For the last two weeks of December, San Franciscans facing eviction get a break.
Deputy sheriffs, who usually make their weekly round of door-to-door evictions on Wednesdays, won’t be going out for the rest of the year.
For some, the temporary reprieve lets them stay in their homes at least until Jan. 7, the first Wednesday of 2026.
But ahead of the holidays, they’re still busy pleading their cases. Lawyers who provide pro-bono eviction defense say the number of clients walking through their doors has been “staggering” as the year comes to a close.
Sheriff’s deputies may pause enforcing evictions for the holidays, but the courts don’t stop ruling on them; they close down only for Christmas and New Year’s Day.
“We have a full calendar,” said Ora Prochovnick, the director of litigation and policy for the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a nonprofit providing free legal assistance to tenants facing eviction.
Prochovnick has 19 cases scheduled for the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Often, the court sees nearly 50 cases each day during the last two weeks of December, Prochovnic said.
Across two Tuesdays in December, the seats in San Francisco Superior Court’s Evictions Department, the city’s eviction court, were lined with dozens of tenants facing imminent eviction. They all pleaded to stay just a little longer, sitting quietly alone or with a lawyer by their side.
Each took their turn at the podium to defend their request to stay before a sheriff’s deputy knocks on their door.
Francisco, who only speaks Spanish, did not understand that he was being evicted at first. Later, he had trouble understanding why.
He shares a one-bedroom apartment with his cousin and another roommate, and has attended eviction hearings nearly every day since early December.
Because he could not find a lawyer in time for the hearing, alongside him sat Chris Meuse, the owner of Cafe Meuse, a Russian Hill wine bar where Francisco has worked for the last 14 years.
“I don’t pretend to know a whole bunch or be an attorney,” said Meuse, dressed in a grey suit and studying a stack of documents related to the case. “I just know what strikes me as not fair.”
Speaking through his translator, Francisco said he received an eviction notice weeks ago from the landlord of his one-bedroom Tenderloin apartment. The notice claimed he owed months of rent.
Not so, Meuse said, interpreting for Francisco: He had paid the rent to the property manager. But the property manager apparently no longer worked at the company.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Mary Wiss, who presided over the hearings that day, put a hand up, stopping Meuse mid-sentence. In order to continue, she said, Francisco would need to find a lawyer to assist him, granting him some more time until he could find an attorney.
They do this each time: Meuse tries to interpret what Francisco is saying to the judge, and what the judge is saying to Francisco, before heading over to the wine bar for the evening shift. He’s helped to file his complaints, email back and forth with the opposing counsel, and navigate an often confounding court system.
The pair got some relief last week: While trying to get an emergency stay to keep Francisco housed, a lawyer from the Eviction Defense Collaborative overheard him and walked over, volunteering to help.
“They’re going after my guy because he’s the easiest target,” Meuse said. Francisco and Meuse are worried that in order to stay at his apartment, he will have to pay his rent twice over to his new property manager.
“They’re just squeezing the little guy,” said Meuse. “I just kind of hope justice will prevail, but I’m not so sure.”
Since the city’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium ended in 2023, and the AI boom caused rents to skyrocket, evictions in San Francisco have begun to rise again.
The current total of eviction notices filed in 2025 stands at 1,469, the city’s highest since 2018, though they have yet to reach the heights they did in 2016 (when landlords issued over 2,000 notices) or 1998 (when the number neared 3,000).
The number of lawsuits filed to formally evict tenants is lower: 856 as of Dec. 16 this year. But those have increased by nearly 60 percent since 2020.
During Tuesday’s eviction proceedings, a woman approached the podium and stated that she has tried to find housing since mid-September, but has been unsuccessful, and needs an emergency stay. She is disabled, she told Wiss. Wiss, looking at her papers in front of her, told her she had no evidence of that.
“I have my doctor’s note in front of me,” she said, holding up a printed out document. The clerk informed her that any evidence needed to be filed in court. “I emailed it earlier,” she protested, but hadn’t sent it to the right channels. Her stay, ruled the court, was declined.
Most of the tenants in court are older, and Latino. One man used a cane, with effort, to rise and walk up to a small microphone attached to the podium, his lawyer sitting a few feet away.
Many are monolingual Spanish speakers. A translator, sitting by the sidelines, jumped in every few minutes to whisper intently into a microphone attached to an earset.
For Dief Dexter, the holiday pause on evictions was useless: The knock on his door had already come.
Dexter, who lives near Mission Bay, said that the rent in the building at 785 Brannan St., which he has lived in for 20 years, increased “dramatically” after it was transferred to a new owner.
Finding a new apartment has been a nightmare, he said: He can only afford to live in a place with roommates and, at 60, he’s been repeatedly rejected, he said, for being “too old.”
Dexter managed to get a temporary stay on Dec. 3 for seven days, after telling the judge that he is actively searching for housing and is on disability. He hoped he would be granted a longer stay after that, and have time to pack his belongings over the holidays.
But on Dec. 10, he was told he had to leave immediately by a sheriff’s deputy. He hurriedly packed away his possessions into a storage closet and found a friend who would take him in until he could figure out what to do next.
Several of Dexter’s former neighbors in his old building, who are also struggling to pay the new rents, may soon be in his shoes, he said.
“Now that the moratorium is over, a lot of people are being pushed out,” said Dexter. “Me included.”
Marina, it might be useful to break out these evictions by type. And in particular between eviction for cause and so-called “no fault evictions”.
The reason being that most evictions are for cause, specifically non-payment of rent. And changes in the number of those relate to tenant misbehavior, and are not necessarily symptomatic of a general decline in landlord behavior, attitudes or greed.
But if Ellis evictions and OMIs are going up, then that is typically associated with upticks in the housing market generally, correlated to improving economic conditions.
All tenants facing eviction in SF are supposed to get free attorneys but don’t. Why?
Chris Meuse sounds like an amazing person. Really hope he and Francisco beat this case.
I’m donating $100 to EDC for Christmas.
The City (we taxpayers) already give millions for free counsel to tenants, though non to small property owners.
The article seems misleading in terms of stats, really it depends where you count it from: evictions are down 50% from 25yrs ago.
It pretty hard to get evicted, so if it’s happening there’s is typically good cause.