At the 24th Street BART plaza, a protestor prepares for an anti-eviction march. Photo by Greta Mart.

The San Francisco Chronicle has another good piece on the housing crisis.

The housing issue has come into sharp focus in recent months and attracted increasing attention from City Hall policymakers. This week, Mayor Ed Lee, Supervisors David Campos and David Chiu and several state lawmakers announced they are pursuing changes to state and local laws in an attempt to curb Ellis Act evictions, which more than doubled to 116 between March 2012 and February 2013 compared with the previous year.

Yet during the same time period, there were 611 no-fault evictions in total. The discrepancy indicates that even if these officials are able to deter Ellis Act evictions, they won’t be able to solve the city’s housing crisis overnight.

Such evictions are only one part of the displacement problem. Owner move-in evictions are much more common, and housing experts representing both landlords and tenants agree that there are probably two to three buyouts, in which an owner offers a tenant money to leave, for every one eviction. Under state and local law, landlords may evict tenants if they violate the terms of their lease; if the owner wants to move into the property; or, under the Ellis Act, take it off the rental market.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

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1 Comment

  1. rent price increases are slowing as all the new housing that is being built is coming onto the market. There is a LOT more housing construction in the pipeline, so it seems likely that this whole issue will slow down, as long as the NIMBY’s dont stall further development efforts.

    building more housing is the best solution!

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