From today’s SF Gate,

San Francisco Community Land Trust completed its $1.5 million purchase of a 21-unit Chinatown apartment building Monday.

In an agreement with the tenants, the land trust will convert the building at 53 Columbus Ave. at the corner of Gibb Street into a housing cooperative in a bid to create a model for affordable housing ownership in San Francisco. Resident-owners will own a limited-equity stake and cannot re-sell the units at market price

The land trust will retain ownership of the land under the building, and each household will own its unit. The co-op will be run by an elected group of tenants, whom the trust will train to manage the property.

The land trust purchased the building from San Francisco City College, which had determined that necessary seismic upgrades made it too expensive. It had planned to house part of its expanded North Beach-Chinatown campus in the building.

This sounds like a great way to keep some housing affordable. And one that doesn’t put the responsibility on an unwilling property owner. What a concept!

There’s no mention of the vacancy status of the building in this article, but in an article on the Community Land Trust web site, they discuss the tenants purchasing their units.

This does point out, however, that since they’re just doing a large cooperative and never planning on a condo conversion, that they (or another entity in another building) could feasibly Ellis Act a building and not care about whatever decision the supervisors make today…

That’s the problem with short-sighted legislation… There are ALWAYS ways to get around the small-minded restrictions that the supervisors come up with. The Ellis Act was made popular in response to Proposition G in 1998. If today’s legislation passes (with or without the retroactivity), attorneys and landlords that are much smarter than our current crop of supervisors (recent kindergarten graduates would fit that bill) will just find another way to solve the problem.

Cooperatives are one solution… The other is individual TIC financing… Legislation won’t stop this process. It will only harden the resolve of people who want to own homes, and they’ll find other ways to make it work. Just wait and see…

Chinatown building may be bought by tenants [SFCLT]

Updated July 25, 2006
Chinatown renters unite to own homes [SFGate]

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