The good news, I suppose, is that the mayor of San Francisco has recognized that there’s a housing emergency and tenants are getting evicted. He issued a press release yesterday outlining the steps he’s taking to “address San Francisco’s rent emergency.”
Some of this is just fine: Finding legal counsel for people facing evictions is a demonstrated way to keep tenants in rent-controlled housing. Supporting Sup. Jackie Fielder’s legislation to prevent evictions over less than a month of unpaid rent is kind of a no-brainer. It’s always good to inform tenants of their rights.
But the mayor didn’t even mention the cause of the eviction crisis: the AI boom in San Francisco that he has encouraged and supported. Tech Boom 3.0 has done exactly what the previous two did, and this was entirely predictable: It brought a lot of high-paid people to San Francisco, and gave greedy landlords a huge incentive to force out tenants with below-market rents. When Anthropic and Open AI go public, hundreds of their workers—most of whom are young, single men—will become very rich, and the situation will get even worse.
This will do nothing to promote the mayor’s “family opportunity agenda.”
The element of his “plan” that made me gag was this:
Legislation sponsored by Mayor Lurie will increase by 25%, nearly $3,000 per person, required payments to tenants being displaced under the Ellis Act to reflect the increased cost of finding a new apartment in San Francisco.
For starters, the Ellis Act is an evil piece of legislation that allows speculators to buy up rent-controlled buildings, evict all the tenants (for no cause at all), and flip them as tenancies in common, a form of condos. The threat of an Ellis eviction is often enough to convince a long-term tenant to accept a buy-out—that is, to take a lump-sum payment in exchange for moving out.
If tenants fight the eviction and lose, they get a tiny pittance in statutory transition payments, and the mayor’s proposal will add so little that it’s worth almost nothing. You can’t even pay one month’s rent with $3,000, much less first, last, and security deposit.
Former Sup. David Campos got the board to approve a law that would have actually discouraged Ellis evictions and given tenants a chance: His bill would have mandated that landlords doing Ellis evictions pay the difference between a tenant’s current rent and market rent for four years.
The landlords sued, and a bad court determined that the law was unconstitutional.
Former Mayor Ed Lee supported efforts by former state Sen. Mark Leno to reform the Ellis Act. Lee said that “all roads [to preventing evictions] lead to Sacramento.”
Leno’s bill never got out of committee. Back then, the real estate industry owned the state Legislature.
Today, Big Tech has a lot of influence. If Lurie really wanted to protect tenants, he could get his billionaire backers to help fund a massive campaign to overturn the Ellis Act and Costa Hawkins.
The rest is just words.
