The tenants at 225 Steiner were all evicted some months ago under the "Ellis Act"-the latest loophole around rent control and eviction protections. Now their apartments are being sold as condominiums. An advertisement for the units says the three apartments can each be bought for between $350,000-$550,000. ALL VACANT!!, the ad proclaims. In the same newspaper, six units at 71 Webster St are advertised as VACANT TICS!!; those tenants, too, had been evicted under the Ellis Act.

Using loopholes in San Francisco’s condominium conversion law, real estate speculators are evicting over 1,000 tenants each year for the purpose of converting the apartments to condos. In virtually each conversion, it’s low-income tenants paying affordable rents who are displaced so that the wealthy dot-commers moving into the city can buy their apartments.

Fed up with the epidemic of evictions for condo conversions, about 100 tenants marched through the Lower Haight neighborhood on May 21, marching by and stopping at over half-a-dozen buildings being converted to condos. Each building was either empty of tenants or being promised to buyers as DELIVERED VACANT! Tenants culminated the march with a 2 hour picket of an ongoing open-house, where the empty units were being shown to well-heeled prospective buyers.

The march was designed to highlight how many evictions are happening for condo conversions (there were over eight buildings within 2 blocks of the Haight and Fillmore intersection) and to highlight how real estate speculators are emptying buildings and making huge profits off condo conversions.

On one block of Scott Street, tenants stopped at 3 buildings. The first, a 4 unit building, was empty following an Ellis eviction. Units were being sold as condos for around $300,000 each. Two doors up, at another 4 unit building, the tenants were literally moving as the march arrived. Having all received Ellis evictions, the remaining tenants were moving stuff out of their apartments onto a moving truck (and leaving much behind on the sidewalk), providing great visual material for the accompanying media. All of the tenants were leaving San Francisco, unable to afford the high rents here.

The last building on this short block was an already-completed condo conversion and it provided a crystal-clear example of how tenants are being evicted so real estate speculators can get rich. This building was converted to condos by Bonnie Spindler, a realtor who works for Zephyr Realty. Spindler owns a bunch of property and has done a couple of "owner move in" evictions, another scam to kick tenants out for condo conversions. Spindler bough the Scott Street building for $430,000 and immediately evicted the tenants. She then sold off the empty units for a total of $960,000-a profit of over half-a-million dollars!!

Besides highlighting these evictions-for-profit, tenants also wanted to being attention to a pending November ballot measure which will close up the loopholes in the city’s condo conversion law. Supposedly, condo conversions (and the accompanying evictions) are limited to just 200 a year, but loopholes in this law mean that each year there’s well over 1,000 such condo conversions. The real estate speculators avoid the cap on condo conversions by selling units as condos but hiding the sale of the individual units on the deed; the proposed ballot measure requires that whenever a unit is sold as a condo it must be recorded as such on the deed. Besides closing the loopholes, the measure will also make permanent the annual 200 unit cap on condo conversions (a cap which is set to expire this December and which Mayor Willie Brown has indicated that he will let expire or will increase it to over 1,000). Tenants right now are collecting signature to place the measure on ballot.

The campaign to highlight the real estate speculators who make their living by evicting tenants will continue over the Summer. On June 3, tenants will be picketing Zephyr Realty, which is very active in evictions and condo conversions. Zephyr, for example, advises its clients (in a recent newsletter) that a building emptied of tenants will sell for 20% more than a building which has tenants living in it. Tenants will also be targeting more and more condo "Open Houses," setting up picket lines to educate prospective buyers that they condo they want to buy is available only because people with lesser income were out on the street.