Editorial: Anti-homeowners Peskin and Daly strike again

From today's San Francisco Business Times,

Charlie Brown had a football. Sisyphus had a rock. The San Francisco supervisors have home ownership.

Our elected leaders keep up their campaign to thwart San Franciscans who would own the roofs above their heads. Like their two fellow protagonists, this attempt is fated for futility: The demand for home ownership in San Francisco is too strong not to find an outlet.

Regrettably, that's not stopping them from trying. Most recently, it's Aaron Peskin. Under legislation he introduced last week, owners of many tenancies-in-common would be barred from entering the city's annual condo-conversion lottery, the goal of most "TIC" owners, if there had been evictions in such buildings, and one involved an elderly or disabled person.

Owners would have to have long memories, too, since Peskin's law would be retroactive: to Jan. 1, 1999.

Given that lengthy trip back into the past, it seems clear that the real goal of this ill-considered measure is simply to trip up or complicate as many San Francisco TICs as possible. Its purported goal is to stop a supposed "epidemic" of Ellis Act evictions, in which a landlord removes all his tenants and puts the building on the market, where it can be sold to a TIC group. That, and to wipe out that shadowy urban villain that tenant activists are convinced is at the root of the problem: the "real estate speculator."

It's the latest in a long line of anti-homeowner measures proposed by various board members. Those not voted down by colleagues or vetoed by the Mayor are generally given rough treatment when hauled into court.

How better it would be if Peskin -- and fellow anti-homeowner jihadis like Chris Daly -- were to ask themselves why San Franciscans are rushing into TICs, what's at the root of Ellis Act evictions (though this "epidemic" is slowing), and what makes speculation happen.

The answer to all three, at least in large part: the failed policies of the San Francisco supervisors.

TICs are plentiful because they offer one of the few opportunities for San Franciscans of modest means to get their foot on the first rung of home ownership. Years of anti-development rhetoric and general meddling by the board have exacerbated the city's structural housing shortage.

As for the Ellis Act, San Francisco has a long and inglorious tradition of regarding landlords as uniformly rapacious scoundrels, and addressing them accordingly, with periodic campaigns of regulatory harassment and frequent encouragement for the scorched-earth tactics of tenant activists. Who wouldn't want to get out of the rental business?

And speculation? It only exists when an imbalance persists between supply and demand. By attempting to close off so many entries to home ownership, supervisors have created this monster that they now decry.

Nobody likes evictions. But as we've noted before, they are a symptom of San Francisco's housing malaise, not a cause. There are simply too many people fighting over too little housing, and too few other opportunities for ownership.

Wiser heads would see a way to embrace the desires for home ownership and condo conversion in a way that addresses the eviction problem: Every TIC that's sold, every condo that converts, generates tax income for the city -- and money that could be directed into affordable rental housing.

Amen, brothers and sisters...

Proposition B Ellis Act Notification - an editorial [SFHomeBlog]