Renters getting deja vu to bad old dot-com days
From today’s Chronicle, “Ellis Act evictions, according to statistics kept by the Rent Board, approached dot-com era levels during the city’s 2004-05 fiscal year, a trend that concerns tenants-rights activists.”
“When landlords invoke the law, they typically move tenants out and put the building up for sale as tenancies-in-common, or TICs. The goal for TICs — real estate transactions popular with first-time home buyers in which a group of people collectively owns a building and shares the mortgage, but lives in separate units — usually is to convert the building into more valuable condominiums.”
“There were 330 Ellis Act eviction notices given by landlords to tenants during the 2004-05 fiscal year, which ended in June, according to the Rent Board. At the height of the dot-com boom and real estate explosion — during the fiscal year 1999-2000 — 440 Ellis Act eviction notices were issued in San Francisco.”
“I’m very proud of the hundreds of affordable home ownership opportunities that I’ve helped create through ‘Ellising’ buildings, buildings that were almost exclusively sold to first-time home buyers,” said Andrew Zacks, a San Francisco lawyer who handles Ellis Act evictions and other land use cases. “They’re buying homes and in neighborhoods where otherwise they would not be able to afford.”
“Zacks, however, said it’s unfair to blame the Ellis Act for San Francisco’s cutthroat real estate market.”
“It’s a very expensive place to live, and those pressures exist irrespective of Ellis Act evictions,” he said. “It’s a complete blip on the radar screen statistically. The notion that 330 Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco is causing gentrification in the city is a stretch.”
