A Superior Court Judge has officially invalidated San Francisco’s recently adopted law which had expanded eviction protections for tenants with a resident child under 18 years of age and extended said protections to educators – which was defined as any person who works at a school in San Francisco as an employee or independent contractor of the school or its governing body in any role – as well.
While San Francisco’s Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance already prevents a landlord from exercising an owner move-in (OMI) eviction during the school year if the eviction would displace a child under 18 years of age, the new ordinance had extended the protections to include condo conversion, capital improvement and rehabilitation based evictions and eliminated the exception that currently allows an eviction during the school year if the landlord only owns a single unit in the building or has school-age children of his or her own.
From Judge Ronald E. Quidachay’s Order: “Since the Ordinance only regulates when some tenancies may be terminated based on who the tenants are, the Court agrees with Petitioners that it is preempted because it enters the fully-occupied field of the ‘timing of landlord-tenant transactions’ which ‘is a matter of statewide concern not amenable to local variations’.”
The challenge of the ordinance (which had been sponsored by Supervisors Campos, Kim, Mar, Avalos, Cohen, and Breed, and passed unanimously with the Mayor’s signature) was brought by The San Francisco Apartment Association and Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute and argued by Zacks, Freedman & Patterson.
I have some good friends at the city attorney’s office, and they hate having to defend dumb acts by the supervisors like this one. For me, the worst part is that the city will (probably) also now have to pay the attorneys fees for the parties that got the measure stricken in addition to having already paid its own lawyers. That money, of course, could have been spent on housing, or dealing with the homeless, or police, or street repairs, etc. I’m all for lawyers getting work, but this really is a waste of resources. Of course, the supervisors just shrug their shoulders and face no consequences for such dumb moves.
Does the BS …excuse me, BOS even bother to ask counsel BEFORE passing things? And if so and they are told an ordinance has little chance of being upheld, what is the response?
Are you kidding? This is great for the Supervisors! Now they can rail about judges and injustice, hold rallies on the steps of City Hall, etc. etc. It’s much easier than actually doing something constructive about our housing problem.
Don’t forget naming a day in honor of this great injustice. Our BoS really is a joke.
You, Sir or Madam, should run for office! You are way ahead of me
Good news. Protected classes foster inequality.
Real estate is the most protected class (of assets) there is…
Real estate has been an extremely protected class of assets for, oh, the last 1000 years in the Anglo-American common law tradition.
Pandering….feel good….BS…dumb….
It didn’t seek to include the Ellis Act, which is §37.9(a)(13).
[Editor’s Note: Good catch, since corrected above.]
Good news for teachers who hope to actually be able to find a rental at some point. The more laws for protected classes the more prospective landlords will avoid such protected classes.
Exactly. I auto-ditched every teacher inquiry I received. Matter of principal. Now they are back in the running. Stupid BoS!
You can thank Campos for limiting access to teachers in SF period.
The legislation basically says: TEACHERS NEED NOT APPLY. Even the thought of this passing had most landlords, large or small, forever weary of teachers.
Soon the BOS will pass laws protecting tenants that don’t pay rent.. Oh wait, thats already the case.
It would be awesome if somebody could ballpark how much money these poverty pimp slap downs cost taxpayers. Secondly, Josh Arce had better beat Hillary Ronen.
the annual cost probably averages less than 10% of the cost of the annual subsidy SF provides the Giants as part of the agreement to build their ballpark.
Iseewhatyoudidthereandmeh
Yea but ballpark provides plenty of blue collar jobs to minorities…something the city presumably supports.
surely, the few part-time seasonal low-paid hourly jobs without benefits held by “minorities” trickle down from the many millions of dollars of taxpayer monies SF gifted to the wealthy owners of the Giants.
No better use of public money could ever be found, presumably.
The amount the city spends in legal fees each year defending unrealistic policies created by the BOS certainly exceeds the cost of supporting the ballpark. A friend in Jeff Adachi’s office thinks it’s close to $20M per year. Those legal fees provide no public benefit.
The ballpark provides an enormous economic benefit, including not just ballpark jobs, but lots of middle-class (yes not “tech-bro” jobs) in the surrounding neighborhood.
Jack, if you or your friend would like to backup that figure, then please do. Until then that looks like something pulled out of a place the sun don’t shine.
There have been published studies of the economic benefits of ballparks vs other uses of the same land and of the costs to the SF city gov of the Giants ballpark. The rather obvious conclusion is that the ballpark is not the most economic use of those 12.5-acres of prime South Beach waterfront.
You can argue that it has many non-economic benefits, but if you are going to justify it based on ROI to anyone but the Giants, then you are standing in foul ground, swinging with a broken bat, in a game that was decided years ago.
That said, go Giants, and welcome Warriors.
I know someone with one of those jobs and it ain’t exactly ‘low pay’, though to be fair, its part-time and yes there is no benefits.
Maybe there should be 40 hr jobs for hot dog sellers at ATT Park.
Do away with the district Supervisors and consolidate the office positions. Automate certain duties. Save on supervisor and aides salaries. Eliminate all the unnecessary costs of pet projects disguised as ballot propositions and needless and pointless legislation.
Restore some common sense.
How are you proposing to do these things? Magic?
Doing away with district supervisors likely would violate the state constitution.
Many cities and counties in California have at-large council/supervisor elections, as San Francisco used to have – it’s certainly allowed by the constitution. How about also reducing the number of supervisors to 5 (like in LA, a city 5x the size?)
For voting rights reasons, very few large cities have at large councils anymore.
So glad. F*ck these Marxist tenant laws.
Yet another legal win for landlords and loss for the city yesterday. Court of Appeal struck down the 2013 ordinance that forced an owner to wait 10 years after an Ellis eviction to apply for approval to merge the withdrawn unit into one or more other units. State law preempted the local ordinance, which unlawfully penalized owners for exercising their rights under the Ellis Act. The trial court ruled the same way so, to my knowledge, this ordinance has not been enforced since 2014. This decision would appear to place substantial limits on the city’s attempts to penalize an owner for exercising his or her right to evict under the Ellis Act.
“The fact that the City/County may have been motivated in part by the worthy goal of preserving the stock of affordable housing is of no moment. Under the legal authority cited above, such exercise of local power is invalid, as it constitutes local intrusion into the wholly state-occupied field of substantive eviction controls over landlords wishing to withdraw units from the residential rental market.”
A144702
(City and County of San Francisco Super. Ct. No. CPF-14-513452)