Tenants fight eviction loophole
Diana Walsh
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Jan. 14, 1999
 

More S.F. landlords using obscure law

 

Frustrated by local laws restricting owner move-in evictions, landlords across The City are using a loophole to evict tenants from their buildings, and City Hall politicians will soon be asked to step in to stop them.

Supervisor Sue Bierman has asked the city attorney to draft legislation that could severely restrict use of a little-known state law called the Ellis Act.

The law, passed in 1986, allows landlords to quit the rental business, empty their buildings of all tenants and move into the vacant units themselves or sell them to a group of individuals who would occupy them.

Tenant activists thought they had put the brakes on owner move-in evictions in San Francisco when they passed Proposition G last November, but landlords quickly turned to the Ellis Act and served eviction papers to dozens of tenants.

In 1998, tenants in 65 buildings received eviction notices under the Ellis Act, compared with 16 using the same law in 1997, 14 in 1996 and just five in 1995, according to Joe Grubb, executive director of San Francisco's Rent and Stabilization Board.

The number of San Francisco apartment units emptied by eviction under the Ellis Act in 1998 - 184 - is dramatically smaller than the 1,400 evictions recorded under old city laws in 1997, but tenant advocates fear the worst is yet to come.

"We knew some number would switch over to Ellis," said Ted Gullicksen of the Tenants Union. "The good news is that they haven't become an epidemic, but the bad news is that they've gone up 1,000 percent."

Raising bureaucratic roadblocks

Predicting that number will grow - one attorney expects that hundreds of landlords will use the law for thousands of units - Gullicksen and other activists called upon Bierman to carry legislation to make it difficult for landlords to do so.

"We have such a dire need for rental housing that we just can't afford to let apartment owners get away with this," Bierman said Wednesday.

Bierman's legislation, first proposed to her by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, would amend The City's planning code to require property owners in buildings with three or more units to get conditional use permits if they want to convert residential rental units into owner-occupied units.

If passed by the Board of Supervisors and signed by the mayor, the legislation would not prevent landlords from turning a rental unit into one that could be owner-occupied. However, requiring a conditional use permit would be a major procedural and bureaucratic roadblock to prospective landlords and would give the Planning Department wide discretion to decide if a landlord could live on his property.

The red tape would be enough to frighten most prospective buyers away, advocates on both sides said.

Clifford E. Fried, a landlord attorney who has handled 6,000 evictions in San Francisco, including dozens under the Ellis Act, believes that Bierman's legislation wouldn't survive a legal challenge.

"You can't put procedural roadblocks in front of property owners who want to go out of the rental business," Fried said. "It's unenforceable. The City is going to get sued again. The Ellis Act supersedes local ordinances like this."

San Francisco real estate interests already are mounting a legal challenge to both Prop. G and other owner move-in eviction laws passed by supervisors last year.

Prop. G, the most stringent of those laws, was designed to clamp down on an increasingly popular real estate buying venture known as tenancies-in-common. TICs, as they are known, allow several individuals who might otherwise be unable to own property independently, to pool their resources, buy a building and convert rental units into their own individual owner units.

Evictions escalate

As rental rates in The City skyrocketed with the booming local economy over the past few years, the popularity of TICs exploded. In turn, the number of owner move-in evictions soared, growing from 420 in 1995 to 1,400 in 1997.

Tenant activists, who felt TICs were being used as an end-run around The City's tough rent-control and eviction restrictions, backed Prop. G, which allows only one owner of a building to evict the occupants of one unit in order to move in. The measure all but eliminates the incentive for partners to pool resources to buy a building they could all live in.

It has real estate interests headed to court.

"We believe it's unconstitutional . . . that the government has regulated the property so much that you can't use it," said Barbara Herzig, an attorney representing the Greater San Francisco Association of Realtors. "It's like the government can't come in and take your house away from you without paying you money."

Tenants are gearing up, too. This week about 75 gathered at a North Beach restaurant and pledged to do everything they could to quash the Ellis Act, which they said would otherwise run them and other renters out of town.

"I'm totally occupied with fighting the Ellis Act," said event organizer Jean Dierkes-Carlisle, who has refused to move out of the $437-a-month North Beach apartment she has lived in for 16 years despite having received an Ellis Act eviction notice in September.

"When people buy these old buildings, they know what they are getting into; they know what the rents are," she said. "If I had money, I wouldn't be able to buy a building with the idea of throwing people out."