A plan to build and preserve affordable housing for 500 San Francisco educators by 2020 is now on the boards. As proposed and announced by Mayor Ed Lee this morning, the City proposes to jointly finance at least one new affordable housing development for 100 educator households with the... Read More »

The Sheriff’s Department is slated to change the locks on Sinbad’s Restaurant and forcibly evict its operators from the doomed building on Pier 2 at 11:30 this morning. But according to a co-owner who didn’t elaborate, “It’s not going to happen.” As plugged-in readers have known... Read More »

San Francisco’s Supervisors have unanimously approved legislation which will prohibit rent increases or evictions based on adding new roommates to an existing tenancy, will give tenants a chance to cure minor lease infractions, including violations of a no subletting clause, prior to allowing a landlord to initiate eviction proceedings,... Read More »

As it currently stands, affordable or ‘Below Market Rate’ housing units in San Francisco are allocated by lottery with preferences given to households that hold a rare Certificate of Preference or tenants who have recently been evicted by way of the Ellis Act.  And being a resident in the... Read More »

Facing protests over their role in providing “displacement mortgages” to those who buy tenant-occupied buildings and then invoke the Ellis Act in order to flip the property or occupy it themselves sans tenants, First Republic Bank will now ask mortgage applicants if they intend to repurpose their target property... Read More »

In addition to prohibiting rent increases or evictions based on adding new roommates to an existing tenancy, even when an existing lease specifically disallows new occupants or specifies an associated increase in rent, a proposed change to San Francisco’s Administrative Code would also prohibit landlords from raising the rent... Read More »

Over the past four months, tenants of 47 rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco have negotiated buyouts to vacate their units, with an average payout of $43,000.  The highest buyout was for $310,000. And in fact, the average buyout reported to the San Francisco Rent Board, as newly required by... Read More »

Over the past ten years, a total of 5,470 rent-controlled housing units have been cleared of tenants and removed from the rental market in San Francisco by way of no-fault evictions, including owner move-ins, Ellis Acts, condo conversions and demolitions. The greatest number of no-fault evictions, 764 or 14... Read More »

The merger or absorption of a non-permitted apartment back into the square footage of an existing house, a tactic which has been employed to re-establish properties as single-family homes in order to circumvent rent control and effectively evict tenants by raising their rents to market rates (or more) in... Read More »

While the details of how it would work or what it would accomplish have yet to be defined, San Francisco Supervisor Julie Christensen is urging the Mayor to create an “early warning system” for evictions in San Francisco. As proposed, a working group with participation from the Mayor’s Office... Read More »