It is 7 a.m., 51° and headed to 68°. Details for the next 10 days are here.
Thank you Dan Scholnick for dropping in on Mission Local.
Now to the news.
In-laws. The proposal to legalize in-law units in the Castro sailed through planning, reports SF Gate.
Evictions. They are at an all-time high, reports SFist.
Dance. Don’t forget to look out tonight for the professional South African dancers who will be in the Mission between southern Valencia and 24th Street tonight and tomorrow night at 7 p.m.
It’s National Pi Day. SF Weekly offers a guide on where to celebrate.
Off to Mission Pie for a Friday scone! Enjoy the day.
some sane words among all the hyperbole about evictions in the SFist piece:
“more than half of the evictions in 2013 were considered legitimate and were justified by either unpaid rent, “committing a nuisance,” or lease agreement violations.
So, at the very least, it would behoove apartment dwellers to stay on their landlord’s good side.”
Logorrheic John actually gets physically stimulated by the word “eviction.”
Evictions per se are neither good nor bad. They merely are.
One can argue that it’s always unfortunate when someone has to do something that they did not choose for themselves. One can say that for a tenant being evicted and of course for a landlord stuck subsidizing his tenants.
But one can also argue that a certain amount of tenant turnover gives new housing opportunities for the newly arrived and aspiring. And that social mobility is a key factor in ensuring that the city has the residents and workers that it needs in the future, and not just as a snapshot of what used to work.
So overall I see little reason for the emotional reactions that you claim to perceive here.
Evictions are bad for the tenants and good for the landlord, meaning they are far from neutral. Displacing someone from their home is as radical as it gets, no matter how you spin it. There is a reason rent control is a law, and we all know how much effort lawmaking requires.
You are correct about one thing. The cities with rent control have the highest rents.
The issue, of course, is whether that is cause or effect.
That’s right, the Russians have just vacated Crimea and are importing outsiders. Social mobility is great!
Your ‘reason for rent control’ argument fails easily, there are different reasons for different laws in different places. For example, one would expect that the city with the highest rental and housing costs would have different laws. Laws are made dynamically as needed …
Remember how the South had Slaves and the North did not?
If there was a “reason why rent control is law” then we’d see it everywhere. But in fact it only exists in a few cities, is illegal in over 30 states, and several cities have gotten rid of it.
Like I said, a tenant eviction is bad in the sense that nobody likes to have decisions made for them by others. But turnover and social mobility also has advantages. If nobody ever left their SF home, where would the incoming workers live/
That’s naive, we’ve already had multiple discussions here that if a landlord really wants a tenant out there are many possible routes to alleged ‘warranted’ eviction. One of these is the timely payment of rent — unless a tenant uses direct deposit a landlord can always claim late payment just by cashing a check etc late, as there is no other legal proof of payment. There are many other tenuous cases, for example regarding visitors, alterations (eg putting a nail in the wall) etc. many housing non profits in SF have troves of stories on this.
And who would really think that tenants are all of a sudden horribly misbehaving in such a outrageous rental market? The ones that are are probably not worried about their next place…
B2B, the suggestion wasn’t that tenants are suddenly misbehaving more. For as long as I can recall, most evictions have been for cause. The Rent Board keeps detailed stats by eviction type, and so you can see that easily for yourself.
I have no evidence that LL’s fabricate evidence to evict tenants for cause where no such cause exists, and a SF jury is typically 2/3 tenants anyway.
What the stats show, and the media distorts, is that more than half of all evictions are for cause AND that evictions in 2013 were less than 1% of the rental housing stock AND that the run rate of Ellis evictions is trivial in relative terms.
99% of SF tenants will not be evicted in 2014. What crisis?
Yes, I’ve linked to the rental stats a while back, here it is again p. 30
http://www.sfrb.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=2660
As you can see breach of lease is up 50% since a few year ago.
tenant, your story sounds a little too cute, trite and convenient to ring many bells. Of course you think your LL lied. Guess what? – he probably claims that you lied.
But anecdotes are not statistics and the idea that LL’s are pretending that rent hasn’t been paid when it has doesn’t sound plausible to me, and no evidence for that has emerged despite me asking several times.
What rights, if any, that a sub-tenant has depends on the situation. But regarding personal stuff, IIRC, a LL cannot obviously steal it, but he can temporarily look after it in a situation like this, and must keep it safely in storage for some time period before it is declared abandoned.
Trying to stay on as a roommate of someone who hares you is not a real smart move. He needs to move on.
My landlord lied when trying to evict our household in 1998. We were able to fend off the attempt, but at great financial and emotional cost.
My experience is just mine, but as real estate prices rise, landlord shenanigans rise as well. The cited statistics bear this out.
This “John” character may be omnipresent here, but he is far from omniscient. He also has a poor understanding of the rights of sub-tenants even after others explain them to him. And no one has the right without court order to confiscate someone’s personal property as happened to Jesus Sanchez.
And as I explained to you, eviction for fault do not have to be recorded at the SFRB anyway. In theory they should but there are not many judges who will bounce an otherwise valid UD because of a technicality like that. The SFRB has no power to stop an eviction,
The net result of that is that the “fault” evictions are undercounted while the “no fault” evictions are not.
Any which way, UD’s for non or late payment easily dwarf the odd Ellis here and there.
I have seen no evidence of LL’s lying to evict a tenant. Can you provide some citations, evidence or proof? I’m guessing not.
You sound confused, just look at the stats. Failure to pay rent and late payment are separate categories … and are somewhat low historically.
And I already gave you specific reasons above for how payment of rent can be gamed by landlords to appear as violation of the lease. Feel free to ignore, the truth will still be there whenever you decide you’re interested.
Its always interesting to me that landlords make the case that SF has extraordinary tenant protections. I wonder why …
It’s not just breach of lease though. Many times it is non and late payment of rent.
Moreover, evictions for cause do not have to go through the SFRB at all, and so SFRB under-reports them, particularly for non-payment of rent.