Protestors make their way through Dolores Street on April 11, 2014.

KQED reports on a Wednesday press conference in which city officials and others called for more funding for the Eviction Defense.

“The sad fact is that many people being evicted should not be evicted and would not be evicted if they had an attorney,” said Ted Gullickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union.

At Campos’ request, the city’s budget and legislative analyst prepared a report on the number of unlawful detainers in 2012 and 2013 that sheds more light on evictions in the city. An unlawful detainer is the stage in an eviction process when a tenant is summoned to appear in court.

Tenant activists say evictions of every kind are up, but the actual numbers haven’t been clear, due in part to what landlords are required to report to the rent board.

The budget analyst’s report says there were 3,423 unlawful detainer lawsuits filed in 2013, and 3,695 filed in 2012. Of those, only 17 percent of tenants had legal representation in 2013, and nearly 13 percent had lawyers in 2012. READ MORE.

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.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

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2 Comments

  1. It is not clear why this has anything to do with Adachi.

    But yes, tenants generally do not want to pay for a lawyer as it a trial can easily run up 10K in legal costs, which cannot be reclaimed even if the tenant prevails. It’s not hard for that to run up to 20K is the LL wants to.

    So it becomes a game of poker where the house always has more chips. That is why most UD cases settle, meaning the tenant leaves with some cash thrown in.

    I have not done that many evictions but I would generally be happy to throw a few grand at a tenant if he goes quietly. But if he gets aggressive then i am happy to pay a lawyer double just to get the tenant out with no payoff.

    Maybe it is hardball but with rent and eviction controls being tightened, a landlord has to level the playing field any way he can, even if that takes some bluff and bluster.

    By the way, for many types of evictions there is no requirement to file the notice with the Rent Board. And even where there is and the LL fails to do so, a judge will often not reject an eviction on what he essentially sees as a technicality. So I do not trust the Rent Board eviction figures, particularly for “at fault” evictions and 3 day notices.

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