist Ron Conway, who invests in both Airbnb and Mayor Lee’s political campaigns and committees.

So the company has stonewalled Guardian inquiries for the last year as it has worked with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu on legislation that tries to bring the company’s business model into compliance with local laws. That hasn’t been easy, as Chiu told us.

“It has been difficult to corral the different stakeholders to get on the same page,” Chiu said. “Airbnb has been like unraveling an onion. The more progress we make, the more issues come up.”

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, says it shouldn’t be so hard. “They need to enforce the law. They need to collect the hotel tax. They don’t need new laws,” she told us.

While the city is unlikely to simply follow New’s advice, the displacement issue adds another layer to Airbnb’s onion, one that sources say has become an issue of growing concern within the company, which has finally begun to respond to Guardian inquiries.

Those concerns have also been compounded as Airbnb is now being sued by one of Tobener’s clients, Chris Butler, who says he was evicted from his rent-controlled Russian Hill apartment so the landlord could make more money through Airbnb (see “Airbnb profits prompted SF eviction, ex-tenant says,” SF Chronicle, 1/22/14).

“We strongly support rules that keep people in their homes, and the vast majority of Airbnb hosts are regular people just trying to make ends meet,” Airbnb told the Guardian. “Whatever happened in this case, we certainly do not support unscrupulous landlords who evict long term tenants solely to turn their apartments into short-term rentals, but it is important to note that experts have found such cases to be extremely rare.”

Airbnb didn’t respond to our follow-up questions, but those “expert” findings appear to be a reference to a study the company commissioned late last year from Berkeley-based Rosen Consulting Group entitled “Short-Term Rentals and Impact on Apartment Market.”

But that study of Airbnb’s impact to rental housing in San Francisco doesn’t really draw the conclusions that company seems to think and hope it does.

 

MISLEADING NUMBERS

One number that the study and Airbnb have repeatedly sought to highlight is the claim that “90 percent of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco use Airbnb to occasionally rent out only the home in which they live,” as the company put it to us.

“Airbnb users generally do not identify themselves as utilizing short-term rentals as a business. In fact, 90 percent of Airbnb hosts [in San Francisco] indicated that they live in the home listed on Airbnb,” was how the study put it.

“It’s trash. They pick and choose the data they want to share,” Tobener said of the study and the 90 percent figure, which he says was derived from a 2011 user survey before the local housing market exploded. Rosner Consulting told us it stands by the study but won’t discuss it.

The figure also lumped in those with multiple rooms in their homes that have traditionally been rented by local residents and covered by rent-control laws. It also discloses that 10 percent of Airbnb hosts are renting out outside units simply as a business, a figure that has likely risen over the last three years.

The study does disclose that there were 1,576 properties booked through the company in August 2012, which the study notes was just 0.4 percent of the 378,000 homes in San Francisco, which Airbnb uses to dismiss its impacts on the market.

But the study includes only macroeconomic data, rather than looking at the company’s impact on certain socioeconomic groups — such as those making 120 percent or less of median area income, the people being evicted from and priced out of the city — or the supply of rent-controlled housing.

“The average gross income per Airbnb property in the previous 12 months was $6,722, or an average of $564 per month,” the study discloses, choosing to use average rather than median figures even though they’re considered less accurate gauges of income and housing data.

Customers who only use Airbnb once or twice will skew those averages way down. Yet the study then compares that number to the “average market-rate apartment rent in San Francisco, which was $2,498 per month in mid-2013. The average income generated is insufficient to cover monthly rental expenses in full.”

Which tells us nothing about how Airbnb is impacting either rent-controlled housing or the median income San Franciscans who rely on it. According to the US Census Bureau, the median rent in San Francisco was $1,463 in 2012 and 64 percent of San Franciscans rent their homes.

“The study is bullshit,” Tobener said. “They could pull data and tell us how many people are renting full units on Airbnb, but they don’t.”

Yet the company claims that it is concerned about these issues and working with the city.

“We believe our community of hosts should pay applicable taxes and we are eager to discuss how this might be made possible. We’ve reached out to officials in San Francisco and we continue to have productive discussions with city leaders,” Airbnb told the Guardian. “These issues aren’t always easy, but if we work together, we can craft fair, responsible, clear rules that ensure San Francisco continues to benefit from home-sharing.”

Yet neither Airbnb nor its political supporters seem to want to have this public discussion. The company has stopped responding to our inquiries, again, and when we asked the Mayor’s Office about Airbnb’s impacts to the affordable housing market, we got this response and a refusal to directly answer either the original or follow-up questions: “The Mayor has prioritized preserving, stabilizing and growing the City’s housing stock. His policy priorities include protecting residents from eviction and displacement, including Ellis Act reform and stabilizing and protecting at-risk rent-controlled units, through rehabilitation loans and a new program to permanently stabilize rent conditions in at-risk units.”

Yet Airbnb continues to have an impact on those “at-risk rent-controlled units” that few people seem to want to discuss.

Gimme 5: Must-see shows this week

Steven T. Jones
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0
Gimme 5: Must-see shows this week

The Bay Area music-related Internets was ablaze this week with the rumor that whiskey-fueled nights at the Mission’s belovedly divey Elbo Room may be numbered, thanks to everyone’s favorite new word to pronounce like it’s an epithet: Condos. The Elbo Room’s current owners and management say they’re just that — rumors — and until we hear more, we refuse to panic. A factual statement, however: If you don’t want your local music venues and endearingly gross watering holes to go the way of the dinosaurs (first victims of the Ellis Act, obviously), you should probably get out and see some live music. Now. Some options:

WED/5

Action Bronson
Action Bronson lives life large. Imposing both physically and lyrically, the Queens native and former gourmet chef draws upon his joys in life — food, drugs, and women — to construct poetically intricate and technically impressive rhymes. His mix tapes are full of love songs, both highly eloquent and frequently offensive, written about the grit or urban life and the beauty of a great meal. Lines about “pissing through your fishnets” are sprinkled among odes to “bone marrow roasted/ spread it on the rosemary bread/ lightly toasted,” all delivered with Bronson’s sure, sharp-tongued talent. At his live shows, Bronson is extremely interactive with his (extremely devoted) fans, passing back and forth joints, liquor, and jokes from the stage to the audience. With the brand new addition of Odd Future thrash punks Trash Talk to the lineup, this show is sure to be insane. (Haley Zaremba)
With Trash Talk
8pm, $25
Slim’s
333 11th Ave, SF
www.slimspresents.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfP7qK0khuQ

THU/6

Marcus Shelby
It’s tough to think of a harder working man in the Bay Area’s jazz scene than Marcus Shelby. The upright bassist and 15-piece band-leader is a force to be reckoned with in his own right; the people he surrounds himself with take live shows to the next level. At this special Black History Month performance, the band will be joined by Martin Luther, Kev Choice, Tiffany Austin, Valerie Trout, and Howard Wiley, with legendary, Mississipi-born jazz and blues vocalist Faye Carol in a featured role. The orchestra will draw from past compositions, including “Harriet Tubman,” “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” and “Port Chicago,” as well as performing some of a new musical work called “Walls,” which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Law.
8pm, $20
Yoshi’s SF
1330 Fillmore, SF
www.yoshis.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrSBoArCUJ0

Oneohtrix Point Never
Picking up on the ’90s-era abstract, contemplative side of Warp Records, recent signee Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven is thoroughly brain busting. The elements are disparate: vocals that begin without reference and depart without finishing, gamelan reminiscent rhythms seemingly performed on the Cosmic Key, and an ever-present effect best described as the stuttering sound of audio on an overburdened CPU. Partly playful, with New Age and stereotypically “world” music samples ripped off of Pirate Bay (where, to be fair, R Plus Seven gets the “plunderphonics” genre tag), the album still manages to sound wholly reverent. To what? Let me get back to you on that. (Ryan Prendiville)
With Holly Herndon (Live A/V), Marco de la Vega, DJ Will, Chad Salty
10pm-3am, $17.50-20
1015 Folsom
1015 Folsom St., SF
www.1015.com

FRI/7

Lucius
Do you ever enjoy feeling like your life is the end credits of a coming-of-age movie, wherein you loved and lost and learned and are now careening down the highway, wind in your hair, on to new adventures? No? Well then don’t go see Lucius, because that’s how this refreshingly earnest, uber professional indie-pop five-piece from Brooklyn makes us feel. Considering how big Lorde got last year, it’s almost confusing that lead vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, with their clear, sweet harmonies and Berklee-bred sensibility aren’t huge yet, but you get the feeling that they’re more concerned with having fun on stage than “blowing up.” Still: Catch ’em before it costs an arm and a leg.
With You Won’t
8:30pm, $16
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
www.theindependentsf.com

SAT/8

Tony Molina

He’s perhaps still best known as a veteran of SF’s hardcore scene (fronting Caged Animal, among others), so Tony Molina surprised a few people with last October’s Six Tracks EP. Solo, he’s still loud, electric, full of restless energy — but there are also nods here to ’80s hair bands, with a sweet, angsty, hook-heavy frame that riffs off the poppiest Guided By Voices and Dinosaur Jr. songs. It’s no surprise, then, that Molina told Spin: “To me, hardcore is about being in a band, and pop’s more about writing and recording. I’m always going to want to try playing in a new hardcore band. But I also love the idea of trying to make something that gives you the feeling you get when you hear a Teenage Fanclub record.” Mission accomplished.
With Life Stinks, Violent Change, and Swiftumz
9pm, $5
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
www.hemlocktavern.com

 

Local journalists starting to catch onto Airbnb’s subversion of SF’s rental market

Sasha Cuttler
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45
Local journalists starting to catch onto Airbnb’s subversion of SF’s rental market

Airbnb and other so-called “shared housing” sites allow hundreds of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco to be essentially removed from the housing market, part of a concern that has caught populist fire recently with protesters and politicians pledging to do something about evictions and displacement.

Yet I’ve been one of the few local journalists to hound Airbnb over its illegal business model and refusal to pay nearly $2 million per year in transient occupancy taxes that it owes the city. But that may be beginning to change, as pair of mainstream local publications in the last week have cautiously waded into what outside journalists from Time magazine (which specifically mentioned my reporting on the issue) to German public television have already seen as a big and important issue.

The San Francisco Chronicle today has a story about a lawsuit from a tenant subjected to an owner-move-in eviction, with said owners then turning around to rent units in the building out through Airbnb. And San Francisco Magazine also mentioned Airbnb in its controversial article criticizing concerns over evictions.

“Isn’t it far more likely that more units are being lost [from the rental market] through Airbnb?” the magazine quoted a UC Berkeley professor as saying, comparing Airbnb to Ellis Act evictions. Hey, SF Mag, don’t you think that’s a good question that might be worth exploring?

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, told me this week that she found 1,100 rent-controlled San Francisco apartments listed on Airbnb — almost all of it in violation of local tenant and zoning laws — a fact that she personally conveyed to Mayor Ed Lee, who supports Airbnb, shares a funding source with the company (venture capitalist Ron Conway), and has been dismissive of the issue.

“They need to enforce the law like they do in New York City,” New told us, referring to a city that has cracked down on Airbnb’s subversion of its rent control laws. She’s lobbied City Hall, documented the problem, and threatened to sue the city: “I’ve done everything I can possibly think of.”

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has been negotiating with Airbnb for almost a year on legislation that would attempt to legalize and regulate its activities here in San Francisco, telling us “it has been difficult to corral the different stakeholders to get on the same page” and no longer offering any predictions when it might be complete.

I was already working on a story about Airbnb (which still won’t respond to my inquiries) for our next issue [UPDATE: It looks like I’ll hold that story for our Feb. 5 issue], so I’ll have more to say about this then. And in the meantime, here’s my latest message to the Mayor’s Office of Communications trying to get some kind of response to this issue, which it has ignored for the last 24 hours:

“I’m about to write about the rampant illegal behavior by Airbnb customers again, which seems increasingly relevant to the “affordability agenda” that Mayor Lee is touting, so I wanted to check in to see whether the mayor is still offering his unqualified support to this company, despite its violations of local housing, zoning, and planning laws and refusal to collect and pay the transient occupancy tax.

“Janan New with the SF Apartment Association says she’s raised this directly with Mayor Lee, including informing him recently that more than 1,100 rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco are listed on Airbnb, all in violation of local law, and she’s frustrated that he’s unwilling to enforce the law, as New York City has been doing. Meanwhile, the Airbnb legislation that David Chiu has been working on for the last year is hopelessly stalled, at least partly because Airbnb has the mayor’s support and is unwilling to compromise while it’s making some much profits off of its illegal behavior in San Francisco.   

“A recent San Francisco Magazine article (http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-eviction-crisis-wasnt) even quotes a UC Berkeley professor saying that Airbnb is likely taking more rent-controlled units off the market than the Ellis Act. Considering the mayor is pursuing Ellis Act reform, why does he continue to ignore the impact that Airbnb is having on the city?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tenant battle brewing

Michael Redmond
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44
Tenant battle brewing

rebecca@sfbg.com

Benito Santiago, 63, was born and raised in San Francisco. But now that he’s received an eviction notice from the apartment he’s lived in since 1977, he isn’t sure what the future holds.

“This is roots for me,” Santiago told us. “I have more affinity for San Francisco than the Philippines,” his family’s place of origin.

He works part-time with disabled youth enrolled in San Francisco public schools. “The idea that I built a rapport with these students here … to be put in a position where I wouldn’t be able to work with them, I’m a little saddened and depressed by it,” he said. “If I’m homeless, I can’t be taking care of these kids. I mean — it’s a worst-case scenario.”

He’s been exploring alternative housing options, and trying to stay positive. He says he’s even trying to “change the rate of vibration” of the real estate speculators seeking to oust him as part of his pre-dawn meditation and ritualistic movement practice, a routine he developed to mitigate the chronic pain he dealt with after being hit by an automobile when he was crossing the street in 1980.

“Hopefully, they can have some compassion,” he said.

Santiago is hoping to get a temporary extension to stave off his eviction, and he’s been looking into publicly subsidized below-market rate apartments. But rent for even the most affordable of those places would eat up 75 percent of his monthly income, he said. Unless he can find an affordable arrangement somewhere, he might end up having to leave the city.

 

GROWING MOVEMENT

Santiago has been a part of a growing movement underway in San Francisco to reform the Ellis Act and introduce meaningful legislation at the local level to protect the city’s renters.

In recent weeks, the San Francisco Anti Displacement Coalition, made up of a wide range of organizations including the San Francisco Tenants Union, has hosted a series of neighborhood tenant conventions to solicit ideas that will be boiled down at a citywide tenants’ gathering scheduled for Feb. 8. At that meeting, organizers plan to hash out a strategy and possibly solicit ideas for a ballot initiative.

The tenant conventions are happening on a parallel track with efforts to reform the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to remove apartments from the rental market and evict tenants.

“Our goal is to ban the use of the Ellis Act in certain circumstances,” explained Dean Preston of Tenants Together, a nonprofit focused on strengthening the rights of renters.

“More than half of Ellis Acts are performed by people who bought the properties within the past six months,” he told us. “Their whole purpose is to buy it and kick everyone out. It was supposed to be for long-term landlords to get out of the business” of being landlords, he added. Instead, “it’s being completely abused.”

Sen. Mark Leno is working with Mayor Ed Lee on a response that would seek to lessen the impact the Ellis Act has had in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is spearheading a separate effort.

“At this time, he’s not really ready to say which avenue he’s taking” in terms of a legislative strategy, said Carlos Alcalá, Ammiano’s communications director. “Because that can rule out that avenue.”

Preston said he’s been through waves of evictions before, but the organizing now taking place has been especially effective at drawing attention to the issue. Oftentimes, “the speculators are not from within the city or even within the state,” he pointed out. “That has fueled a lot of activism and courage.”

For Santiago, the organizing has given him heart during a difficult time. “I’m hearing a lot of sad stories,” he said, “and I am not alone.”

State of the City: spin over substance

Michael Redmond
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5

It was maddening to watch Mayor Ed Lee deliver his annual State of the City address on Jan. 17. This was pure politics, from the staged backdrop of housing construction at Hunters Point Shipyard to the use of “regular people” props to the slate of vague and contradictory promises he made.

“This place, the shipyard, links our proud past to an even more promising future,” was how Lee began his hour-plus, invite-only address.

Later, he touted the housing construction being done there by Lennar Urban as emblematic of both his promise to bring 30,000 new housing units online by 2020 — the cornerstone to what he called his “affordability agenda” — and the opposition to unfettered development that he is pledging to overcome.

“A great example is the place we’re standing right now. This took us too long,” Lee said after decrying the “easy slogans and scapegoating” by progressive activists who place demands on developers.

But that implication was bullshit. As we’ve reported, progressive and community activists have long encouraged Lennar Urban (which has a close relationship to Lee) to speed up development on this public land that it was given almost a decade ago, particularly the long-promised affordable housing, rather than waiting for the real estate market to heat up.

That was just one of many examples of misleading and unsupported claims in a speech that might have sounded good to the uninformed listener, but which greatly misrepresented the current realities and challenges in San Francisco.

For example, Lee called for greater investments in the public transit system while acknowledging that his proposal to ask voters this November to increase the vehicle license fee isn’t polling well. And yet even before that vote takes place, Lee wants to extend free Muni for youth and repeal the policy of charging for parking meters on Sundays without explaining how he’ll pay for that $10 million per year proposal.

Lee also glossed over the fact that he hasn’t provided funding for the SFMTA’s severely underfunded bicycle or pedestrian safety programs, yet he still said, “I support the goals of Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths in our city.”

Again, nice sentiment, but one disconnected from how he’s choosing to spend taxpayer money and use city resources. And if Lee can somehow achieve his huge new housing development push, Muni and other critical infrastructure will only be pushed to the breaking point faster.

Even with his call to increase the city’s minimum wage — something that “will lift thousands of people out of poverty” — he shied away from his previous suggestion that $15 per hour would be appropriate and said that he needed to consult with the business community first: “We’ll seek consensus around a significant minimum wage increase.”

But Mayor Lee wants you to focus on his words more than his actions, including his identification with renters who “worry that speculators looking to make a buck in a hot market will force them out.”

Yet there’s little in his agenda to protect those vulnerable renters, except for his vague promise to try to do so, and to go lobby in Sacramento for reforms to the Ellis Act.

Lee also noted the “bone dry winter” we’re having and how, “It reminds us that the threat of climate change is real.” Yet none of the programs he mentions for addressing that challenge would be as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the CleanPowerSF program that Lee and his appointees are blocking, while offering no other plan for building renewable energy capacity.

Far from trying to beef up local public sector resources that vulnerable populations increasingly need, Lee said, “Affordability is also about having a city government taxpayers can afford.”

Debunking SF Mag’s Ellis Act apologist article, point by point

Erica Hanna
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107
Debunking SF Mag’s Ellis Act apologist article, point by point

Well, everyone’s got an opinion. And when it comes to San Francisco’s housing crisis, that’s doubly true.

San Francisco Magazine’s opinion though, amounts to a cry for help for (they say) the oft-demonized landlords from what they call the ever-overblown Ellis Act eviction crisis.

In his Tweet earlier today, San Francisco Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jon Steinberg said “We’re calling BS on San Francisco’s eviction crisis.” The article, by San Fran Mag Web Editor Scott Lucas, lays out a San Francisco that’s hard to recognize, one where evictions and rental increases aren’t displacing people in droves. At least, not enough to qualify as a “crisis.”

Sorry Jon, we’re calling BS on your article.

The Guardian reached out to Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenant’s Union and Erin McElroy, the head of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, to debunk some of the claims made in SF Magazine’s attempt to de-fang the threat of Ellis Act evictions. 

You can read the full article here, but we’ve reproduced lines from the piece and included responses from Gullicksen and McElroy addressing their points one by one. 

San Francisco Magazine The narrative was a straightforward one: Because the Bay Area has seen an influx of people—largely young, white, and working in tech—who need housing (and can pay for it), greedy landlords, many of them out-of-town speculators, are throwing longtime San Franciscans into the streets and turning the city over to gentrification. It looked cut-and-dried.

It’s not. In fact, Ellis Act evictions represent only a small proportion of the city’s total evictions—and they’re not even historically high to begin with. 

Ted Gullicksen That is incorrect on a couple levels. First off, it’s important to understand that the main way people are evicted these ways are via the Ellis Act followed by a buyout. The reason for that is that San Francisco passed strict condominium conversion prohibitions several years ago. If you do an Ellis, you generally are not going to be able to convert to condos ever. 

(You need to) include the Ellis threats… for every single Ellis Act eviction filed with the rent board, they’re where the speculators tried to get the tenants to bite… for every Ellis Act eviction, there are about five buyouts where Ellis Act was used as a club.

I come to that number by the number of people coming to the Tenants Union concerned about buyouts, and comparing those with the rent board’s numbers. Pretty consistently we see 33 percent of what the rent board sees. 

Erin McElroy California is the only state where the Ellis Act is utilized, it’s hard to say whether it’s historically high or not. We also see it’s being utilized by landlords repeatedly. It’s being used as a business model, not a way of going out of business which was its intended use in 1986. 

SFM In the 12-month period ending on February 28, 2013, the total number of Ellis Act evictions was 116—an almost twofold increase over the previous year, but a nearly 70 percent decrease since 2000, when such evictions hit an all-time high of 384. All told, the Ellis Act was behind less than 7 percent of the 1,716 total evictions in the city between February 2012 and February 2013. “Isn’t it far more likely,” asks Karen Chapple, a professor of city planning at UC Berkeley, “that more units are being lost [from the market] through Airbnb?”

TG That number, the 1,716 number, includes “for fault” evictions. If you just include no-fault evictions, Ellis Act evictions are the highest amounts. No-fault evictions are the ones we’re all talking about here. There are a number of rental units lost from the market and that’s a big problem, but the TIC and condominium conversions far surpass tourist conversions (like AirBNB).

EM First of all, for every Ellis Act being recorded, there is not a recording of the units evicted. While you can say there is a number of evictions, it doesn’t represent the units or people being displaced: it doesn’t record the number of people losing their homes.

What we’ve done through the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is to match those petitions with the number of units. If you go to our website you can see the number of units lost since 1997 in each petition. While the city (of San Francisco) only recorded about 1,300 Ellis Act evictions since then, there have been at least 4,000 units lost. We don’t know how many people are in each unit. There could be between 1 and 6 people in each on average. 

SFM Laying the blame on nefarious Rich Uncle Pennybags types isn’t exactly right either. A recent report commissioned by Supervisor David Campos is clear on that point: The increase in Ellis Act evictions, it found, “occurred simultaneously with significant increases in San Francisco housing prices.” In other words, the problem isn’t speculators. It’s the market. 

TG The problem is indeed the speculators. Most of these buyouts are done by speculators, of the current Ellis Act evictions right now, most of the buyouts are done by one of twelve speculators. 

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project showed that these real estate speculators form Limited Liability Corporations for each building. The Anti Eviction Mapping Project went through all these LLC’s and identified actual owners and compared them to Ellis Act evictions at the rent board. One person involved is doing six Ellis evictions right now. 

EM Speculators are taking advantage of the market. If there weren’t people to buy luxury condos, Ellis Act evictors wouldn’t buy up the units and turn them into condos. 

It’s one thing for a landlord to issue an Ellis Act one time because they’re done being a landlord, it’s another to see serial evictors use it over and over again through Limited Liability Corporations. Urban Green has 40 or so LLC’s, they’re using them all to push the Ellis Act. See our serial evictor chart and you’ll see 12 different people that use that serial evictor model. It’s a way for them to make money. 

SFM The city simply doesn’t have enough housing to keep up with job growth. And as real estate values rise, the incentive for a property owner to sell grows considerably. No villainy. Just economics.

TG The city is building a ton of housing, as anyone can tell you. The city, though, is building nothing but luxury condos. There’s plenty of housing, but nothing affordable.

EM If displacing long term residents and folks with disabilities and seniors is just economics, it’d be an argument against our economic system. The city offers services for trans folk, queer folk, people with HIV, all reasons people moved to San Francisco and it has a popular place in people’s imagination. Native San Franciscans are also not being valued. If that’s economics, San Francisco has lost its heart and its soul.

SFM Even if incremental changes happen, San Francisco’s affordability problem will likely continue almost unabated. Ellis Act evictions are, in Chapple’s words, not a cause of the housing crisis, but rather “a symptom. Fixing it is like using a Band-Aid for brain cancer.”

TG The Ellis Act is in fact a cause, because it’s taking thousands of units off the rent control market. When we’re losing more and more rent control units, supply dwindles and the rents go up. 

EM I would agree the Ellis Act isn’t the cause of the problem. The problem is it’s being utilized with other forms of evictions for landlords to take advantage of a political economy with the relationship between the city and tech. The problem is the relationship with the new tech class and the impunity it maintains through city government.

State of the City speech filled with unsupported promises

Sasha Cuttler
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State of the City speech filled with unsupported promises

It was maddening to watch Mayor Ed Lee deliver his annual State of the City address this morning. This was pure politics, from the staged backdrop of housing construction at Hunters Point Shipyard to the use of “regular people” props to the slate of vague and contradictory promises he made.

“This place, the shipyard, links our proud past to an even more promising future,” was how Lee began his hour-plus, invite-only address.

Later, he touted the housing construction being done there by Lennar Urban as emblematic of both his promise to bring 30,000 new housing units online by 2020 — the cornerstone to what he called his “affordability agenda” — and the opposition to unfettered development that he is pledging to overcome.

“A great example is the place we’re standing right now. This took us too long,” Lee said after decrying the “easy slogans and scapegoating” by progressive activists who place demands on developers.

But that implication was complete bullshit. As we and others have reported, progressive and community activists have long encouraged Lennar Urban (which has a close relationship to Lee) to speed up development on this public land that it was given almost a decade ago, particularly the long-promised affordable housing, rather than waiting for the real estate market to heat up.

That was just one of many examples of misleading and unsupported claims in a speech that might have sounded good to the uninformed listener, but which greatly misrepresented the current realities and challenges in San Francisco.

For example, Lee called for greater investments in the public transit system while acknowledging that his proposal to ask voters this November to increase the vehicle license fee isn’t polling well. And yet even before that vote takes place, Lee wants to extend free Muni for youth and repeal the policy of charging for parking meters on Sundays without explaining how he’ll pay for that $10 million per year proposal.

“Nobody likes it, not parents, not our neighborhood businesses, not me,” Lee said of Sunday meters, ignoring a study last month by the San Francisco Muncipal Transportation Agency showing the program was working well and accomplishing its goals of increasing parking turnover near businesses and bringing in needed revenue.

Lee also glossed over the fact that he hasn’t provided funding for the SFMTA’s severely underfunded bicycle or pedestrian safety programs, yet he still said, “I support the goals of Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths in our city.”

Again, nice sentiment, but one that is totally disconnected from how he’s choosing to spend taxpayer money and use city resources. And if Lee can somehow achieve his huge new housing development push, Muni and other critical infrastructure will only be pushed to the breaking point faster.  

Lee acknowledges that many people are being left out of this city’s economic recovery and are being displaced. “Jobs and confidence are back, but our economic recovery has still left thousands behind,” he said, pledging that, “We must confront these challenges directly in the San Francisco way.”

And that “way” appears to be by making wishful statements without substantial support and then letting developers and venture capitalists — such as Ron Conway, the tech and mayoral funder seated in the second row — continue calling the shots.

Even with his call to increase the city’s minimum wage — something that “will lift thousands of people out of poverty” — he shied away from his previous suggestion that $15 per hour would be appropriate and said that he needed to consult with the business community first.

“We’ll seek consensus around a significant minimum wage increase,” he said, comparing it to the 2012 ballot measures that reformed the business tax and created an Affordable Housing Fund (the tradeoff for which was to actually reduce the on-site affordable housing requirements for developers).

But Mayor Lee wants you to focus on his words more than his actions, including his identication with renters who “worry that speculators looking to make a buck in a hot market will force them out.”

Yet there’s little in his agenda to protect those vulnerable renters, except for his vague promise to try to do so, and to go lobby in Sacramento for reforms to the Ellis Act. While in Sacramento, he says he’ll also somehow get help for City College of San Francisco, whose takeover by the state and usurpation of local control he supported.   

“City College is on the mend and already on the path to full recovery,” Lee said, an astoundingly out-of-touch statement that belies the school’s plummeting enrollment and the efforts by City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others to push back on the revocation of its accreditation.

Lee also had the audacity to note the “bone dry winter” we’re having and how, “It reminds us that the threat of climate change is real.” Yet none of the programs he mentions for addressing that challenge — green building standards, more electric vehicle infrastructure, the GoSolar program — would be as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emmisions as the CleanPowerSF program that Lee and his appointees are blocking, while offering no other plan for building renewable energy capacity.

Far from trying to beef up local public sector resources that vulnerable city residents increasingly need, or with doing environmental protection, Lee instead seemed to pledge more of the tax cutting that he’s used to subsidize the overheating local economy.

“Affordability is also about having a city government taxpayers can afford,” Lee said. “We must be sure we’re only investing in staffing and services we can afford over the long term.”

How that squares with his pledges to put more resources into public transit, affordable housing development, addressing climate change, and other urgent needs that Lee gives lip service to addressing is anybody’s guess.  

Confronting the speculators

Michael Redmond
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rebecca@sfbg.com

A group of tenant advocates has upped the ante in the ongoing protest movement against San Francisco evictions, publicizing the names, photographs, property ownership, and corporate affiliations of a dozen landlords and speculators they’ve deemed “serial evictors.”

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-led effort that snagged headlines last fall when it released data visualizations charting long-term displacement in San Francisco, released its Dirty Dozen list Jan. 10.

The project spotlights property owners who’ve moved to evict tenants under the Ellis Act, a controversial state law that allows landlords to oust tenants even if they aren’t in violation of lease terms. In practice, the Ellis Act tends to be waged against longtime residents with low monthly rental payments, frequently impacting elderly or low-income tenants who benefit from rent control.

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project’s list gets up close and personal, publishing details such as landlord’s cell phone numbers, home addresses, and histories of legal entanglement.

It’s an edgy use of public records that seems to raise a slew of questions about free speech, privacy, and the use of information sharing and public shaming as a protest tactic in the digital age.

Erin McElroy, a volunteer and lead organizer of the project, said the goal was to spotlight landlords “who are disproportionately impacting senior and disabled tenants,” and to raise public awareness about “people who are making millions at the expense of tenants.”

She added that there is a budding effort to push for Ellis Act reform in Sacramento, and noted that a goal of this project was to fuel that statewide effort by providing easily accessible information.

Among those individuals named on the Dirty Dozen list was David McCloskey of Urban Green Investments, a company that owns more than 15 San Francisco properties. Urban Green has been a frequent target of San Francisco housing activists, in part due to the company’s ongoing attempt to evict Mary Elizabeth Phillips, a Dolores Street tenant who will turn 98 in April.

Another landlord who made the list, Elba Borgen, has also attracted past attention from tenant activists due to her history of pursuing Ellis Act evictions at six different San Francisco properties. A tenant currently residing in a 10th Avenue property, where Borgen’s LLC has filed for eviction, is 90 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s, according to an interview with her daughter Vivian Montesdeoca posted to the mapping project website.

The Bay Guardian‘s efforts to reach landlords who were spotlighted on the Dirty Dozen list were largely unsuccessful. We did manage to contact Tom Iveli, president of Norcal Ventures, who spoke briefly before excusing himself, saying he had to take another call. Iveli clearly wasn’t aware that he and his business partner Bob Sigmund had been singled out.

McElroy said the Dirty Dozen list was the product of an in-depth research project which entailed filtering through property records, San Francisco Rent Board data, and information gleaned from the website Corporation Wiki.

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project initiative has attracted around 15 volunteers and will be partnering with Stanford University students to produce an oral history project showcasing the narratives of San Francisco tenants facing eviction, McElroy said.

Some of the same activists involved in recent high-profile blockades of tech buses were also part of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project effort.

“We’re not, you know, anti-tech by any means,” said McElroy. “We’re anti- speculative real estate,” and wary of policies like the Ellis Act and city government’s tendency to give deep-pocketed corporations a free pass, regardless of the consequences.

“It’s that linkage that is kind of the crux of the issue,” she added.

Preserve existing rental housing

Michael Redmond
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8

San Francisco’s housing affordability crisis has become the main threat to the livability of the city for hundreds of thousands of residents. One glimmer of hope came last month, as the Board of Supervisors reformed decades-old laws that permit, and often encourage, the loss of affordable rental units.

When San Francisco adopted its zoning laws in the 1960s, it assigned a zoning district to every parcel in the city. Each zoning district set a maximum number of dwelling units allowed per parcel. These density limits effectively forbade adding units to existing buildings across most of the city, and deemed approximately 51,000 dwelling units “nonconforming.”

Nonconforming units are allowed to remain for the lifetime of the building, but could not be enlarged or improved. The controls on merging dwelling units actually encouraged the loss of units if the units were nonconforming or denser than the neighboring buildings. The planners’ intent was that nonconforming units would be eliminated over time, as buildings are remodeled or rebuilt.

The 2009 General Plan Housing Element moved in a different direction, calling for preservation of dwelling units, especially affordable and rent-controlled housing, and favoring in-kind replacement of affordable units lost to conversion, demolition, and merger. Two ordinances, sponsored by Sup. John Avalos and based on proposals from Livable City, have now brought the Planning Code in line with the Housing Element policies.

One ordinance amended the controls on residential demolition, conversion, and merger to reflect the Housing Element goals. It strengthens requirements that lost units be replaced with similarly affordable units, and restricts mergers in buildings with a recent history of Ellis Act or owner-move-in evictions. It also clarifies the legal status of dwelling units where the permit records are ambiguous, making them legal unless there is conclusive evidence that the units are illegal. This will improve housing security for thousands of San Franciscans who dwell in older, rent-controlled buildings that are denser than the Planning Code currently allows.

A second ordinance permits the improvement and expansion of nonconforming units that exceed current density limits, so long as they remain within the existing building envelope. This allows owners to enlarge units by converting space in existing buildings to dwelling space. To protect tenants from speculative evictions, improvement and expansion are not permitted in buildings with a recent history of Ellis and owner move-in evictions.

In addition, Sup. David Chiu introduced legislation in November to permit legalization of thousands of existing rent-controlled units that were built without planning permission. This ordinance will protect these rent-controlled units from conversion and merger, and allow them to be brought up to building and housing code.

Bolder measures will be needed to make San Francisco an affordable city for all, but preserving more of our affordable housing moves us in the right direction.

Tom Radulovich is the executive director of Livable City.

Lee: Prioritize Affordable Housing

Erica Hanna
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13
Lee: Prioritize Affordable Housing

joe@sfbg.com 

Mayor Ed Lee announced an executive directive on Dec. 18 for all San Francisco government departments with a hand in housing development, to prioritize construction of affordable units.

The Department of Building Inspection, Mayor’s Office of Housing, Planning Department and others have all been directed to tailor their activities to the directive — a stark indicator of just how potent this issue has become after months of high-profile evictions and progressive organizing and demonstrations.

“It isn’t always on the private sector, we’ve got to have a stake in the action as well,” Lee told reporters. “(San Francisco) is expensive. But we don’t have to accept it. We can do something.”

With the tech-fueled housing crisis pricing out San Franciscans left and right, and Ellis Act evictions surging 170 percent in the last three years, the city is in dire need of housing help. But as progressives have noted before, you can’t simply build your way out of this crisis, as Lee acknowledged.

“The other part of this directive is to also get the other departments to work with me and the private sector to build more housing in all the different spectrums, and middle class housing,” Lee said.

Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said Lee’s plan sounded like a step in the right direction. “The proof’s in the pudding, of course,” he said. “It’s the kind of directive that I wish, honestly, would come out a year ago. The answer has been, let’s keep building and hope it fixes itself.”

Lee made his announcement at the nearly finished Natoma Family Apartments, a new affordable housing development. The building will have 60 units, and will open in January. The number of San Franciscans who applied to live there? 2,806.

Mayor Lee orders affordable housing push

Erica Hanna
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26
Mayor Lee orders affordable housing push

Mayor Ed Lee stood on the rooftop terrace between high brick walls of the soon-to-be-built Natoma Family Apartments, and in the distance, the buzz and clanks of nearby construction echoed his message of the day: Build, baby, build. 

Today (Wed/18) the mayor announced an executive directive for all San Francisco government departments with a hand in housing development to prioritize construction of affordable units, from completely below market rate (BMR) projects to those that have a mix of BMR and market rate units. 

The Department of Building Inspection, Mayor’s Office of Housing, Planning Department and others involved with approving development will all reorient their priorities towards getting new affordable housing built — a stark indicator of just how potent this issue has become after months of high-profile evictions and progressive organizing and demonstrations.

“It isn’t always on the private sector, we’ve got to have a stake in the action as well,” Lee told reporters gathered at the Natoma apartment building. 

“(San Francisco) is expensive,” he said, “but we don’t have to accept it. We can do something.”

With the tech-fueled housing crisis pricing out San Franciscans left and right, and Ellis Act evictions surging 170 percent in the last three years, the city is in dire need of housing help. Even the national media has picked up on San Francisco’s rising inequality, even if some local media outlets have been slower to react.  

But as progressives have noted before, you can’t simply build your way out of this crisis, as Lee acknowledged. His directive carries a promise to incentivize an emphasis on middle class housing, which has been particularly lacking in the housing now being built. 

“The other part of this directive is to also get the other departments to work with me and the private sector to build more housing in all the different spectrums, and middle class housing,” Lee said.  

New Housing Project at Natoma street

Mayor’s Office of Housing Director Olson Lee speaks to a reporter on the deck of a community garden at the new Natoma Family Apartments, which will open in January. 

City rules will also change to protect current housing stock. Now, when a loss of housing is proposed, it will need to go through the Planning Commission for a discretionary review hearing. The mayor also formed a working group of city department heads to make recommendations to the mayor on how to preserve and create new affordable rental stock in San Francisco.

“It isn’t always on the private sector, we’ve got to have a stake in the action as well,” Lee said.

The promise of more housing in the city almost sounds too good to be true. Will the mayor’s plans reverse San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis? 

Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said it sounded like a step in the right direction. “The proof’s in the pudding, of course,” Cohen told the Guardian. “It’s the kind of directive that I wish, honestly, would come out a year ago. The answer has been, let’s keep building and hope it fixes itself.”

By prioritizing affordable housing and mixed use housing, the mayor is using the leverage of government to get developers to do the right thing. “If developers are pushed to put more units they’ll do it,” Cohen said.

Let’s hope the new push from the mayor has come in time to stunt the crisis. Even at the Natoma property where he made the announcement, the need of San Franciscans for affordable housing was palpable.

The new Natoma affordable housing building has 60 units, and will open in January. How many San Franciscans applied to live there? 2,806. 

SF Board of Supervisors approves new tenant protections

Sasha Cuttler
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11

The Board of Supervisors today (Tues/17) gave unanimous final approval to legislation aimed at giving renters in the city additional protections against being displaced by real estate speculators, and initial approval to legislation protecting tenants from harassment by landlords, both part of a wave of reforms moving through City Hall to address rising populist concerns about gentrification and evictions.

The anti-eviction legislation, created by Sup. John Avalos and co-sponsored by Sups. Eric Mar and David Campos, seeks to preserve rent-controlled and affordable housing by restricting property-owners’ abilities to demolish, merge, and convert housing units, three of the most common ways that affordable housing units are being eliminated in the city.

There was no discussion of the Avalos legislation today as it was approved on second reading, belying last week’s initial discussion, which got a little heated at times. “San Francisco is facing a crisis,” Avalos said last week as he conveyed the importance of passing the ordinance before the end of the year. “We’ve been called on by our constituents to declare a state of emergency for renters in the city.”

Last month, Campos held a high-profile hearing at the board on the city’s affordable housing and eviction crisis, and won approval for his legislation to double how much tenants being evicted under the Ellis Act receive. Today’s board meeting also includes a first reading of legislation by Campos to help protect tenants in rent-controlled apartments from being harassed by landlords seeking to force them out and increasing rents.

“We have heard about tenants being locked out of their apartments. We have heard about loud construction work being done…for the purpose of forcing the tenants out,” Campos said today of his legislation to allow targetted tenants to have complaints heard by the Rent Board rather than having to file a lawsuit. Later, Campos said the legislation sends the message “that is not something that is going to be tolerated in San Francisco.”

Campos’ legislation also received unanimous approval and little discussion, even by supervisors who generally side with landlords over tenants, perhaps including just more potent this issue has become. Board President David Chiu also today introduced a resolution to support his work with Mayor Ed Lee and Sen. Mark Leno to amend the Ellis Act at the state level, hoping to give the city more control over its rent-controlled housing. 

Avalos last week said he is so convinced of the urgency of the current situation that he responded to concerns voiced during the Land Use and Economic Development Committee Meeting on Dec. 9 about how the new legislation would work in the cases of temporary evictions and residential hotels by immediately making amendments to the ordinance without objection.

Nonetheless, further questions arose during the Dec. 10 meeting. Sups. Norman Yee and Katy Tang expressed reservations about the legislation applying in the case of owner move-in (OMI) evictions.

“I would love to support the piece, but this part just doesn’t make sense to me,” Yee concluded. “I’m not getting how it hurts the tenants.”

While Avalos explained that OMI evictions still take affordable housing off the market, he agreed to compromise by reducing the ordinance’s 10-year moratorium on demolishing, merging and converting housing units to five years.

Then, Sup. London Breed spoke up.

“This might not be popular for me to say as a legislator, but I’m very confused,” she began. “I know we have this crisis of Ellis Acts around the city, but I really feel pressured, and that this legislation is being rushed. I can’t support something that I don’t completely understand the impacts of. I just need more time.”

While Breed did not have the chance to review the legislation before the meeting, she had found the time to prepare speeches about President Nelson Mandela’s passing last week and her alma mater Galileo High School’s recent football victory.

Concurring with Breed, Cohen stated, “I understand that we are in a crisis of protecting our rental stock units, but I’m hesitant. Connect the dots for me, how does this save rentals? Or conserve affordable housing? What are we trying to do here?”

Kim reprimanded her fellow board members for not attending the meeting prepared, then stated, “I would support moving the ordinance forward today. The situation we are facing here in the city is extremely challenging…and this legislation is one of the tools we have for it.”

Sup. Scott Wiener and David Chiu echoed Kim’s support, commending Avalos for promptly addressing their former issues with his amendments and additions.

When Cohen used her time on the floor to respond to Kim’s admonition by stating, “I certainly do my homework. I don’t want to be made to feel bad for not getting it on the first time,” Campos suggested that it might be a good time to put the discussion on hold and open the floor for public comments.

While members of the community stepped up to the visitors’ podium, Yee and Campos met at the back of the room while Breed conversed with Sophie Hayward of the Planning Department, who had reviewed the ordinance before it was presented for recommendations. After further discussion with Avalos himself, Yee returned to his seat to speak with Tang. Satisfied with what she learned from Hayward, Breed came over to discuss the ordinance with Campos and Avalos. Cohen remained seated for the duration of the time, speaking with no one.

After the conclusion of public comments, Avalos reiterated the importance of passing the ordinance as soon as possible. “We have been called on by scores, hundreds of people, to preserve this stock,” he stated. “This legislation will help keep families in San Francisco.”

The ordinance was passed unanimously in its first reading, but the fight is not over. Breed for one made it clear that, while she understood the ordinance better after her preceding discussions, she was only giving it her support because she knew the legislation would be up for further review in a week, when all the supervisors will have had time to study it more closely.

With the affordable housing and displacement issues only generating more heat in the last week, today there was only prompt, unanimous approval and no discussion. 

Serial evictors named in mapping project

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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65

The San Francisco Anti-Eviction Mapping Project – the same tenant advocates who produced this time-lapse of Ellis Act evictions – have published a new interactive data visualization, displaying locations of properties where seniors and disabled tenants were ousted by no fault of their own.

Showing data over the last three years, the map plots locations of where tenants were evicted under the Ellis Act, and displays the identities of the responsible landlords for each affected unit.

“Waiting lists for public senior housing take years. Often senior and/or disabled tenants are forced to leave San Francisco altogether, or end up on the street homeless,” Anti-Eviction Mapping Project organizers wrote in a statement accompanying the interactive map. “If dispossessed from the city, they often lose access to vital city-subsidized healthcare and community support that they had been reliant upon.”

At today’s (Tue/26) Board of Supervisor’s Meeting, legislation seeking to assist seniors affected by Ellis Act evictions won preliminary approval by the full board. Called the Ellis Act Displaced Emergency Assistance Ordinance, it prioritizes evicted seniors when they seek to access affordable housing programs administered by the city.

“We need this measure to keep residents who have no other means of permanent housing from becoming homeless,” said Board President David Chiu, who cosponsored the legislation along with Sups. David Campos, Jane Kim, Eric Mar and London Breed.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project also released a time-lapse plotting the total number of no-fault evictions from 1997 to 2013. A counter that starts when you hit the play button breaks down the number of units where evictions were carried out under the Ellis Act, via owner move-in evictions, and through demolition.

The grand total for that timeframe is 11,766 no-fault evictions. That’s counting units, not individual tenants. Owner move-in evictions made up the lion’s share, with 6,952 units affected. Watch the visualization here.

Meanwhile, tenant advocates who are developing these data-driven presentations are also conducting a survey to gather information for another mapping project in the works.

Eviction epidemic spurs legislative solutions

Michael Redmond
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3

Tenants, organizers and residents impacted by Ellis Act evictions packed the Board of Supervisors Chambers at San Francisco City Hall Nov. 14 for a hearing on eviction and displacement in San Francisco. As more and more residents face ousters only to be priced out, lawmakers and advocates are floating legislative fixes to try and reverse the trend before it reaches the soaring levels of the displacement epidemic that impacted the city during the first dot-com boom.

“It seems to me that we have a tale of two cities,” Sup. David Campos, who requested the hearing, said at the start of the discussion, held at the Board of Supervisors’ Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee. “We must act urgently to address this crisis, which I believe is a crisis,” he added. “We are fighting, I think, for the soul of San Francisco.”

Fred Brousseau of the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office shared his recent analysis on eviction and displacement trends across the city.

Overall evictions in San Francisco rose from 1,242 to 1,716 over the past three years, he said, reflecting an increase of 38.2 percent. Ellis Act evictions rose by 169.8 percent in that same time frame.

Almost 42 percent of individuals impacted by eviction had some form of disability, Brousseau noted, while 49 percent had incomes at or below the federal poverty level. On the whole, a total of nearly 43 percent of San Francisco households are “rent-burdened,” a term that officially means devoting more than 30 percent of household income toward rent, the study found.

Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union emphasized that tenant buyouts, frequently offered in lieu of an eviction, are also driving displacement, although those transactions aren’t reflected in city records. “There are about three of them for every Ellis Act eviction,” he said. “When you consider them in combination with Ellis, the numbers are very dramatic.”

Throughout the afternoon, tenants shared their stories and fears about getting frozen out of San Francisco by eviction. “I’m looking at shopping carts, and I’m terrified,” one woman told supervisors during public comment. “You have to do something. It might not be enough for me right now, but you can’t do this to any more people.”

Campos is working with Assembly Member Tom Ammiano on a proposal to grant San Francisco the authority to place a moratorium on Ellis Act evictions. He’s also pursuing legislation that would create a mechanism at the San Francisco Rent Board to allow tenants to register formal complaints about landlord harassment and other kinds of pressure.

“I am eager to introduce a bill in January,” Ammiano noted. “One option might be a law that will allow the local jurisdictions, like San Francisco, to suspend the Ellis Act or establish a moratorium, because of the emergency housing situation. Another possibility is working to make sure that landlords are not skirting Ellis eviction requirements by improperly pressuring tenants to leave. We must do something, but we have to work together to make it successful.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee recently announced that he is working with Sen. Mark Leno on legislation to curb Ellis Act evictions by requiring additional permits or hearings before they proceed. They’re also contemplating floating more stringent regulations on the sale and resale of properties where tenants have been evicted under Ellis.

At the end of the day, it’s clear that housing advocates are gaining momentum as the spike in tenant ousters continues in pricey San Francisco, where rents are the highest in the nation.

 

Hundreds attend hearing to call for action on evictions

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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247

Tenants, organizers and residents impacted by Ellis Act evictions packed the Board of Supervisors Chambers at San Francisco City Hall today, Thu/14, for a hearing called by Sup. David Campos on eviction and displacement in San Francisco.

“It seems to me that we have a tale of two cities,” Campos said at the outset of the hearing, which was held by the Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee. “The vast majority of individuals are struggling to stay in San Francisco. We must act urgently to address this crisis, which I believe is a crisis.” He added, “We are fighting, I think, for the soul of San Francisco.”

Tony Robles of Senior and Disability Action, who showed up at the hearing wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with pobre (the Spanish word for “poor”) printed across the front, expressed his frustration with the surge of evictions taking place in the booming economic climate. “We have been overlooked – the workers, communities of color … it’s almost as if we are an afterthought,” he said.

Fred Brousseau of the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office delivered a report on his recent analysis of eviction and displacement trends across the city.

Overall evictions in San Francisco rose from 1,242 in 2010 to 1,716 in 2013, reflecting an increase of 38.2 percent, according to San Francisco Rent Board Data highlighted in Brousseau’s report. 

Ellis Act evictions in particular increased by 169.8 percent in that same time frame, he said, with the most recent data showing a total of 162 Ellis Act evictions over the twelve months ending in September 2013. That number reflects units evicted, not how many tenants were impacted.

Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union emphasized that tenant buyouts, frequently offered in lieu of an eviction, are also driving displacement even though these transactions aren’t reflected in city records.

“We need to get in control of these buyouts,” he said. “There are about three of them for every Ellis Act eviction. When you consider them in combination with Ellis, the numbers are very dramatic.”

Brousseau also showed a slide profiling the people who’ve been impacted by evictions citywide. Almost 42 percent had some form of disability, the data revealed, while 49 percent had incomes at or below the federal poverty level.

On the whole, Brousseau said, a total of nearly 43 percent of San Francisco households are “rent-burdened,” a term that officially means devoting more than 30 percent of household income to monthly rental payments.

Throughout the afternoon, tenants shared their stories and fears about getting frozen out of San Francisco by eviction. “I’m looking at shopping carts, and I’m terrified,” one woman told supervisors during public comment. “You have to do something. It might not be enough for me right now, but you can’t do this to any more people.”

Hene Kelly noted that elderly tenants are being disproportionately impacted by Ellis Act evictions. “They don’t have the reserves, they don’t have the jobs, and they don’t have the money to be able to move if they are evicted,” she said. Referencing landlords and speculators who are driving displacement, she added, “It makes me think of cabaret. Money, money, money, money, money makes the world go round.”

Campos noted that he is working with Assembly Member Tom Ammiano on a proposal to grant San Francisco the authority to place a moratorium on Ellis Act evictions.

He’s also working toward legislation that would create a mechanism at the San Francisco Rent Board allowing tenants to register complaints of harassment or other forms of pressure from landlords seeking to drive them out.

His proposal also envisions doubling the amount of relocation assistance that landlords would have to provide to tenants, in the case of no-fault evictions. He also mentioned the possibility of regulating buyouts, by requiring landlords to record these transactions with the rent board, and possibly prohibiting property owners from charging market-rate rent directly after completing a tenant buyout.

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee recently announced that he is working with Sen. Mark Leno on legislation that is meant to reduce Ellis Act evictions. That proposal would require additional permits or hearings before an Ellis Act eviction could go forward, and place more stringent regulations on the sale and resale of properties where tenants have been evicted under the state law.

Just a couple weeks ago, a coalition of housing advocates proposed a sweeping package to turn the tide on evictions.

At the end of the day, it’s clear that housing advocates are gaining momentum as the spike in tenant ousters continues in pricey San Francisco, where rents are the highest in the nation.

“We’ve never been late on our rent,” noted Beverly Upton, executive director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, who is battling an Ellis Act eviction. “We’ve paid for every improvement ever done in 25 years. And now we have to leave.” She appealed for legislators to take action for the sake of the city’s future, asking, “Once the advocates and the organizers and the people who care are gone, who will be left in our city?”

Making it fit

Michael Redmond
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300
Making it fit

joe@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s overheating housing market has polarized the city. While progressive activists push to protect rent-controlled apartments and encourage construction of new below-market-rate housing, moderates, Realtors, and developers say any new housing helps keep prices in check, calling on the city to build 5,000 units per year.

But there is a hidden side to the housing issue in San Francisco, one that offers both complex challenges and enormous potential as a source of housing for low-income city residents, and it’s getting a fresh look with desperate eyes.

Secondary units — also known as granny flats or in-law housing — dot the city by the thousands, and are for the most part illegal. They’re tucked behind garages, in basements, or in backyards, most of them single serving sized and largely ignored.

Such units are legal under California law, and the reasons they’re quasi-legal in San Francisco are complex. It mostly boils down to the fact that often these units aren’t up to Building or Planning codes, but there have also been decisions to deliberately limit density in some neighborhoods, sometimes driven by concerns about more competition for street parking spaces.

Tenants in such units can be reluctant to report housing code violations for fear of losing cheap apartments in this rapidly gentrifying city, even if that means living in substandard housing. And the owners of those units often can’t afford to bring them up to code or pay the fines. It remains an underground industry with few watchdogs.

Caught between conflicting realities of housing shortages, poverty, and safety, the city has largely turned a blind eye to in-law units, adopting what housing advocates call a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy around inspecting in-law units. Now that may change.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and Sup. Scott Wiener have plans in the works that could spur development of secondary units in the city. San Francisco has been there and done that though, and the bodies of failed past granny flat campaigns litter the political wasteland.

“In-law legalization has been for a lot of housing advocates the holy grail, but for a lot of politicians, it’s been a third rail,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, a nonprofit group that advocates for a more walkable, livable San Francisco.

Despite the many failed jump starts over the years, Radulovich sees hope in the prospects of legalizing more secondary units because “it’s a good, cheap, and green way to add housing.”

 

BUILD SMALL

So what’s different now? First off, unlike past efforts, the politicians involved are taking some small but significant steps.

Wiener’s plan could directly spur the creation of new secondary units, but it’s limited to only the Castro District. It basically lifts caps on the number of units that can be built in a single residence, waiving some density and other Planning Code requirements.

Wiener views his plan as a pilot program. “I decided to try a more limited geographic area to show that it can work,” he told us, saying that the past failed campaigns tried to force the issue citywide.

The Castro is a prime candidate for more affordable housing. The neighborhood has many tenants who are single, Wiener said. And as gentrification slammed the Castro, the vulnerable were hurt as well. Jeremy Mykaels, a 17-year Castro tenant living with AIDS, recently fought back an Ellis Act eviction that would have cost him his home.

“I am not looking for pity,” Mykaels wrote on his website, addressing his eviction. “I just want to shed a light on a growing problem in this city for many senior and disabled tenants like myself.”

Wiener’s office declined to say how many secondary units could be built. But as he introduced the legislation to the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 22, he said that many longtime residents in the Castro, in terms of housing, “are living on the edge.”

Castro residents like Mykaels have lived under rent control for years, and once folks like him are pushed out, they often can’t afford to stay in the city.

Fair market rent in the Castro for a two-bedroom apartment is $3,295 a month, according to the Department of Public Health. According to its rental affordability map, a tenant would need 6.2 full-time minimum wage jobs to afford to live there.

“It’s a neighborhood in desperate need of additional housing options,” Wiener said.

Enter in-law units, which are often more affordable. Though there have been no citywide studies of their affordability, a study this year by the Asian Law Caucus, “Our Hidden Communities,” said the average cost of those units in the Excelsior neighborhood is between $1,000–$1,249 a month, way below average rents.

Wiener’s legislation was turned over to the Land Use and Economic Development Committee, where it will be evaluated for impacts to the neighborhood. The supervisors will hear it again in 30 days.

 

GO BIG

One housing advocate thinks Wiener is thinking too small and needs to expand his vision.

“I think Wiener’s proposal is creating a patchwork of regulation, but this will create a mess, which the board is accomplished at doing,” Saul Bloom, head of Arc Ecology, told the Guardian. He thinks a citywide proposal to legalize in-law units is the only way go to — because the city is in a housing crisis right now, he said, and we don’t have time for just a pilot.

One big advantage is the units are far cheaper to construct than traditional houses or condominiums. Bloom notes the Lennar Urban will be spending about $400,000 for each of the thousands of homes it will build at Hunters Point Shipyard and surrounding areas, but that small secondary units can be built in existing neighborhoods for $75,000 to $200,000 each.

“We’re not expanding units in affordable housing through existing strategies,” Bloom said, and he’s right.

San Francisco has mostly built about 1,500 new housing units a year, which is much less than needed to keep up with demand, according to San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) and the Housing Action Coalition.

To keep up with the frantic demand, San Francisco would need to build 5,000 new units a year, the groups argue. If the city could keep up with demand for housing, the price of housing itself could go down — meaning lower rents for everyone.

“If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people — a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams, a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work — we have to fix the supply problem,” SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf wrote in a recent article for The Atlantic (“The San Francisco Exodus,” Oct. 14).

Yet progressive housing activists have long said that the city can’t build its way to affordability, arguing that demand for market rate units is essentially insatiable, and that what the city needs to do is build housing specifically for low-income residents.

Bloom put out a study from Arc Ecology, suggesting that if just 5 percent of the city’s 100,000 single family homes converted their excess space into in-law units, an additional 5,000 affordable rentals would spread across town.

Wiener’s proposal looks at making new units in just a slice of the city, but another proposal will look at the issue citywide. Chiu’s legislation seeks to take that sea of hidden and unlawful granny flats and bring them up to code, but it wouldn’t look to build new ones.

“The big picture is that we’re exploring legalizing existing [in-law] units that are illegal, to make sure they become safe and protect residents there,” said Amy Chan, an aide in Chiu’s office.

 

UP TO CODE

Safety isn’t the only consideration, as this could also help the housing supply in the city, those involved told the Guardian. Often these in-law units are rented out to friends and family, and once up to code they’d open up to the market.

But safety is important because these units also often lack city permits because they’re dangerously constructed. Sometimes that can lead to death.

“A lot of time (the units) may not have proper egress for an emergency,” said Dan Lowrey, deputy director of inspection services at the Department of Building Inspection. “We just had a fire last month where three people died because of that.”

Lowrey is part of Chiu’s workgroup that’s navigating the complexities of his new legislation. Just how do you make these units legal? There’s a number of challenges, he said.

When looking at a unit, housing inspectors have a checklist to look through, and some of it is real garden variety stuff. Smoke detectors? Check. Proper floor covering? Check. Those are easy. The real challenge is when there are ceilings that are too low, hallways not wide enough to navigate in an emergency, or the unit has no windows from which to escape in a fire.

That’s when you have an in-law apartment that requires total reconstruction to be brought up to code, a straight up illegal unit. As the law stands now, the only recourse for the city in that case is to evict the people living there.

“That’s the challenge, what do we do with the [in-law apartments] that can’t be legalized?” said Bill Strawn, a spokesperson for DBI. Those are some of the questions that Chiu’s workgroup is tackling now.

The good news, he said, is that there are a good number of units that are up to the Building Code, but not the Planning Code — that’s a much easier hurdle to clear.

The Planning Code basically separates neighborhoods of the city into zones for one, two, or three families in a housing unit. This looks at the amount of available free space, sunlight, air, and parking. With those lifted, many units could be more easily converted to living use.

But finding the units that aren’t up to code is important, said Omar Calimbas, a senior staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus.

He led the “Our Hidden Communities” study that revealed 33 percent of homes in the Excelsior district contained in-law units, far above the city’s estimates.

His team went door to door and found out for itself. What Calimbas saw was that those living in unregulated units often lived in substandard conditions with nowhere to go for help.

There are some units with no heating, he said. Other times the in-law unit is in a basement barely renovated for use as a living space. Sometimes the bathrooms and shower are really tiny cubes. There are mold and dampness problems.

“You’re living in a space that doesn’t make you feel protected from the elements,” he said. And when the units are made without permits, tenants feel they can’t go to the city for help.

To put it in a nutshell, they are in dire need of regulation. Calimbas is also working with Chiu on his legislation to do just that. But ultimately, each of the two ordinances around secondary units takes small bites out of the housing pie.

Bloom is calling for the city to move aggressively on this issue. “We’re rapidly becoming a more expensive city to live in, more and more so every year.” As more and more San Franciscans are priced out of their homes, time may soon run out.

Angered by senior evictions, Filipino American activists decline award

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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36

The board members of a local Filipino heritage organization, with ties to a high-profile eviction defense battle at San Francisco’s International Hotel in the late 1970s, have declined to an accept an award that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee had planned to extend to them as part of a Filipino American History celebration because they are angry about a growing trend of senior evictions.

In a written statement sent to media by board member Tony Robles, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation explained that it couldn’t accept the award as long as “elders are being preyed upon, evicted and given a de facto death sentence thereof.”

The Manilatown Heritage Foundation board members were informed by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu that Lee had planned to recognize the I-Hotel as part of an annual cultural history celebration at City Hall, the statement noted. “Part of the occasion was to honor the I-Hotel and its many tenants and activists for its contribution to Filipino American history,” board members explained.

In 1976, the I-Hotel was targeted for demolition, prompting an historic eviction defense battle led by housing activists who rallied to the defense of the impacted tenants. A significant fixture in what was once a predominantly Filipino neighborhood known as Manilatown, the I-Hotel housed 196 tenants, predominantly low-income Filipino immigrants. 

“The I-Hotel fight was for dignity and it lived by the premise that housing is a human right,” Manilatown Heritage Foundation members explained in the written statement. “The fight for the I-Hotel galvanized the community around the fight for affordable housing, particularly for seniors—who sacrificed much and on whose shoulders we stand. The fight included tenants, elders, activists, artists and students who recognized that the real estate developers and financial interests were out of control—power unchecked.” 

The fight dragged on, at one point more than two thousand people surrounded the building to blockade the doors in an effort to prevent an eviction from going forward. The battle over the I-Hotel also brought on a famous San Francisco episode in which then-Sheriff Richard Hongisto served five days in his own jail for refusing to carry out the eviction order. In the end, the tenants were finally ousted. But the epic battle ultimately helped to produce a different outcome, many years later: The property became the site of low-cost senior housing, complete with a commemorative display in the interior documenting the dramatic I-Hotel fight.

As a young attorney who worked with the Asian Law Caucus, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was involved in that fight – as an activist defending tenants’ rights to stay. He frequently referred to this chapter of his personal history while running for mayor in 2011, to demonstrate his sensitivity to concerns about affordable housing.

But now that Lee is well into his mayoral term, a surge of evictions of low-income seniors is worsening on his watch. Tenant defense organizations such as Eviction Free San Francisco are showing up outside landlords’ homes and offices to protest eviction notices that threaten to push low-income seniors with few options out of the city. Some evictions have caught the attention of mainstream media, such as the ouster of elderly Chinatown couple Gum Gee Lee and Poor Heung Lee and their disabled daughter, Shiuman Lee.

Some advocates have proposed legislative solutions; meanwhile, the situation has evidently become so criticial that even city’s Human Services Agency is seeking outside assistance to provide eviction prevention services for elderly and disabled tenants facing Ellis Act evictions.

And today, the board of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation drew a line in the sand to send Lee a clear message by refusing to accept the honor of recognition in the current housing climate. So far, mayoral spokesperson Christine Falvey has not responded to the Bay Guardian’s request for comment in response to the Manilatown Heritage Foundation’s statement.

“Given the current state of San Francisco housing by forces out to make a killing by killing our communities, we as the torch bearers of the I-Hotel struggle and in the memory of its displaced elders and advocates Al Robles, Bill Sorro, Felix Ayson, Wahat Tampao and others, cannot, in good consciousness, accept any honor or award while elders are being preyed upon, evicted and given a de facto death sentence thereof. And it doesn’t matter if the honor is bestowed by Mayor Lee, President Obama or the pope. We have to say no.”

Here’s the full statement from the Manilatown Heritage Foundation. Here’s an historical essay about the I-Hotel from Shaping San Francisco’s digital archive at FoundSF.org.

Fight back to save your home

Sasha Cuttler
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36

By Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Fred Sherburn-Zimmer

OPINION The good news from San Francisco these days is that tenants are fighting back in a big way to save their homes. Speculators and investors intent on making a killing in a sizzling real estate market are not always having an easy time getting rid of those who stand between them and obscene profits.

While tenant resistance has become a hot ticket item in the local mainstream media, legislators are introducing a slew of new laws aimed at curbing speculation and the housing crisis. Even the Mayor’s Office has gotten into the act, intervening in at least two recent high-profile evictions: the Lee family and 1049 Market.

A low-income elderly Chinese couple and their disabled daughter, the Lee family chose to stay and fight when the Sheriff’s Department gave them notice that it was coming to lock them out after an Ellis Act eviction. Hundreds showed up in support, with a large number of people willing to block the door and risk arrest. TV went live from the protest. Within no time at all, the Mayor’s Office stepped in to negotiate with the landlord for more time so that the Lees could find an affordable place to live. While the Lee family didn’t ultimately get to stay, their struggle brought public attention to what is happening here in San Francisco.

When the tenants in the artist live/work lofts at 1049 Market received letters from their new landlord saying that the city was forcing him to evict them because of an outstanding code violation from 2007 that he inherited when he bought the building, they didn’t take it lying down. It wasn’t true that the city was making him evict anyone. He had the option to bring the building up to code, something he found “economically infeasible.”

Tenants from 1049 Market contacted Housing Rights Committee where we work, and we helped them organize. We were afraid the landlord’s other two buildings on the same block might meet the same fate. The story made the cover of the San Francisco Examiner about a week later.

Suddenly, the Department of Building Inspection announced that it had discretion in terms of the code violations, especially the costliest of them. DBI’s deputy director sent the notice of violation back to its staff for review. The city began meeting with the landlord to try and prevent the tenants from being evicted.

Negotiations are still in progress, but the fact that the City has stepped in so aggressively on the side of the tenants is a major victory. Of course, it’s due to tenants fighting back when so many people told them they couldn’t win.

Jeremy Mykaels, a gay disabled man who’s lived in the Castro for the past 40 years and in his current apartment for almost 18, decided not to move when new owners (investors from Atherton and Union City) threatened him with an Ellis eviction. They went through with it after he turned down a buyout.

Eviction Free San Francisco, a direct action group, organized protests in SF, Atherton, and Union City. Attorney Steve Collier of Tenderloin Housing Clinic challenged the eviction in court. A judge just threw out the eviction on a technicality. The jury is out on whether the investors will start the process all over again. Fight back. It could save your home. 

Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Fred Sherburn-Zimmer work at the Housing Rights Committee.

Shit happened (Oct. 23-29)

Sasha Cuttler
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6
Shit happened (Oct. 23-29)

Tenant proposals and Guardian forum address eviction crisis

Tenant advocates have proposed a sweeping set of legislative proposals to address what they’re calling the “eviction epidemic” that has hit San Francisco, seeking to slow the rapid displacement of tenants by real estate speculators with changes to land use, building, rent control, and other city codes.

“In essence, it’s a comprehensive agenda to restrict the speculation on rental units,” Chinatown Community Development Center Policy Director Gen Fujioka told the Guardian. “We can’t directly regulate the Ellis Act [the state law allowing property owners to evict tenants and take their apartments off the rental market], but we’re asking the city to do everything but that.”

The package was announced Oct. 24 on the steps of City Hall by representatives of CCDC, San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee of SF, Causa Justa-Just Cause, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, UNITE HERE Local 2, Community Tenants Association, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

“San Francisco is falling into one of the deepest and most severe eviction crises in 40 years,” SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said. “It is bad now and is going to get worse unless the city acts.”

The announcement came a day after the Lee family — an elderly couple on Social Security who care for their disabled daughter — was finally Ellis Act evicted from its longtime Chinatown home after headline-grabbing activism by CCDC and other groups had twice turned away deputies and persuaded the Mayor’s Office to intervene with the landlord.

But Mayor Ed Lee has been mum — his office ignored our repeated requests for comment — on the worsening eviction crisis, the tenant groups’ proposals, and the still-unresolved fate of the Lees, who are temporarily holed up in a hotel and still hoping to find permanent housing they can afford.

The package proposed by tenant advocates includes: require those converting rental units into tenancies-in-common to get a conditional use permit and bring the building into compliance with current codes (to discourage speculation and flipping buildings); regulate TIC agreements to discourage Ellis Act abuse; increase required payments to evicted tenants and improve city assistance to those displaced by eviction; require more reporting on the status of units cleared with the Ellis Act by their owners; investigate and prosecute Ellis Act fraud (units are often secretly re-rented at market rates after supposedly being removed from the market); increase inspections of construction on buildings with tenants (to prevent landlords from pressuring them to move); prohibit the demolition, mergers, or conversions of rental units that have been cleared of tenants using no-fault evictions in the last 10 years (Sup. John Avalos has already introduced this legislation).

“The evidence is clear. We are facing not only an eviction crisis but also a crisis associated with the loss of affordable rental housing across the city. Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions. And the trend points to the situation becoming much worse,” the coalition wrote in a public statement proposing the reforms.

Evictions have reached their highest level since the height of the last dot-com boom in 1999-2000, with 1,934 evictions filed in San Francisco in fiscal year 2012-13, and the rate has picked up since then. The Sheriff’s Department sometimes does three evictions per day, last year carrying out 998 court-ordered evictions, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us, arguing for an expansion of city services to the displaced.

At “Housing for Whom?” a community forum the Guardian hosted Oct. 23 in the LGBT Center, panelists and audience members talked about the urgent need to protect and expand affordable housing in the city. They say the current eviction epidemic is being compounded by buyouts, demolitions, and the failure of developers to build below-market-rate units.

“We’re bleeding affordable housing units now,” Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of Housing Right Committee said last night, noting the steadily declining percentage of housing in the city that is affordable to current city residents since rent control was approved by voters in 1979. “We took out more housing than we’ve built since then.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations actually quantified the problem, citing studies showing that only 15 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rents and home prices of new housing units coming online. He said the housing isn’t being built for current city residents: “It’s a demand derived from a market calculation.”

Cohen said the city’s inclusionary housing laws that he helped write more than a decade ago were intended to encourage developers to actually build below-market-rate units in their projects, but almost all of them choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, letting the city find ways to build the affordable housing and thereby delaying construction by years.

“It was not about writing checks,” Cohen said. “It was about building affordable units.”

Discussion at the forum began with a debate about the waterfront luxury condo project proposed for 8 Washington St., which either Props. B or C would allow the developer to build. Project opponent Jon Golinger squared off against proponent Tim Colen, who argued that the $11 million that the developer is contributing to the city’s affordable housing fund is an acceptable tradeoff.

But Sherburn-Zimmer said the developer should be held to a far higher standard given the obscene profits that he’ll be making from waterfront property that includes a city-owned seawall lot. “Public land needs to be used for the public good.”

Longtime progressive activist Ernestine Weiss sat in the front row during the forum, blasting Colen and his Prop. B as a deceptive land grab and arguing that San Francisco’s much ballyhooed rent control law was a loophole-ridden compromise that should be strengthened to prevent rents from jumping to market rate when a master tenant moves out, and to limit rent increases that exceed wage increases (rent can now rise 1.9 percent annually on rent controlled apartment).

“That’s baloney that it’s rent control!” she told the crowd. (Steven T. Jones)

Students fight suspensions targeting young people of color

Sagging pants, hats worn indoors, or having a really bad day — the list of infractions that can get a student suspended from a San Francisco Unified School District school sounds like the daily life of a teenager. The technical term for it is “willful defiance,” and there are so many suspensions made in its name that a student movement has risen up against it.

The punishment is the first step to derailing a child’s education, opponents said.

Student activists recognize the familiar path from suspensions to the streets to prisons, and they took to the streets Oct. 22 to push the SFUSD to change its ways. Around 20 or so students and their mentors marched up to City Hall and into the Board of Education to demand a stop of suspensions over willful defiance.

A quarter of all suspensions in SFUSD for the 2011-12 school year were made for “disruption or defiance,” according to the California Department of Education. Half of all suspensions in the state were for defiance.

When a student is willfully defiant and suspended, it’s seen as a downward spiral as students are pushed out of school and onto the streets, edging that much closer to a life of crime.

“What do we want? COLLEGE! What are we gonna do? WORK HARD!” the students shouted as they marched to the Board of Education’s meeting room, on Franklin Street.

They were dressed in graduation gowns of many colors, signs raised high. They smiled and danced and the mood was infectious. One driver drove by, honked and said “Yes, alright!” Assorted passersby of all ethnicities cheered on the group. The students were from 100% College Prep Institute, a Bayview tutoring and mentoring group founded in 1999 aiming to educate students of color in San Francisco. Their battle is a tough one. Though African American students make up only 10 percent of SFUSD students, they accounted for 46 percent of suspensions in 2012, according to SFUSD data. Latinos made up the next largest group, at 30 percent. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Techies to NSA: Stop spying on us!

Thousands of privacy and civil liberties activists, including many from the Bay Area, headed to Washington DC for an Oct. 26 rally calling for surveillance legislation reform, in response to National Security Agency spying programs. It was organized by more than 100 groups that have joined together as part of the Stop Watching Us coalition. The group has launched an online petition opposing NSA spying, and planned to deliver about 500,000 signatures to Congress. Many of the key drivers behind Stop Watching Us, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Mozilla, are based in San Francisco. (Rebecca Bowe)

Tenant groups propose sweeping package to ease the “eviction epidemic”

Sasha Cuttler
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317

Tenant advocates today proposed a sweeping set of legislative proposals to address what they’re calling the “eviction epidemic” that has hit San Francisco, seeking to slow the rapid displacement of tenants by real estate speculators with changes to land use, building, rent control, and other city codes.

“In essence, it’s a comprehensive agenda to restrict the speculation on rental units,” Chinatown Community Development Center Policy Director Gen Fujioka told the Guardian. “We can’t directly regulate the Ellis Act [the state law allowing property owners to evict tenants and take their apartments off the rental market], but we’re asking the city to do everything but that.”

The package was announced this morning on the steps of City Hall by representatives of CCDC, San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee of SF, Causa Justa-Just Cause, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, UNITE HERE Local 2, Community Tenants Association, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

“San Francisco is falling into one of the deepest and most severe eviction crises in 40 years,” SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said. “It is bad now and is going to get worse unless the city acts.”

The package includes: require those converting rental units into tenancies-in-common to get a conditional use permit and bring the building into compliance with current codes (to discourage speculation and flipping buildings); regulate TIC agreements to discourage Ellis Act abuse; increase required payments to evicted tenants and improve city assistance to those displaced by eviction; require more reporting on the status of units cleared with the Ellis Act by their owners; investigate and prosecute Ellis Act fraud (units are often secretly re-rented at market rates after supposedly being removed from the market); increase inspections of construction on buildings with tenants (to prevent landlords from pressuring them to move); prohibit the demolition, mergers, or conversions of rental units that have been cleared of tenants using no-fault evictions in the last 10 years (Sup. John Avalos has already introduced this legislation).

“The evidence is clear. We are facing not only an eviction crisis but also a crisis associated with the loss of affordable rental housing across the city. Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions. And the trend points to the situation becoming much worse,” the coalition wrote in a public statement proposing the reforms.

Evictions have reached their high level since the height of the last dot-com boom in 1999-2000, with 1,934 evictions filed in San Francisco in fiscal year 2012-13, and the rate has picked up since then. The Sheriff’s Department sometimes does three evictions per day, last year carrying out 998 court-ordered evictions, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us, arguing for an expansion of city services to the displaced.

At “Housing for Whom?” a community forum the Guardian hosted last night in the LGBT Center, panelists and audience member talked about the urgent need to protect and expand affordable housing in the city. They say the current eviction epidemic is being compounded by buyouts, demolitions, and the failure of developers to build below-market-rate units.  

“We’re bleeding affordable housing units now,” Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of Housing Right Committee said last night, noting the steadily declining percentage of housing in the city that is affordable to current city residents since rent control was approved by voters in 1979. “We took out more housing than we’ve built since then.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations actually quantified the problem, citing studies showing that only 15 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rents and home prices of new housing units coming online. He said the housing isn’t being built for current city residents: “It’s a demand derived from a market calculation.”

Cohen said the city’s inclusionary housing laws that he helped write more than a decade ago were intended to encourage developers to actually build below-market-rate units in their projects, but almost all of them choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, letting the city find ways to build the housing and thereby delaying construction by years.

“It was not about writing checks,” Cohen said. “It was about building affordable units.”

Last night’s discussion began with a debate about the waterfront luxury condo project proposed for 8 Washington Street, which either Props. B or C would allow the developer to build. Project opponent Jon Golinger squared off against proponent Tim Colen, who argued that the $11 million that the developer is contributing to the city’s afforable housing fund is an acceptable tradeoff.

But Sherburn-Zimmer said the developer should be held to a far higher standard given the obscence profits that he’ll be making from waterfront property that includes a city-owned seawall lot. “Public land needs to be used for the public good.”

Longtime progressive activist Ernestine Weiss sat in the front row during the forum, blasting Colen and his Prop. B as a deceptive land grab and arguing that San Francisco’s much ballyhooed rent control law was a loophole-ridden compromise that should be strengthened to prevent rents from jumping to market rate when a master tenant moves out, and to limit rent increases that exceed wage increases (rent can now rise 1.9 percent annually on rent controlled apartment.

“That’s baloney that it’s rent control!” she told the crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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