thetenssf:

lifeaftergradschool:

Reason 4,392,087 that San Francisco is loosing its bite. According to SFBG’s, Tim Redmond, “Each one represents a transforming city that no longer has room for the middle class, much less poor people. It makes me want to cry. Or throw up. Or something.” 

“The “Ellis Act” (download copy of law) is a state law which says that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to “go out of business.” For an Ellis eviction, the landlord must remove all of the units in the building from the rental market, i.e., the landlord must evict all the tenants and can not single out one tenant (with low rent) and/or remove just one unit from the rental market. When a landlord invokes the Ellis Act, the apartments can not be re-rented, except at the same rent the evicted tenant was paying, for five years following the evictions, While there are restrictions on ever re-renting the units, there are no such restrictions on converting them to ownership units (e.g., tenancies in common or condos). “

Something we see pretty much EVERY DAY at my work, is that landlords are using the Ellis Act to place tenants under pressure so that they feel forced to accept a payout. Some of these landlords have no intention of converting to ownership units, but rather just want to increase the value of their building before a sale. (Although MANY of these will be converted to ownership units.) For this, and other reasons, a housing attorney at my work believes that within two years, there will be no poor people living in private housing in San Francisco.

Click on the link, it’s really disturbing.

Uch, I usually don’t reblog here, but this is crazy…