Maria Fuentes’ room is dark and the curtains are drawn. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the prone 94-year-old’s bed, and the stacked cardboard boxes holding the remaining possessions of a family uncertain where it will next turn. “No me gusta esta casa,” she tells me — I don’t like this house. Back in El Salvador, she continues, things were different....
When a dozen or so tenant rights advocates arrived on the doorstep of the San Francisco Association of Realtors on Thursday morning carrying signs and a megaphone, one immediately clashed at the door with a member of the association with each pushing the other until a staffer was able to pull the door shut. “This is private property!” the man...
As 14 rent-controlled tenants of one Folsom Street building prepare to fight their evictions, housing rights advocates organized a block party on Saturday to support them. “There are a ton of evictions happening here on Folsom Street. There are buildings that are being demolished that are full of tenants,” said Maria Zamudio, housing rights campaign organizer for Causa Justa. “We...
A group of artists displaced by a fire at their home on Stevenson Street in January 2014 are being sued for the tens of thousands of dollars they originally received in eviction relocation assistance under a city ordinance. The Tenant Relocation Assistance Payment ordinance, passed in June 2014 and in effect for five months, required landowners to pay tenants the difference...
Tenants at 812 Guerrero, who have been fighting their evictions by Google employee Jack Halprin for more than a year now, learned yesterday that their landlord would appeal the decision to quash their evictions. That decision was handed down in the cases of three units in the building last week; the fourth unit’s tenant is fighting her eviction separately and...
A handful of activists and tenants stood on the blustery corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez streets Monday afternoon, calling for residents to fight the city’s escalating eviction environment with the Mission District at its epicenter. Although Ellis Act evictions have declined by 48 percent over the previous year, illegal use evictions were 117 percent higher than the previous year, according to...
Happy Holidays! The Mission Local crew is (mostly) out of the office, and we hope you’re catching some vacation time as well. For our Thanksgiving edition, we decided we would share some stories that our neighbors have written in the past. They’re not necessarily Thanksgiving stories (though some may inspire gratitude for the things many of us take for granted)...
Tenants Patricia Kerman and Thomas Rapp, longtime tenants on 20th and Folsom streets who have been fighting an Ellis Act eviction since February 2012, had an unusual victory in court this morning. Steve Collier, the tenants’ lawyer, argued in court that the eviction notice at their apartment building on 20th Street had not been properly served and therefore the notice was in violation...
Or so asks Kevin Montgomery, founder and editor of Uptown Almanac, in a post this afternoon for Valleywag. He’s wondering if specifically targeting big tech companies and their employees is the most effective way for activists to raise attention to issues of gentrification and rising inequality. Fixing income inequality and gentrification in San Francisco sounds like its outside of Google’s purview—because...
Last week was a full one in the legislative debate about fixing San Francisco’s housing crisis. Here at Mission Local HQ we could barely keep up with all the various proposals, amendments and votes. To help you sort through the administrative mess, here’s a (hopefully) useful guide to the latest in housing legislation: What’s Happening in Sacto Ellis Act Reform...
A Senate committee voted 19-18 against the legislation by Mark Leno to reform the Ellis Act, according to a report in SF Gate. It does so just as Mission Local reports that planned affordable housing is in limbo. The San Francisco Democrat may try once more to garner additional support before Friday’s deadline to move bills out of their house of origin....
Ellis Act evictions are on the rise and in the news almost daily – so much so that Mission Supervisor David Campos and Mayor Ed Lee have been proposing legislation to either ban them or make them more expensive for landlords. Here’s the personal story of tenants in one ten-unit Mission property at 23rd and Florida facing an Ellis Act...
The fundraiser tonight for leading cultural figures Rene Yañez and Yolanda Lopez, who are being evicted from the home they have lived in for 35 years, will bring together some of the icons of the Latino art and performance world including the Culture Clash, Guillermo Gomez-Peña and San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murgia. Yañez, who helped found the Mission Cultural Center for Latino...
Spanning three decades in the Mission District, prominent San Francisco artist and curator René Yañez, who seeded and grew the annual Dia de Los Muertos celebration into a citywide event, is in the process of being evicted from his home of 35 years. His former wife, artist Yolanda Lopez, and his son, the artist Rio Yañez, are also included in...
Three times in the last 18 years, Edwin Ortiz, 48, has survived the threat of eviction from his rent-controlled studio at 739 Valencia St. Once again he hopes to prevail as restaurateur Jack Knowles threatens to evict him and two other tenants using the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to take rental units off the market. To do...
