The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that the market slowed in October.
“There’s not a lot of oomph in the market post-midsummer,” said Andrew LePage, an analyst at San Diego’s DataQuick. “The pace of price appreciation has slowed if not halted, although it’s still up by a very impressive amount compared to a year ago.”
A total of 7,595 new and resale houses and condos changed hands in the nine-county Bay Area in October, DataQuick said. That was down 3.9 percent from October 2012, and 11.2 percent below the historic October average.
What this means for eviction rates and the proposals to help stall them is unclear. But everyone — including the mayor — seems to have an idea of what should be done.
A couple of things…
These data don’t include price-outs in commercial and non-traditional living spaces (like Million Fishes Gallery, for example). In this common scenario, the landlord says “hey guys, the rent is going from $5,000 to $30,000 per month”. The tenants can’t pay it, (and may not realize they have any rights) and go quietly.
These data don’t include bribe-outs, whereby unsophisticated tenants are lured by lump sums of cash to vacate, with no paperwork filed with the city.
The mass eviction of 60 tenants from 1049 Market is neither an Ellis or OMI, thus isn’t included in this statistic.
Ignoring eviction for a moment, these data miss the fact that astronomical rents on vacant units bar all but 6-figure professionals from entering SF. So there is no new blood coming into the arts, trades, teaching, child care, service industries, etc. This will have PROFOUND negative long term effects on the character of SF.
As far as official Ellis evictions, though few in number relative to the population, they are rising fast.
So if you are among the 70% of San Franciscans who rent, evictions and housing costs are THE issue. Don’t let the pathologically greedy real estate drones tell you otherwise.
Some clarifications are necessary there, nutrisystem.
What you are calling “price outs” can only happen where there is no rent control. So that includes commercial leases such as you mention, but they are typically signed for several years at a time, and so can only happen occasionally.
Likewise it can happen to those who rent SFH’s and condo’s, as there is no rent control on those either (although there is eviction control, and a “too high” rent increase might be deemed to be a constructive eviction, so it’s not riskless for a LL).
As for “bribe outs”, it’s not true that only unsophisticated tenants accept those. One of my neighbors paid 30K recently for the tenant to move out. The tenant was in fact very shrewd and sophisticated, and negotiated hard.
In any event, there really isn’t anything to be done about that, as people are always free to abort a contract if they both agree, whether for cash or some other consideration. There’s nothing to report to the city when that happens as it’s not an eviction but a voluntary departure.
1049 is an airless, windowless totally illegal residential building and the city policy for those is to issue a certificate for removal of the units – a just cause for eviction. Both Wiener and Chui are working on new laws that might ease illegal unit but, in any event, any tenant moving into an illegal unit does so knowing the risk, or should do anyway.
As for there being no new artists, why do you exclude home-grown artists i.e. the children of people already here? And why exclude artists who may work in SF but live in, say, Oakland?
Thanks John, a voice of reason in a sea of madness.
That data from dataquest is for the 9 Bay Area counties, and almost meaningless when looking specifically at SF. Just how does Santa Rosa and Vacaville reflect SF? Hello?
Please, get informed about analyzing RE stats. I suggest socketsite.com as a start.
There are 240,000 households in San Francisco.
This past year, 300 of them were evicted.
That’s 0.1%. And this is a city-wide emergency?
Yeah, banishment is no biggee when it’s happening to somebody else.
Banishment is also not a biggee when it is happening to a small fraction of one percent of the rental stock. Even when the press like to dress that up as a “crisis” or “epidemic” because it sells newspapers and grabs online eyeballs.
Yes, this hysteria about evictions is being drummed by a relatively small number of non-profit vested interests and the “usual suspect” generic whiners.
The reality is that over 99% of tenants are free to stay in their units year-on-year, and only a tiny percentage of them are evicted. And even then, far more evictions happen because of just cause, such as non-payment of rent.
This is a non-issue.
Looks like the chart only addresses evictions due to OMI and Ellis. It doesn’t include evictions for other reasons.
I have no issue with this, but it would be helpful if we could see OMI and Ellis numbers annually from 1979 to the present.
Can we please get a graph with more than 2 data points?
I found this graph on Curbed SF, which paints a *completely* different picture than the completely biased graph above. Come on, journalists.
http://sf.curbed.com/uploads/ellis_chart_95_13-thumb.jpg