13 ms·

Evicted in San Francisco

227 points by shmeedogg 13y ago

RyanZAG 13y ago
> Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage. What the hell? She has to threaten and insult people around her and was living in an illegal building, yet has the perfect option open to her. EDIT: And before anybody says anything about her giving up her life - by the sound of the article, her life consisted of insulting and fighting with all her neighbors. Logically if she had friends, she wouldn't be living in her car - her friends would have helped her out.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
"According to Inge, she pursued some of these options, but was turned off by the no-guarantee nature of the wait-lists, and felt she was entitled to stay where she was." So she voluntarily did not use resources designed to help her out. That lands credibility to landlords story. If I lived on fixed income, I would definitely move out of Bay Area somewhere cheaper.
- normloman 13y ago
  It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I guess you say "Sorry poor trash, but you gotta be this rich to live here. If you can't cut it, kindly leave the city you've known your whole life, abandon your friends, and get a new job." But that seems cold, doesn't it?
  - maxlybbert 13y ago
    > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I've done many things I didn't want to. It's part of being an adult. Then again, nobody makes me eat my vegetables.
    - normloman 13y ago
      You echo a lot of other comments. Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain." That's not a valid argument. Being forced to move sucks, no matter who you are. More importantly, why should the poor in San Francisco move? They were there first. They could afford rent, until us tech people came. Why should we crowd them out? And if we did, is that the kind of city we want? A city where everyone is rich, and the poor and middle class huddle into slums outside the border? Here's how that will turn out: When the rich city makes too much garbage, they will dump it in the middle of poor city. When the state creates funds for new infrastructure project, you can bet they will all go to rich city. When big companies relocate, they will build their luxurious campus in rich city. Sorry, no jobs for poor city. But don't worry, rich city still needs street sweepers and baristas. Huddling the poor in a small area just makes them an easier target for oppression.
      - maxlybbert 13y ago
        > Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain." I'm sorry. That's not my argument in any way. For one, I support free speech enough that I won't say people have no right to complain. Personally, I think anybody who constantly streams complaints is probably immature and not somebody I want to associate with, but they can complain all they want; I'll simply tune them out. Looking at the particular case of this lady: * she is currently homeless, and apparently does not like that; * she used to antagonize her former landlord; * her former landlord tried to help her find a new place, but she declined the help; * she refuses to work with organizations that exist to help people like her, she apparently chafes at their rules and regulations; * she has the option of moving to Germany free of charge, but refuses to do so. But my statement that "doing things you don't like is part of being an adult" is true. Many college students are appalled when they discover that the life isn't as easy as they were led to believe. I'm sure I was one of them; it's been a while and my memory is foggy. But complaining that things aren't always hunky dory is silly. At some point you have to make the best with what you have. And saying "but I don't want to move away from my friends" or "but why do I have to pay market rates for a place to live?" simply comes off as immature.
  - hnal943 13y ago
    It's not about her being poor so much as uncivil. When you stop paying your rent and you've destroyed the value of the building you live in and fight with the neighbors, it makes it very hard for anyone to want to help you. If she had been cooperative, I don't think this would have even been a story.
  - CodeMage 13y ago
    There might be many cases of rich vs. poor in San Franscisco and I'm not disputing that your arguments might be perfectly suited to those. However, if the case presented in this article is the best the author(s) could find, then we're seeing an example of sloppy journalism. Here's why: "I could send you transcripts of a phone message where she said she will burn the house down if we didn't fix the leaking roof. Or show you the rent increase letter that was returned to me unopened and defaced with 'Fuck You' written on it. We tried to help her." Basically, you purchase a property from someone else and it comes with a tenant. You try to co-exist with that tenant and she behaves in a manner that is unreasonably hostile. Are we really supposed to be sympathetic? Is this really supposed to make us feel for the plight of people being evicted in San Francisco?
  - yesiamyourdad 13y ago
    From the sound of the article she has no family and whatever friends she has don't like her enough to let her live with them. It's a simple thing: she and her prior landlord were breaking the law. Either SF has to change their zoning laws or she had to comply. Hard to see the property owner as the bad guy. After years of legal action and dealing with someone who honestly sounds like an exceedingly difficult personality, I'd want to sell the house too.
  - ryguytilidie 13y ago
    I make six figures and I couldn't afford to live in SF anymore, so I relocated to the east bay. This is entirely reasonable...
  - raldi 13y ago
    > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. You're right. But that's life. For example, I had to pack up and move 8 times in the last 14 years, and it sucked every time. But I dealt with it. Having to move merely once every several decades is a comparative luxury.
  - eqdw 13y ago
    > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I lost my job in Canada, and it was prohibitively difficult to find a software job I could sustain myself on in my home city, so I packed up and moved. I moved out of the city I had lived in my whole life. I left my friends and family and landed, alone, in SF. Because the economic landscape forced me to move. I understand what you are trying to say, but I'm having trouble sympathizing. And, given how many H1Bs get given out every year, I suspect I'm not the only one here who feels that way
  - null_ptr 13y ago
    That's what the majority of people in this thread seem to say, and this lack of empathy is disheartening. There's some dick a few comments up that said people uproot themselves all the time, "he did it when he was 18 and left for college". Unbelievable. It's sad to slowly see where all the techie-hate comes from, the entitlement and lack of basic empathy demonstrated in this thread is eye-opening.
- Eduardo3rd 13y ago
  Even worse- "Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage." She has a golden ticket to a vast array of social services, but she's tied to a community in one of the most expensive cities in the USA.
cperciva 13y ago
Inge has an amalgam of health issues, the most serious of which is her high glucose levels. She has to take daily insulin shots, which must be chilled on ice. That might have been good advice 30 years ago, but it certainly isn't now. Modern insulin preparations should be kept at room temperature while in use for up to 30 days -- keeping it refrigerated while in use is contraindicated due to the potential for thermal cycling to result in inaccurate dosing -- and keeping insulin "on ice" is never recommended due to the risk of the insulin being damaged by freezing.
- ominous_prime 13y ago
  Might still be better than the large temp fluctuation of a car interior though.
  - cperciva 13y ago
    Maybe, but I doubt it. If she were in Texas, sure, but not in San Francisco.
- eqdw 13y ago
  > That might have been good advice 30 years ago, but it certainly isn't now. Modern insulin preparations should be kept at room temperature while in use for up to 30 days -- keeping it refrigerated while in use is contraindicated due to the potential for thermal cycling to result in inaccurate dosing -- and keeping insulin "on ice" is never recommended due to the risk of the insulin being damaged by freezing. Do you have a citation for this? I'd be interested in researching more on this subject. My girlfriend tells me she needs to keep her insulin pens in the fridge. We've also noticed that her blood glucose will fluctuate for strange and mysterious reasons. Your comment wrt thermal cycling rings true, and I'm wondering if the temperature change from constantly going from fridge (~5C) to her purse (~20C) and back, several times a day, might be causing this
  - cperciva 13y ago
    Do you have a citation for this? Every insulin pen "user guide" I've seen says "store unopened cartridges in a refrigerator; keep your pen at room temperature". My girlfriend tells me she needs to keep her insulin pens in the fridge. We've also noticed that her blood glucose will fluctuate for strange and mysterious reasons. Your comment wrt thermal cycling rings true, and I'm wondering if the temperature change from constantly going from fridge (~5C) to her purse (~20C) and back, several times a day, might be causing this The biggest problem with thermal cycling is that insulin pen cartridges, unlike insulin vials, aren't perfectly sealed -- the rubber stopper needs to be able to slide. As a result, when a cartridge is cooled and the liquid contracts, it will tend to draw a small amount of air into the cartridge. This will result in bubbles forming, and obviously injecting a bubble of air will be less effective than injecting insulin. In young adults this is a nuisance more than anything else, since we're likely to notice bubbles, but in children (who don't understand the implications) or the elderly (who are less likely to notice this due to visual impairment) it can be a serious problem. Assuming your girlfriend falls into the "young adult" age range, it's unlikely that her blood glucose fluctuations are caused by this; assuming you've ruled out monthly and diurnal patterns from endocrine causes, I'd look at diet -- protein in particular, since amino acid catabolism can dump glucose into your bloodstream at unexpected times.
kohanz 13y ago
Call me cold, but after reading this I come away with almost no sympathy for the evicted senior citizen. She comes across as very entitled.
- makaveli8 13y ago
  I feel exactly the same. She even got a $14k resettlement fee! If she didn't want to be evicted out into the cold she should have been a little warmer to her landlord and neighbors instead of being such a nuisance.
- Crito 13y ago
  I have little sympathy for her, or the new owners (who failed to report the illegal situation to the city immediately after becoming owners of the property). My main take-away from all of this is that being evicted in SF is quite the feat, right up there with climbing Mount Everest or swimming the English channel. We should commend her for accomplishing something so difficult, despite all the people who told her it could not be done (read: tried to help her).
  - iopq 13y ago
    Why, because they were nice enough to still let her stay there? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's illegal so they should kick her out immediately.
    - Crito 13y ago
      It was illegal, and they made the decision to do it. Anything that follows that gets little sympathy from me; I believe that people should own the consequences of their actions in situations like that. Your illegal tenant refuses to pay you rent, leaving you with no legal recourse? Cry me a river. And make no bones about it, it wasn't a sense of charity that made them decide to let her stay. They were charging her rent (and in fact, attempted to raise it at least once).
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    well, actually not really. Even if you were a perfect tenant, there's nothing stopping you from getting evicted short of human kindness.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- GuiA 13y ago
  "Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage. But for 50 years, she has built a life for herself in San Francisco, and that’s something she doesn’t want to give up."
  - jedanbik 13y ago
    But could she get on the plane?
    - kansface 13y ago
      I willing to bet the landlord would have paid for uber and the ticket.
steven777400 13y ago
We don't have a strong enough social welfare net (or enough resources there-in) to care for folks that need care; but, we're not comfortable letting them starve on the streets either. The result? Essentially innocent people, like the property owner, get "stuck" with "it's your problem now" where various agencies give contradictory mandates, backed with fines. How was property owner supposed to respond when told he must get rid of the illegal dwelling, but also told he can't evict the tenant? I mostly sympathize with the property owner here. As a tenant, especially a tenant in an illegal or undocumented dwelling, you have to expect that a day of reckoning will come. Even property owners can be "evicted" (eminent domain), much less a property renter.
- wmf 13y ago
  How was property owner supposed to respond when told he must get rid of the illegal dwelling, but also told he can't evict the tenant? Clearly he should have moved out of the house and let her live there.
  - justizin 13y ago
    Someone told him this would happen before he bought the property.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  My thoughts too. As soon as the DBI saw that the unit was illegal, I would have assumed the occupants would have been removed almost immediately. It should not have taken that long for the owner to be able to do what he was legally required to do. But instead he was legally prevented from doing what he was legally required to do. Makes no sense.
  - flomo 13y ago
    San Francisco almost always looks the other way regarding these 'illegal' units. Many of them are in plain sight and the rent/tenancy control laws still apply. I would guess the unit must have been a serious health/safety hazard for them to do anything.
jseliger 13y ago
Nonetheless, it’s a good time to be a Bornstein in San Francisco: in the past year alone, Ellis Act evictions have risen 170%; since 1997, there have been 3,811, and that number is constantly rising. The obvious solution to rapidly rising prices is to increase supply, as described here (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) or here (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis...). I've posted both links before but we keep seeing stories like these and the solutions remain the same. The technology necessary to increase housing supply (steel frames, elevators) is a century old (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valley_housing_boom_there_s_no_such_thing.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valle...) and well-understood. The problem is almost entirely political.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  It's amazing how so many people refuse to accept that out-of-control housing prices are due to artificial scarcity, and that the solution is deregulation, rather than even more idiotic rent control and eviction regulations. David Campos is now trying to enact legislation to penalize Ellis Act evictions. More than two decades after the USSR collapsed, and people are still clinging to socialist ideologies.
  - bicknergseng 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure the ordinances against housing construction in SF have very little to do with socialism or the USSR...
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      The zoning laws are good old NIMBYism. But the rent control? That's good ol' socialism.
      - wutbrodo 13y ago
        Oh for god's sake, just because you don't understand what the word means doesn't mean you can use socialism for any government action in the economy. Rent control isn't stupid because it's redistributive or whatever you think "socialist" means, it's stupid because it arbitrarily redistributes from long-standing tenants (rich, middle-class or poor) to those who move more often (rich, middle-class, or poor), while introducing a massive amount of uncertainty and overhead for landlords and reducing the quality and quantity of housing stock. A little understanding of economics goes a long way; the fact that rent control is distorting the price mechanism per se is not the reason that it's retarded (by that logic, Pigovian taxes would be just as disastrous as rent control).
pyrrhotech 13y ago
Another whine story. I do feel sorry for those people that legitimately deserve it. You know, women in the middle east who are beaten or stoned to death for not wearing berkas, or orphans in Africa dealing with genocidal warlords. But this lady could live perfectly fine on her social security if she would move to somewhere she could afford. Living in San Francisco is something a whole lot of people want to do. That's why it's so damn expensive. I want to do it too, but I don't want to pay that price. That's ok, you shouldn't get everything you want. It's a privilege to live there, not a right.
- jedmeyers 13y ago
  It looks like the Entitled do not consider it to be a privilege. To them once you rented a place somewhere for x years, you are entitled to live at that place indefinitely.
  - Shivetya 13y ago
    we only have to look to politicians to assign the blame, in the East its called rent control, whats its called in SF? It is like any government handout, except here in the case of money they merely take your rights away to your property.
    - jjoonathan 13y ago
      Blaming this on politicians is lazy and narrowsighted. Compromise is a two way street: Landowners get zoning rules that prevent them from competing with highrise apartment buildings, turning desirable regions into pressure-cookers that drive rents and property values sky-high. Tenants get rent control that shields them from the from the worst of the landowner-cartel's machinations. Not as well as they were promised at voting time, but they don't typically invest as much in local politics, so that's to be expected. The real losers are the people who would move into a neighborhood if they could. They don't get any representation in the local government. That's either a feature or a bug, depending on which side of the fence you're on :)
- fishtoaster 13y ago
ww520 13y ago
What a hellish process to go through eviction. No wonder the rental housing market is so out of whack in SF. Becoming a landlord is a major headache.
Crito 13y ago
> When the current owners, the Withrington brothers, purchased the property in 2002, Inge came with it. > In San Francisco, a landlord can’t evict a current tenant just because they are selling or buying the property; by the time the unit was purchased, Inge had already been living there for ten years, and she had no intention to go anywhere. Since Inge's unit was illegal, her landlord had even fewer options in the way of legal recourse. If the new owners were willing to come clean to the city about the illegal unit, then I don't see what the issue would have been. Being the new owners, surely they could not be held responsible for the crime that was committed by the old owner, right? It seems to me that the only reason why their hands were bound is because they decided to not notify the city immediately after the property became theirs.
- mullingitover 13y ago
  > It seems to me that the only reason why their hands were bound is because they decided to not notify the city immediately after the property became theirs. Why would they? They'd immediately throw themselves into the situation where they can't legally evict her, and are fined for failing to evict her. It's not too crazy (or abnormal, given that 10% of SF's housing is illegal) that they'd decide to kick that can down the road for a while.
ominous_prime 13y ago
After seeing some eviction processes myself, I'm not sure what more one can do for someone like this. I've seen a few evictions where the occupants seem to completely deny what's happening, refuse to help themselves, and refuse outside assistance. On top of the denial, this woman was actively antagonistic, which made things all that much harder. Yes, the current housing situation in SF is bad, but this is a failure of the social services we provide. The article seems to take issue with the landlord, but what would any of us do in a similar situation, with an illegal and toxic tenant in our house?
- dragontamer 13y ago
  The article is very carefully written, such that the reader can take issue with whatever fits their own bias. Its a very well done article in general, and provides ammo for both sides to sling each other with. IMO, the intelligent reader will see the story for what it is. A tragedy... and a realization on what happens when tenants don't like being evicted.
ddoolin 13y ago
Life's already a bitch, why add to it by being one yourself...
tn13 13y ago
Government regulations are the villain here. Is it legal or stay in a car with cat litter around but living in a room with height less that 7' is illegal ? In the name of protecting tenant rights government has made regulations that deeply hurt the land owners and reduce their incentives to create housing opportunities for poor. "In San Francisco, a landlord can’t evict a current tenant just because they are selling or buying the property; by the time the unit was purchased. " Burning down the house in that case sounds like a lucrative offer.
pdeuchler 13y ago
> First came the arbitration hearing, where Inge’s lawyer and the landlord’s lawyers tried to strike a deal to avoid any type of elongated legal dispute. This ended somewhat peacefully: Withrington agreed to pay Inge a settlement of $14,000 in resettlement fees, and she signed a contract agreeing to vacate the property within 60 days. The first eviction notice was issued. Yet she refused to do so and is now homeless, with a fraction of $14k to her name. It sounds like the landlords went above and beyond, I would kill to have landlords like that, and yet because this woman was her own worst enemy[0] she ends up on the street. Barring mental illness (which is quite possible) I can't see this being anything else but a conscious choice on her part to end up on the street. Furthermore, it seems like this woman was actively taking away resources from those who are in more dire situations[1]. Maybe we should be more concerned that the multiple social workers (and the post author) didn't consider that the woman might have needed mental help? [0] “I personally went out and found stuff -- my own mother personally went out and found stuff. We put Inge in touch with multiple social workers and housing agencies. The problem is that a lot of these places come and check where you’re living and only take you in if you meet their standards. Inge is a hoarder, a smoker, and has a cat. The smell in her unit was absolutely…just...unbelievable. That didn’t work out well for her.” [1]“It took three truck loads to get her stuff out,” recalls Withrington. “And the help of a whole team of social workers.”
tn13 13y ago
The reality is that none of us deserve anything. The so called social welfare is nothing but a government's excuse to reduce our liberties. If there is any reason why poor can not afford housing in SF then it is not the fault of the landlord who is trying to make maximum money but the government regulations which prevent him from doing so. It is beyond me why In-Law unit is illegal in SF. The city is expensive, poor people are clearly willing to stay in these illegal units which is a better option than staying in a car. What exactly is government's problem ? My making the in-law unit illegal government has actually deprived the poor people of any legitimate consumer rights they could have. Government has reduced competition between the in-law unit owners and as a result increased prices and left the poor people susceptible to all sort of oppression. The problem with poor people is most often they are able to see the first order causes but not beyond that. Igne was not stupid to blame the Landlord for her situation, but she was merely ignorant of the fact that it is government that forced him to take such steps. Her sense of entitlement though it totally misplaced.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  The city is expensive, poor people are clearly willing to stay in these illegal units which is a better option than staying in a car. What exactly is government's problem ? I am pretty anti-regulation as such things go, but one plausible reason: Such "close quarters" tenancy is bound in the aggregate of a big city to lead to a large number of he-said, she-said disputes of the sort that are nearly impossible for the city to resolve or regulate in a just way. I say you're using more than the agreed share of electricity, so I'm evicting you immediately. You say my car is blocking your access to the unit through the garage and want to sue me for breach of contract. Yes, the tenant and landlord could, in a regulation-free Utopia, negotiate a specific binding agreement that could cover all contingencies, but again, those will be very expensive and time consuming to litigate. The city agrees to enforce rental agreements that fall within certain parameters, and one way those parameters are set is by looking at what kinds of disputes they're likely to produce and which the city is actually capable of adjudicating.
  - SilasX 13y ago
    Wait, the possibility of hard-to-resolve domestic disputes justifies banning that arrangement? Why not go after, say, roommates? Or marriage!
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
The empathy deprived Randian hordes that flock to these stories on HN to display their superiority over those less well off than them make me physically ill.
- vitalus 13y ago
  Totally agree. This entire situation is quite a shame for all involved - it's a dreadful problem without a good resolution.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  What empathy is one supposed to have for this person? She lived in their house, refused to pay rent, filled it with trash and feces, started fights with neighbors and refused any help. What empathy are you expecting people to have at that point?
- johngalt 13y ago
  We have piles of empathy. For the property owner.
- brc 13y ago
  I'm sure plenty of people, including myself, have sympathy for everyone involved, including the tenant, landlord and social workers. I don't have any sympathy for the lawyers who got to profit from other peoples suffering. HN is a place devoted to people interested in technology, slanted towards startups. Startups absolutely require the concept of private property and the ability to determine the use of that property. The makeup of the majority of visitors determines the point of view taken on stories like this. The thing at fault here is rent-control laws. They are insanity and lead to perverse outcomes, including housing shortages, high prices, sub-standard housing and cases like this one where someone is allowed to make other peoples lives a misery because they somehow became part of a protected class - a privelege denied to just about everyone commenting here.
Mz 13y ago
I really hate articles like this. Excerpt: A look inside her Volvo is enough to curdle a stomach of steel: trash bags are piled high in the back seat, open packages of food topple into a litter box full of cat feces, door-sides are crammed full of half-smoked Pall Malls and prescription painkillers. I am homeless. I do not live that way. Not everyone who is homeless chooses to live in filth. Plus, earlier in the article, it talks about how she did "odd jobs" to support herself in Europe and lists "delivered flowers to prostitutes" as one of the odd jobs. Seriously? They could have just said "delivered flowers." Whom she delivered them to seems like gratuitous "color" for this story, just something salacious to say that has nothing to do with this issue at all. I was evicted. I lived in fear of eviction for 18 months. I have a serious medical issue and I did stuff like remove carpeting without my landlord's permission. I knew it was coming. I was willing to accept the consequences as the lesser evil compared to what my medical condition is supposed to do to me. The real issue common to both my situation and Inge's is that America has some real issues with housing stock, not just illegal in-law units in San Francisco, but all kinds of issues. This article is highly unlikely to get people to talk about that issue and highly unlikely to get anything done about that issue. That is not something either landlords or tenants control. I was not impressed the lame management of my apartment whose incompetence promoted mold growth in my apartment but, honestly, I would have evicted me too for the things I did. But I also had compelling reasons for what I did. Blaming landlords and tenants and pitting them against each other does absolutely nothing to improve a situation like this. If anything, it makes the problem more intractable. We need to figure out what does work to foster an environment where affordable, decent housing can exist without it being artificially rent controlled and nonsense like that. The need for rent control tells you there is something very wrong with the policies, laws, and so forth. There is a climate we are trying to fight against. And rather than change that climate, we just vilify people who have no real control over it. Sigh.
- eshvk 13y ago
  I am sorry to hear you feel like that. To offer a counter perspective: I found the article to be unusually well-balanced. It was sympathetic to both her and the landlord. Also, I don't know if the author's detailed description (probably of artistic intent) of one homeless person's life impugns on the reputation of all people who are down on their luck and temporarily homeless. I feel like you are conflating your personal experience with hers. You may very well be morally justified in actions you have taken in your life but it is not clear to me how an article on her is an attack on you or any action you took (say remove carpets) is roughly equivalent to hers (make threats to burn down a building).
anateus 13y ago
Have a look at this infographic from dangrover posted here a couple months ago: http://dangrover.github.io/sf-ellis-evictions/ http://dangrover.github.io/sf-ellis-evictions/ Note that both Ellis Act and other kinds of evictions seem to be disproportionately lower than what the median house prices would lead one to expect. I'm not making an argument in favor of the evictions. But articles like these and recent activism imply that this is a worrying new trend rather than a slow return to previous levels.
yeukhon 13y ago
While everyone focuses on the main problem, I'd say the moral of the story here for home buyers is to avoid buying any problematic homes. When my parents recently purchased a new home they made it damn sure the home has no existing warrants/tickets/legal issue to handle and they ensure no one lives in the house. They visited several homes before they could settle one that was nice, cheap and problem-free. Sometimes it's better to take less risk than having to scratch your hair for years.
- ghaff 13y ago
  I had a friend who bought a house with an elderly renter and she ended up going through months of running around to find her a new place to live. I imagine that some locales make relocating an existing renter easier or harder but it can clearly be a real nightmare. Obviously it's not pleasant for the elderly renter wither but I'm not sure I see the reasonable alternative.
TechNewb 13y ago
In an SF rent control unit, if the tenant signs a 1 year lease, are they able to decide if they stay or not after the 1 year initial lease term is over?
- aetherson 13y ago
  Yes, unless their landlord is able to evict them for whatever reason. (And, to be clear, all or essentially all rental units in SF are subject to rent control).
  - spiralpolitik 13y ago
    Here are the major exemptions to Rent Control in SF: 1. You live in a building constructed after June of 1979. 2. You live in subsidized housing, such as HUD housing projects. 3. You live in a dormitory, monastery, nunnery, etc. 4. You live in a residential hotel and have less than 28 days of continuous tenancy. So most of the new developments in the last 30 years aren't covered by RC.
    - aetherson 13y ago
      I hadn't realized the post-1979 thing! Sorry for the misinformation above. I guess that every place I ever considered renting in SF was an older building.
- ev-dev-dev 13y ago
  You automatically go month to month.
batbomb 13y ago
The building cited as an SRO is the Hugo Hotel. It's vacant, and not even in the tenderloin.
Beliavsky 13y ago
Unproductive people can be unproductive anywhere, and it does not make sense for them to take up precious space in places like San Francisco or New York City. They should move to cheaper areas.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
I just don't get how you can defend this tenant at all. She was constantly unpleasant, didn't pay rent, didn't even bother trying until the last possible second at which point it was "well what options do I have?" It's as if she believed she deserved to live in a house she didn't own for the same price in perpetuity. How does this belief make any sense and why should people sympathize with it? The idea that the owner had to pay his tenant 14k to get her out while she was refusing to pay rent and didn't leave anyway is absolutely maddening. These laws need to change.
- jonknee 13y ago
  It wasn't until she was aware the owner was trying to evict her that she stopped paying rent. Why would anyone continue to pay rent in that case? > Over the years, Inge’s rent had gradually increased from $480 to $560 per month; in late 2012, in the midst of the permit debacle, she decided to stop paying rent altogether. Withrington says he “couldn’t do a damn thing about it,” since he was renting an illegal unit. Sounds pretty smart to me.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    >Sounds pretty smart to me. Sure. Sometimes it's pretty smart to screw other people over. I guess it just depends on what kind of person you are.
    - jonknee 13y ago
      Are you referring to the person who bought a property knowing about an illegal rental unit and ultimately took their money for years until it was opportune to kick out the nearly destitute leasee?
      - chaostheory 13y ago
        1. The Bay Area as a whole has pretty good public transit. 2. There are plenty of cheap single room rentals outside of SF. 3. She wasn't living on public property. It's private.
Glyptodon 13y ago
So why can't she just drive to somewhere where rent is cheaper?
prawn 13y ago
“It was cash only, and everything was shady and under-the-table." You mean, like an illegal in-law unit?
j10t 13y ago
The intersection of Mission & 16th Street is price-equivalent to Greenwich Ave & Jane Street. Assuming price per square foot is a proxy for the ratio of demand to supply, these are the most coveted locations to live in the world. Should a retired taxi driver be able to afford such a location? Should we be upset that she cannot?
- SilasX 13y ago
  Indeed. From the fact that we should care for the poor, it simply doesn't follow that we should give them luxury goods. We'd scoff at someone who suggested giving the poor vouchers for caviar. But do the same thing with housing instead of food, and ...
joeevans1000 13y ago
A nice fair seeming but utterly slanted portrayal of the gentrification process. Real life is eccentric. All the polished startups and gadgets in the world won't permanently pave over the fact that focusing on the needy as disheveled and ratty is as insidious as an author can be. This story tells the tale of a capitalist's hassles. It doesn't go any deeper, into the real issues.
johnvschmitt 13y ago
People just don't understand inflation/math: "...$1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002." Wow! Sounds huge right? Well, 12 years to double? That means it's a ~6% yearly increase. That's LOWER than medial bills, college education, & almost exactly what you'd get from any stock index (S&P 500) for that time period.
- jonknee 13y ago
  If you don't count the rent during that time... It housed her illegal apartment as well as two other families. Her $500 rent alone would be $72,000. I'm sure the other units (non rent-control) were fetching quite a bit more.
  - johnvschmitt 13y ago
    Correct! But, more fun math: Stocks don't have maintenance costs like houses/rental units. The property tax alone per year on a ~$500k place is ~$8k. (You'd need to get $700/month in rent JUST to cover property tax.) (The next buyer, at 1.4M valuation, would need to charge ~$2k/month JUST to cover the prop tax, nothing else!) Add in ~$2k/year in regular maintenance, + ~$30k of maintenance every ~5-10 years (roofs, flooring, bathroom fixtures, appliances all die someday), and renting not so profitable. Reliable capital appreciation is the bigger, pure profit here.
- rohin 13y ago
  You made a mistake in your calculation because you ignored leverage. Most people buy a house using some combination of equity and debt (usually 20% / 80%). You need to calculate the return based on the equity invested. Assuming they paid 20% down that's $125K. The house appreciated $773K over the initial purchase price. That's a 6x return on equity, not a 2x. But thanks for the lecture about how other people don't understand inflation / math.
  - johnvschmitt 13y ago
    You are correct, of course. My point was more about how journalists too often spout "PRICES DOUBLED!" to get attention like blood in the water, including here. And, in too many cases, it's over a time period that's 10+ years, so it's not really doubling, but 6%/year. And, yes, leverage can profit, but it can bite hard too. Plenty of people bought at $500k with $100k down, then saw the value drop to $300k, meaning they lost 200+100 = $300k if they had to sell. All fun math, with, yes, GROSS simplifications here.
AJ72 13y ago
Great article and reinforces just how much work we need to do to help our communities
raldi 13y ago
How come they never write articles like this profiling the 22-year-old who's just starting out in the world and is desperatly trying to make ends meet while paying market rate for a tiny apartment? Or three of them packed in a walkup one-bedroom and paying double the rent of their downstairs neighbor who's of much greater means but had the good fortune of being born a few years earlier? Or the young artist who had to leave SF altogether because they couldn't afford to pay market rate and didn't have enough San Francisco seniority to qualify for a hefty rent-control subsidy?
greenrice 13y ago
Ok, San Francisco, it's time to bite the bullet and build (much) more housing. This is getting ridiculous.
desuma 13y ago
The article is a Rorschach test for housing policy. Do you see yourself as the vulnerable elderly tenant, forced to move and abandon your longtime existence? Or the kindly landlord, trapped between two contradictory legal regimes? I live in San Francisco, and own a 2-unit building in the heart of the tech shuttle stops near Dolores Park. I had rented in the city for years before that. I couldn't have bought my place (almost unlivably dilapidated in the 2009 downturn) without a job at Google and help from my college friend who agreed to rent one of the apartments, despite the hot tub installed in the living room by the previous owner. Sadly, she's moving out this summer. Almost all of my friends rent, and very few of them work in tech. My partner is an artist, and his contribution to SF culture is an irreplaceable part of what makes SF great, but it's not remotely competitive financially with tech. I've personally benefitted from the city and its business and social cultures. I have a duty to pay it back. But I won't rent the vacant apartment, because renting to someone is a commitment more permanent than marriage. My house - not accounting for the insane appreciation - is more than 50% of my net assets. It'd be irresponsible. There has to be some protection for the cultural core of San Francisco, given its status as a boom-bust town. Rent stabilization, a la NYC. A maximum-allowable rent increase, tied to inflation. But there also needs to be a lot more housing. Rent control is a populist disaster that sounds great - remember "The rent is too damn high!"? - but actually accomplishes the reverse of its stated intent. The current political paralysis is a nightmare, and a fascinating window onto the class politics that our modern scaled economy is creating.
- 100k 13y ago
  Granted it is very hard to evict a rent-controlled tenant in San Francisco, so I can understand your trepidation, but San Francisco rent control already works pretty much like your prescription: there is an annual allowed rent increase, and rents reset when the tenant moves out. In other words, this is "soft" rent control as opposed to "hard" rent control where prices are fixed, essentially forever. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.9.1.99 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.9.1.99
  - desuma 13y ago
    The linked article is great reading, thanks! It's true that landlords can set the price of a vacant unit arbitrarily, unlike say NYC's rent stabilization, which limits increases even between tenants. However, I'd argue SF rent control isn't very "soft" by the article's definition - there's no hardship or rate of return provisions for the landlord, and during a tenant's stay, the allowable increases are negligible (less than CPI/inflation and certainly much less than market rate you'd expect on an investment with similar risk). Because a landlord has to evaluate a potential tenant for a lifetime lease, a lot of the same negative dynamics apply during the rental transaction. The landlord is trying to reduce their uncertainty - finding a tenant who will not only pay the greatest possible rent, but also stay for the shortest possible time. As market prices rise, tenants of rent-controlled units are highly incentivized to stay in their current home, because a new lease would be so much more expensive. This further reduces the available supply. It gets even worse when you consider the variety of protected classes SF rental law has created. Elderly and disabled tenants cannot be evicted without special cause, even if they've stopped paying rent years ago. The intent of the law is good: to protect vulnerable populations who would suffer greatly if they were evicted. But in effect, it only protects vulnerable tenants who already have a lease. Every other member of that class will find it much harder to find housing, because their tenancy comes with strings attached. There are anti-discrimination provisions in housing law, but in a competitive market, those are incredibly difficult to enforce.
epx 13y ago
She jumped from an 80-floor building and pretended she was flying for 79 floors.
guelo 13y ago
The comments here are a good example of how the predominantly white male upper class tech population that is moving in is changing SF's culture from a unique semi-socialist one to the same capitalist-uberalles culture of upper class white males everywhere. It's the latest colonization.
zaroth 13y ago
You would think a property owner would have an implicit right to "go out of business" when a lease term expires. Every lease I've ever signed had a clause that at the end of the least it can only be renewed, with notice, if BOTH parties agree. As a renter, I would never presume to be able to stay in a unit past the end of the lease without the landlord's permission. How was this basic right of property ownership was ever subverted? It sounds a bit like 'involuntary servitude' (13th amendment) to be forced to rent your property to someone after the lawful terms of your agreement to rent it have expired.
mathattack 13y ago
Within a few weeks of the eviction, the landlord put the property on the market for $1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002. Is this so crazy and outrageous? Someone buys a property, and 12 years later they want to sell it? Yes, it's appreciated. Has it appreciated that much more than the S&P 500, given the liquidity issues and upkeep? I feel bad for the tenant, and our safety net is imperfect, but "I'm renting here now" shouldn't mean "I'm renting here forever at below market rates." One reason housing rates are so high is that people don't want to invest in housing infrastructure if they can't get their money back.
davidf18 13y ago
The real issue is a systems issue caused by an artificially induced shortage of housing caused by "rent seeking" (politics that induce artificial shortages) through zoning ordinances. While convenient and emotionally satisfying to fingerpoint and blame SV higher incomes for the increased cost of housing, the real cause is the zoning ordinances which help wealthy landowners increase their income not through creativity and wealth creation but through politics. Remove the "rent seeking" political constraints on an efficient housing market and you will go along way towards fixing the problem of people getting displaced by higher rents.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  You can change the rate, but with an expanding planet and continuing flight to cities there's no end in sight. So ultimately, old people quit being able to afford where they live. It's not going to change soon, but as you observe you may be able to change the rate at which it occurs.

227 points by shmeedogg 13y ago

> Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage. What the hell? She has to threaten and insult people around her and was living in an illegal building, yet has the perfect option open to her. EDIT: And before anybody says anything about her giving up her life - by the sound of the article, her life consisted of insulting and fighting with all her neighbors. Logically if she had friends, she wouldn't be living in her car - her friends would have helped her out.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

"According to Inge, she pursued some of these options, but was turned off by the no-guarantee nature of the wait-lists, and felt she was entitled to stay where she was." So she voluntarily did not use resources designed to help her out. That lands credibility to landlords story. If I lived on fixed income, I would definitely move out of Bay Area somewhere cheaper.

normloman 13y ago
It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I guess you say "Sorry poor trash, but you gotta be this rich to live here. If you can't cut it, kindly leave the city you've known your whole life, abandon your friends, and get a new job." But that seems cold, doesn't it?
- maxlybbert 13y ago
  > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I've done many things I didn't want to. It's part of being an adult. Then again, nobody makes me eat my vegetables.
  - normloman 13y ago
    You echo a lot of other comments. Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain." That's not a valid argument. Being forced to move sucks, no matter who you are. More importantly, why should the poor in San Francisco move? They were there first. They could afford rent, until us tech people came. Why should we crowd them out? And if we did, is that the kind of city we want? A city where everyone is rich, and the poor and middle class huddle into slums outside the border? Here's how that will turn out: When the rich city makes too much garbage, they will dump it in the middle of poor city. When the state creates funds for new infrastructure project, you can bet they will all go to rich city. When big companies relocate, they will build their luxurious campus in rich city. Sorry, no jobs for poor city. But don't worry, rich city still needs street sweepers and baristas. Huddling the poor in a small area just makes them an easier target for oppression.
    - maxlybbert 13y ago
      > Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain." I'm sorry. That's not my argument in any way. For one, I support free speech enough that I won't say people have no right to complain. Personally, I think anybody who constantly streams complaints is probably immature and not somebody I want to associate with, but they can complain all they want; I'll simply tune them out. Looking at the particular case of this lady: * she is currently homeless, and apparently does not like that; * she used to antagonize her former landlord; * her former landlord tried to help her find a new place, but she declined the help; * she refuses to work with organizations that exist to help people like her, she apparently chafes at their rules and regulations; * she has the option of moving to Germany free of charge, but refuses to do so. But my statement that "doing things you don't like is part of being an adult" is true. Many college students are appalled when they discover that the life isn't as easy as they were led to believe. I'm sure I was one of them; it's been a while and my memory is foggy. But complaining that things aren't always hunky dory is silly. At some point you have to make the best with what you have. And saying "but I don't want to move away from my friends" or "but why do I have to pay market rates for a place to live?" simply comes off as immature.
- hnal943 13y ago
  It's not about her being poor so much as uncivil. When you stop paying your rent and you've destroyed the value of the building you live in and fight with the neighbors, it makes it very hard for anyone to want to help you. If she had been cooperative, I don't think this would have even been a story.
- CodeMage 13y ago
  There might be many cases of rich vs. poor in San Franscisco and I'm not disputing that your arguments might be perfectly suited to those. However, if the case presented in this article is the best the author(s) could find, then we're seeing an example of sloppy journalism. Here's why: "I could send you transcripts of a phone message where she said she will burn the house down if we didn't fix the leaking roof. Or show you the rent increase letter that was returned to me unopened and defaced with 'Fuck You' written on it. We tried to help her." Basically, you purchase a property from someone else and it comes with a tenant. You try to co-exist with that tenant and she behaves in a manner that is unreasonably hostile. Are we really supposed to be sympathetic? Is this really supposed to make us feel for the plight of people being evicted in San Francisco?
- yesiamyourdad 13y ago
  From the sound of the article she has no family and whatever friends she has don't like her enough to let her live with them. It's a simple thing: she and her prior landlord were breaking the law. Either SF has to change their zoning laws or she had to comply. Hard to see the property owner as the bad guy. After years of legal action and dealing with someone who honestly sounds like an exceedingly difficult personality, I'd want to sell the house too.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  I make six figures and I couldn't afford to live in SF anymore, so I relocated to the east bay. This is entirely reasonable...
- raldi 13y ago
  > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. You're right. But that's life. For example, I had to pack up and move 8 times in the last 14 years, and it sucked every time. But I dealt with it. Having to move merely once every several decades is a comparative luxury.
- eqdw 13y ago
  > It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there? I lost my job in Canada, and it was prohibitively difficult to find a software job I could sustain myself on in my home city, so I packed up and moved. I moved out of the city I had lived in my whole life. I left my friends and family and landed, alone, in SF. Because the economic landscape forced me to move. I understand what you are trying to say, but I'm having trouble sympathizing. And, given how many H1Bs get given out every year, I suspect I'm not the only one here who feels that way
- null_ptr 13y ago
  That's what the majority of people in this thread seem to say, and this lack of empathy is disheartening. There's some dick a few comments up that said people uproot themselves all the time, "he did it when he was 18 and left for college". Unbelievable. It's sad to slowly see where all the techie-hate comes from, the entitlement and lack of basic empathy demonstrated in this thread is eye-opening.
Eduardo3rd 13y ago
Even worse- "Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage." She has a golden ticket to a vast array of social services, but she's tied to a community in one of the most expensive cities in the USA.

cperciva 13y ago

Inge has an amalgam of health issues, the most serious of which is her high glucose levels. She has to take daily insulin shots, which must be chilled on ice. That might have been good advice 30 years ago, but it certainly isn't now. Modern insulin preparations should be kept at room temperature while in use for up to 30 days -- keeping it refrigerated while in use is contraindicated due to the potential for thermal cycling to result in inaccurate dosing -- and keeping insulin "on ice" is never recommended due to the risk of the insulin being damaged by freezing.

ominous_prime 13y ago
Might still be better than the large temp fluctuation of a car interior though.
- cperciva 13y ago
  Maybe, but I doubt it. If she were in Texas, sure, but not in San Francisco.
eqdw 13y ago
> That might have been good advice 30 years ago, but it certainly isn't now. Modern insulin preparations should be kept at room temperature while in use for up to 30 days -- keeping it refrigerated while in use is contraindicated due to the potential for thermal cycling to result in inaccurate dosing -- and keeping insulin "on ice" is never recommended due to the risk of the insulin being damaged by freezing. Do you have a citation for this? I'd be interested in researching more on this subject. My girlfriend tells me she needs to keep her insulin pens in the fridge. We've also noticed that her blood glucose will fluctuate for strange and mysterious reasons. Your comment wrt thermal cycling rings true, and I'm wondering if the temperature change from constantly going from fridge (~5C) to her purse (~20C) and back, several times a day, might be causing this
- cperciva 13y ago
  Do you have a citation for this? Every insulin pen "user guide" I've seen says "store unopened cartridges in a refrigerator; keep your pen at room temperature". My girlfriend tells me she needs to keep her insulin pens in the fridge. We've also noticed that her blood glucose will fluctuate for strange and mysterious reasons. Your comment wrt thermal cycling rings true, and I'm wondering if the temperature change from constantly going from fridge (~5C) to her purse (~20C) and back, several times a day, might be causing this The biggest problem with thermal cycling is that insulin pen cartridges, unlike insulin vials, aren't perfectly sealed -- the rubber stopper needs to be able to slide. As a result, when a cartridge is cooled and the liquid contracts, it will tend to draw a small amount of air into the cartridge. This will result in bubbles forming, and obviously injecting a bubble of air will be less effective than injecting insulin. In young adults this is a nuisance more than anything else, since we're likely to notice bubbles, but in children (who don't understand the implications) or the elderly (who are less likely to notice this due to visual impairment) it can be a serious problem. Assuming your girlfriend falls into the "young adult" age range, it's unlikely that her blood glucose fluctuations are caused by this; assuming you've ruled out monthly and diurnal patterns from endocrine causes, I'd look at diet -- protein in particular, since amino acid catabolism can dump glucose into your bloodstream at unexpected times.

kohanz 13y ago

Call me cold, but after reading this I come away with almost no sympathy for the evicted senior citizen. She comes across as very entitled.

makaveli8 13y ago
I feel exactly the same. She even got a $14k resettlement fee! If she didn't want to be evicted out into the cold she should have been a little warmer to her landlord and neighbors instead of being such a nuisance.
Crito 13y ago
I have little sympathy for her, or the new owners (who failed to report the illegal situation to the city immediately after becoming owners of the property). My main take-away from all of this is that being evicted in SF is quite the feat, right up there with climbing Mount Everest or swimming the English channel. We should commend her for accomplishing something so difficult, despite all the people who told her it could not be done (read: tried to help her).
- iopq 13y ago
  Why, because they were nice enough to still let her stay there? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's illegal so they should kick her out immediately.
  - Crito 13y ago
    It was illegal, and they made the decision to do it. Anything that follows that gets little sympathy from me; I believe that people should own the consequences of their actions in situations like that. Your illegal tenant refuses to pay you rent, leaving you with no legal recourse? Cry me a river. And make no bones about it, it wasn't a sense of charity that made them decide to let her stay. They were charging her rent (and in fact, attempted to raise it at least once).
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  well, actually not really. Even if you were a perfect tenant, there's nothing stopping you from getting evicted short of human kindness.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

GuiA 13y ago
"Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage. But for 50 years, she has built a life for herself in San Francisco, and that’s something she doesn’t want to give up."
- jedanbik 13y ago
  But could she get on the plane?
  - kansface 13y ago
    I willing to bet the landlord would have paid for uber and the ticket.

steven777400 13y ago

We don't have a strong enough social welfare net (or enough resources there-in) to care for folks that need care; but, we're not comfortable letting them starve on the streets either. The result? Essentially innocent people, like the property owner, get "stuck" with "it's your problem now" where various agencies give contradictory mandates, backed with fines. How was property owner supposed to respond when told he must get rid of the illegal dwelling, but also told he can't evict the tenant? I mostly sympathize with the property owner here. As a tenant, especially a tenant in an illegal or undocumented dwelling, you have to expect that a day of reckoning will come. Even property owners can be "evicted" (eminent domain), much less a property renter.

wmf 13y ago
How was property owner supposed to respond when told he must get rid of the illegal dwelling, but also told he can't evict the tenant? Clearly he should have moved out of the house and let her live there.
- justizin 13y ago
  Someone told him this would happen before he bought the property.
jack-r-abbit 13y ago
My thoughts too. As soon as the DBI saw that the unit was illegal, I would have assumed the occupants would have been removed almost immediately. It should not have taken that long for the owner to be able to do what he was legally required to do. But instead he was legally prevented from doing what he was legally required to do. Makes no sense.
- flomo 13y ago
  San Francisco almost always looks the other way regarding these 'illegal' units. Many of them are in plain sight and the rent/tenancy control laws still apply. I would guess the unit must have been a serious health/safety hazard for them to do anything.

jseliger 13y ago

Nonetheless, it’s a good time to be a Bornstein in San Francisco: in the past year alone, Ellis Act evictions have risen 170%; since 1997, there have been 3,811, and that number is constantly rising. The obvious solution to rapidly rising prices is to increase supply, as described here (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) or here (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis...). I've posted both links before but we keep seeing stories like these and the solutions remain the same. The technology necessary to increase housing supply (steel frames, elevators) is a century old (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valley_housing_boom_there_s_no_such_thing.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valle...) and well-understood. The problem is almost entirely political.

w1ntermute 13y ago
It's amazing how so many people refuse to accept that out-of-control housing prices are due to artificial scarcity, and that the solution is deregulation, rather than even more idiotic rent control and eviction regulations. David Campos is now trying to enact legislation to penalize Ellis Act evictions. More than two decades after the USSR collapsed, and people are still clinging to socialist ideologies.
- bicknergseng 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure the ordinances against housing construction in SF have very little to do with socialism or the USSR...
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    The zoning laws are good old NIMBYism. But the rent control? That's good ol' socialism.
    - wutbrodo 13y ago
      Oh for god's sake, just because you don't understand what the word means doesn't mean you can use socialism for any government action in the economy. Rent control isn't stupid because it's redistributive or whatever you think "socialist" means, it's stupid because it arbitrarily redistributes from long-standing tenants (rich, middle-class or poor) to those who move more often (rich, middle-class, or poor), while introducing a massive amount of uncertainty and overhead for landlords and reducing the quality and quantity of housing stock. A little understanding of economics goes a long way; the fact that rent control is distorting the price mechanism per se is not the reason that it's retarded (by that logic, Pigovian taxes would be just as disastrous as rent control).

pyrrhotech 13y ago

Another whine story. I do feel sorry for those people that legitimately deserve it. You know, women in the middle east who are beaten or stoned to death for not wearing berkas, or orphans in Africa dealing with genocidal warlords. But this lady could live perfectly fine on her social security if she would move to somewhere she could afford. Living in San Francisco is something a whole lot of people want to do. That's why it's so damn expensive. I want to do it too, but I don't want to pay that price. That's ok, you shouldn't get everything you want. It's a privilege to live there, not a right.

jedmeyers 13y ago
It looks like the Entitled do not consider it to be a privilege. To them once you rented a place somewhere for x years, you are entitled to live at that place indefinitely.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  we only have to look to politicians to assign the blame, in the East its called rent control, whats its called in SF? It is like any government handout, except here in the case of money they merely take your rights away to your property.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    Blaming this on politicians is lazy and narrowsighted. Compromise is a two way street: Landowners get zoning rules that prevent them from competing with highrise apartment buildings, turning desirable regions into pressure-cookers that drive rents and property values sky-high. Tenants get rent control that shields them from the from the worst of the landowner-cartel's machinations. Not as well as they were promised at voting time, but they don't typically invest as much in local politics, so that's to be expected. The real losers are the people who would move into a neighborhood if they could. They don't get any representation in the local government. That's either a feature or a bug, depending on which side of the fence you're on :)
fishtoaster 13y ago

ww520 13y ago

What a hellish process to go through eviction. No wonder the rental housing market is so out of whack in SF. Becoming a landlord is a major headache.

Crito 13y ago

> When the current owners, the Withrington brothers, purchased the property in 2002, Inge came with it. > In San Francisco, a landlord can’t evict a current tenant just because they are selling or buying the property; by the time the unit was purchased, Inge had already been living there for ten years, and she had no intention to go anywhere. Since Inge's unit was illegal, her landlord had even fewer options in the way of legal recourse. If the new owners were willing to come clean to the city about the illegal unit, then I don't see what the issue would have been. Being the new owners, surely they could not be held responsible for the crime that was committed by the old owner, right? It seems to me that the only reason why their hands were bound is because they decided to not notify the city immediately after the property became theirs.

mullingitover 13y ago
> It seems to me that the only reason why their hands were bound is because they decided to not notify the city immediately after the property became theirs. Why would they? They'd immediately throw themselves into the situation where they can't legally evict her, and are fined for failing to evict her. It's not too crazy (or abnormal, given that 10% of SF's housing is illegal) that they'd decide to kick that can down the road for a while.

ominous_prime 13y ago

After seeing some eviction processes myself, I'm not sure what more one can do for someone like this. I've seen a few evictions where the occupants seem to completely deny what's happening, refuse to help themselves, and refuse outside assistance. On top of the denial, this woman was actively antagonistic, which made things all that much harder. Yes, the current housing situation in SF is bad, but this is a failure of the social services we provide. The article seems to take issue with the landlord, but what would any of us do in a similar situation, with an illegal and toxic tenant in our house?

dragontamer 13y ago
The article is very carefully written, such that the reader can take issue with whatever fits their own bias. Its a very well done article in general, and provides ammo for both sides to sling each other with. IMO, the intelligent reader will see the story for what it is. A tragedy... and a realization on what happens when tenants don't like being evicted.

ddoolin 13y ago

Life's already a bitch, why add to it by being one yourself...

tn13 13y ago

Government regulations are the villain here. Is it legal or stay in a car with cat litter around but living in a room with height less that 7' is illegal ? In the name of protecting tenant rights government has made regulations that deeply hurt the land owners and reduce their incentives to create housing opportunities for poor. "In San Francisco, a landlord can’t evict a current tenant just because they are selling or buying the property; by the time the unit was purchased. " Burning down the house in that case sounds like a lucrative offer.

pdeuchler 13y ago

> First came the arbitration hearing, where Inge’s lawyer and the landlord’s lawyers tried to strike a deal to avoid any type of elongated legal dispute. This ended somewhat peacefully: Withrington agreed to pay Inge a settlement of $14,000 in resettlement fees, and she signed a contract agreeing to vacate the property within 60 days. The first eviction notice was issued. Yet she refused to do so and is now homeless, with a fraction of $14k to her name. It sounds like the landlords went above and beyond, I would kill to have landlords like that, and yet because this woman was her own worst enemy[0] she ends up on the street. Barring mental illness (which is quite possible) I can't see this being anything else but a conscious choice on her part to end up on the street. Furthermore, it seems like this woman was actively taking away resources from those who are in more dire situations[1]. Maybe we should be more concerned that the multiple social workers (and the post author) didn't consider that the woman might have needed mental help? [0] “I personally went out and found stuff -- my own mother personally went out and found stuff. We put Inge in touch with multiple social workers and housing agencies. The problem is that a lot of these places come and check where you’re living and only take you in if you meet their standards. Inge is a hoarder, a smoker, and has a cat. The smell in her unit was absolutely…just...unbelievable. That didn’t work out well for her.” [1]“It took three truck loads to get her stuff out,” recalls Withrington. “And the help of a whole team of social workers.”

tn13 13y ago

The reality is that none of us deserve anything. The so called social welfare is nothing but a government's excuse to reduce our liberties. If there is any reason why poor can not afford housing in SF then it is not the fault of the landlord who is trying to make maximum money but the government regulations which prevent him from doing so. It is beyond me why In-Law unit is illegal in SF. The city is expensive, poor people are clearly willing to stay in these illegal units which is a better option than staying in a car. What exactly is government's problem ? My making the in-law unit illegal government has actually deprived the poor people of any legitimate consumer rights they could have. Government has reduced competition between the in-law unit owners and as a result increased prices and left the poor people susceptible to all sort of oppression. The problem with poor people is most often they are able to see the first order causes but not beyond that. Igne was not stupid to blame the Landlord for her situation, but she was merely ignorant of the fact that it is government that forced him to take such steps. Her sense of entitlement though it totally misplaced.

twoodfin 13y ago
The city is expensive, poor people are clearly willing to stay in these illegal units which is a better option than staying in a car. What exactly is government's problem ? I am pretty anti-regulation as such things go, but one plausible reason: Such "close quarters" tenancy is bound in the aggregate of a big city to lead to a large number of he-said, she-said disputes of the sort that are nearly impossible for the city to resolve or regulate in a just way. I say you're using more than the agreed share of electricity, so I'm evicting you immediately. You say my car is blocking your access to the unit through the garage and want to sue me for breach of contract. Yes, the tenant and landlord could, in a regulation-free Utopia, negotiate a specific binding agreement that could cover all contingencies, but again, those will be very expensive and time consuming to litigate. The city agrees to enforce rental agreements that fall within certain parameters, and one way those parameters are set is by looking at what kinds of disputes they're likely to produce and which the city is actually capable of adjudicating.
- SilasX 13y ago
  Wait, the possibility of hard-to-resolve domestic disputes justifies banning that arrangement? Why not go after, say, roommates? Or marriage!

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

The empathy deprived Randian hordes that flock to these stories on HN to display their superiority over those less well off than them make me physically ill.

vitalus 13y ago
Totally agree. This entire situation is quite a shame for all involved - it's a dreadful problem without a good resolution.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
What empathy is one supposed to have for this person? She lived in their house, refused to pay rent, filled it with trash and feces, started fights with neighbors and refused any help. What empathy are you expecting people to have at that point?
johngalt 13y ago
We have piles of empathy. For the property owner.
brc 13y ago
I'm sure plenty of people, including myself, have sympathy for everyone involved, including the tenant, landlord and social workers. I don't have any sympathy for the lawyers who got to profit from other peoples suffering. HN is a place devoted to people interested in technology, slanted towards startups. Startups absolutely require the concept of private property and the ability to determine the use of that property. The makeup of the majority of visitors determines the point of view taken on stories like this. The thing at fault here is rent-control laws. They are insanity and lead to perverse outcomes, including housing shortages, high prices, sub-standard housing and cases like this one where someone is allowed to make other peoples lives a misery because they somehow became part of a protected class - a privelege denied to just about everyone commenting here.

Mz 13y ago

I really hate articles like this. Excerpt: A look inside her Volvo is enough to curdle a stomach of steel: trash bags are piled high in the back seat, open packages of food topple into a litter box full of cat feces, door-sides are crammed full of half-smoked Pall Malls and prescription painkillers. I am homeless. I do not live that way. Not everyone who is homeless chooses to live in filth. Plus, earlier in the article, it talks about how she did "odd jobs" to support herself in Europe and lists "delivered flowers to prostitutes" as one of the odd jobs. Seriously? They could have just said "delivered flowers." Whom she delivered them to seems like gratuitous "color" for this story, just something salacious to say that has nothing to do with this issue at all. I was evicted. I lived in fear of eviction for 18 months. I have a serious medical issue and I did stuff like remove carpeting without my landlord's permission. I knew it was coming. I was willing to accept the consequences as the lesser evil compared to what my medical condition is supposed to do to me. The real issue common to both my situation and Inge's is that America has some real issues with housing stock, not just illegal in-law units in San Francisco, but all kinds of issues. This article is highly unlikely to get people to talk about that issue and highly unlikely to get anything done about that issue. That is not something either landlords or tenants control. I was not impressed the lame management of my apartment whose incompetence promoted mold growth in my apartment but, honestly, I would have evicted me too for the things I did. But I also had compelling reasons for what I did. Blaming landlords and tenants and pitting them against each other does absolutely nothing to improve a situation like this. If anything, it makes the problem more intractable. We need to figure out what does work to foster an environment where affordable, decent housing can exist without it being artificially rent controlled and nonsense like that. The need for rent control tells you there is something very wrong with the policies, laws, and so forth. There is a climate we are trying to fight against. And rather than change that climate, we just vilify people who have no real control over it. Sigh.

eshvk 13y ago
I am sorry to hear you feel like that. To offer a counter perspective: I found the article to be unusually well-balanced. It was sympathetic to both her and the landlord. Also, I don't know if the author's detailed description (probably of artistic intent) of one homeless person's life impugns on the reputation of all people who are down on their luck and temporarily homeless. I feel like you are conflating your personal experience with hers. You may very well be morally justified in actions you have taken in your life but it is not clear to me how an article on her is an attack on you or any action you took (say remove carpets) is roughly equivalent to hers (make threats to burn down a building).

anateus 13y ago

Have a look at this infographic from dangrover posted here a couple months ago: http://dangrover.github.io/sf-ellis-evictions/ http://dangrover.github.io/sf-ellis-evictions/ Note that both Ellis Act and other kinds of evictions seem to be disproportionately lower than what the median house prices would lead one to expect. I'm not making an argument in favor of the evictions. But articles like these and recent activism imply that this is a worrying new trend rather than a slow return to previous levels.

yeukhon 13y ago

While everyone focuses on the main problem, I'd say the moral of the story here for home buyers is to avoid buying any problematic homes. When my parents recently purchased a new home they made it damn sure the home has no existing warrants/tickets/legal issue to handle and they ensure no one lives in the house. They visited several homes before they could settle one that was nice, cheap and problem-free. Sometimes it's better to take less risk than having to scratch your hair for years.

ghaff 13y ago
I had a friend who bought a house with an elderly renter and she ended up going through months of running around to find her a new place to live. I imagine that some locales make relocating an existing renter easier or harder but it can clearly be a real nightmare. Obviously it's not pleasant for the elderly renter wither but I'm not sure I see the reasonable alternative.

TechNewb 13y ago

In an SF rent control unit, if the tenant signs a 1 year lease, are they able to decide if they stay or not after the 1 year initial lease term is over?

aetherson 13y ago
Yes, unless their landlord is able to evict them for whatever reason. (And, to be clear, all or essentially all rental units in SF are subject to rent control).
- spiralpolitik 13y ago
  Here are the major exemptions to Rent Control in SF: 1. You live in a building constructed after June of 1979. 2. You live in subsidized housing, such as HUD housing projects. 3. You live in a dormitory, monastery, nunnery, etc. 4. You live in a residential hotel and have less than 28 days of continuous tenancy. So most of the new developments in the last 30 years aren't covered by RC.
  - aetherson 13y ago
    I hadn't realized the post-1979 thing! Sorry for the misinformation above. I guess that every place I ever considered renting in SF was an older building.
ev-dev-dev 13y ago
You automatically go month to month.

batbomb 13y ago

The building cited as an SRO is the Hugo Hotel. It's vacant, and not even in the tenderloin.

Beliavsky 13y ago

Unproductive people can be unproductive anywhere, and it does not make sense for them to take up precious space in places like San Francisco or New York City. They should move to cheaper areas.

ryguytilidie 13y ago

I just don't get how you can defend this tenant at all. She was constantly unpleasant, didn't pay rent, didn't even bother trying until the last possible second at which point it was "well what options do I have?" It's as if she believed she deserved to live in a house she didn't own for the same price in perpetuity. How does this belief make any sense and why should people sympathize with it? The idea that the owner had to pay his tenant 14k to get her out while she was refusing to pay rent and didn't leave anyway is absolutely maddening. These laws need to change.

jonknee 13y ago
It wasn't until she was aware the owner was trying to evict her that she stopped paying rent. Why would anyone continue to pay rent in that case? > Over the years, Inge’s rent had gradually increased from $480 to $560 per month; in late 2012, in the midst of the permit debacle, she decided to stop paying rent altogether. Withrington says he “couldn’t do a damn thing about it,” since he was renting an illegal unit. Sounds pretty smart to me.
- tsotha 13y ago
  >Sounds pretty smart to me. Sure. Sometimes it's pretty smart to screw other people over. I guess it just depends on what kind of person you are.
  - jonknee 13y ago
    Are you referring to the person who bought a property knowing about an illegal rental unit and ultimately took their money for years until it was opportune to kick out the nearly destitute leasee?
    - chaostheory 13y ago
      1. The Bay Area as a whole has pretty good public transit. 2. There are plenty of cheap single room rentals outside of SF. 3. She wasn't living on public property. It's private.

Glyptodon 13y ago

So why can't she just drive to somewhere where rent is cheaper?

prawn 13y ago

“It was cash only, and everything was shady and under-the-table." You mean, like an illegal in-law unit?

j10t 13y ago

The intersection of Mission & 16th Street is price-equivalent to Greenwich Ave & Jane Street. Assuming price per square foot is a proxy for the ratio of demand to supply, these are the most coveted locations to live in the world. Should a retired taxi driver be able to afford such a location? Should we be upset that she cannot?

SilasX 13y ago
Indeed. From the fact that we should care for the poor, it simply doesn't follow that we should give them luxury goods. We'd scoff at someone who suggested giving the poor vouchers for caviar. But do the same thing with housing instead of food, and ...

joeevans1000 13y ago

A nice fair seeming but utterly slanted portrayal of the gentrification process. Real life is eccentric. All the polished startups and gadgets in the world won't permanently pave over the fact that focusing on the needy as disheveled and ratty is as insidious as an author can be. This story tells the tale of a capitalist's hassles. It doesn't go any deeper, into the real issues.

johnvschmitt 13y ago

People just don't understand inflation/math: "...$1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002." Wow! Sounds huge right? Well, 12 years to double? That means it's a ~6% yearly increase. That's LOWER than medial bills, college education, & almost exactly what you'd get from any stock index (S&P 500) for that time period.

jonknee 13y ago
If you don't count the rent during that time... It housed her illegal apartment as well as two other families. Her $500 rent alone would be $72,000. I'm sure the other units (non rent-control) were fetching quite a bit more.
- johnvschmitt 13y ago
  Correct! But, more fun math: Stocks don't have maintenance costs like houses/rental units. The property tax alone per year on a ~$500k place is ~$8k. (You'd need to get $700/month in rent JUST to cover property tax.) (The next buyer, at 1.4M valuation, would need to charge ~$2k/month JUST to cover the prop tax, nothing else!) Add in ~$2k/year in regular maintenance, + ~$30k of maintenance every ~5-10 years (roofs, flooring, bathroom fixtures, appliances all die someday), and renting not so profitable. Reliable capital appreciation is the bigger, pure profit here.
rohin 13y ago
You made a mistake in your calculation because you ignored leverage. Most people buy a house using some combination of equity and debt (usually 20% / 80%). You need to calculate the return based on the equity invested. Assuming they paid 20% down that's $125K. The house appreciated $773K over the initial purchase price. That's a 6x return on equity, not a 2x. But thanks for the lecture about how other people don't understand inflation / math.
- johnvschmitt 13y ago
  You are correct, of course. My point was more about how journalists too often spout "PRICES DOUBLED!" to get attention like blood in the water, including here. And, in too many cases, it's over a time period that's 10+ years, so it's not really doubling, but 6%/year. And, yes, leverage can profit, but it can bite hard too. Plenty of people bought at $500k with $100k down, then saw the value drop to $300k, meaning they lost 200+100 = $300k if they had to sell. All fun math, with, yes, GROSS simplifications here.

AJ72 13y ago

Great article and reinforces just how much work we need to do to help our communities

raldi 13y ago

How come they never write articles like this profiling the 22-year-old who's just starting out in the world and is desperatly trying to make ends meet while paying market rate for a tiny apartment? Or three of them packed in a walkup one-bedroom and paying double the rent of their downstairs neighbor who's of much greater means but had the good fortune of being born a few years earlier? Or the young artist who had to leave SF altogether because they couldn't afford to pay market rate and didn't have enough San Francisco seniority to qualify for a hefty rent-control subsidy?

greenrice 13y ago

Ok, San Francisco, it's time to bite the bullet and build (much) more housing. This is getting ridiculous.

desuma 13y ago

The article is a Rorschach test for housing policy. Do you see yourself as the vulnerable elderly tenant, forced to move and abandon your longtime existence? Or the kindly landlord, trapped between two contradictory legal regimes? I live in San Francisco, and own a 2-unit building in the heart of the tech shuttle stops near Dolores Park. I had rented in the city for years before that. I couldn't have bought my place (almost unlivably dilapidated in the 2009 downturn) without a job at Google and help from my college friend who agreed to rent one of the apartments, despite the hot tub installed in the living room by the previous owner. Sadly, she's moving out this summer. Almost all of my friends rent, and very few of them work in tech. My partner is an artist, and his contribution to SF culture is an irreplaceable part of what makes SF great, but it's not remotely competitive financially with tech. I've personally benefitted from the city and its business and social cultures. I have a duty to pay it back. But I won't rent the vacant apartment, because renting to someone is a commitment more permanent than marriage. My house - not accounting for the insane appreciation - is more than 50% of my net assets. It'd be irresponsible. There has to be some protection for the cultural core of San Francisco, given its status as a boom-bust town. Rent stabilization, a la NYC. A maximum-allowable rent increase, tied to inflation. But there also needs to be a lot more housing. Rent control is a populist disaster that sounds great - remember "The rent is too damn high!"? - but actually accomplishes the reverse of its stated intent. The current political paralysis is a nightmare, and a fascinating window onto the class politics that our modern scaled economy is creating.

100k 13y ago
Granted it is very hard to evict a rent-controlled tenant in San Francisco, so I can understand your trepidation, but San Francisco rent control already works pretty much like your prescription: there is an annual allowed rent increase, and rents reset when the tenant moves out. In other words, this is "soft" rent control as opposed to "hard" rent control where prices are fixed, essentially forever. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.9.1.99 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.9.1.99
- desuma 13y ago
  The linked article is great reading, thanks! It's true that landlords can set the price of a vacant unit arbitrarily, unlike say NYC's rent stabilization, which limits increases even between tenants. However, I'd argue SF rent control isn't very "soft" by the article's definition - there's no hardship or rate of return provisions for the landlord, and during a tenant's stay, the allowable increases are negligible (less than CPI/inflation and certainly much less than market rate you'd expect on an investment with similar risk). Because a landlord has to evaluate a potential tenant for a lifetime lease, a lot of the same negative dynamics apply during the rental transaction. The landlord is trying to reduce their uncertainty - finding a tenant who will not only pay the greatest possible rent, but also stay for the shortest possible time. As market prices rise, tenants of rent-controlled units are highly incentivized to stay in their current home, because a new lease would be so much more expensive. This further reduces the available supply. It gets even worse when you consider the variety of protected classes SF rental law has created. Elderly and disabled tenants cannot be evicted without special cause, even if they've stopped paying rent years ago. The intent of the law is good: to protect vulnerable populations who would suffer greatly if they were evicted. But in effect, it only protects vulnerable tenants who already have a lease. Every other member of that class will find it much harder to find housing, because their tenancy comes with strings attached. There are anti-discrimination provisions in housing law, but in a competitive market, those are incredibly difficult to enforce.

epx 13y ago

She jumped from an 80-floor building and pretended she was flying for 79 floors.

guelo 13y ago

The comments here are a good example of how the predominantly white male upper class tech population that is moving in is changing SF's culture from a unique semi-socialist one to the same capitalist-uberalles culture of upper class white males everywhere. It's the latest colonization.

zaroth 13y ago

You would think a property owner would have an implicit right to "go out of business" when a lease term expires. Every lease I've ever signed had a clause that at the end of the least it can only be renewed, with notice, if BOTH parties agree. As a renter, I would never presume to be able to stay in a unit past the end of the lease without the landlord's permission. How was this basic right of property ownership was ever subverted? It sounds a bit like 'involuntary servitude' (13th amendment) to be forced to rent your property to someone after the lawful terms of your agreement to rent it have expired.

mathattack 13y ago

Within a few weeks of the eviction, the landlord put the property on the market for $1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002. Is this so crazy and outrageous? Someone buys a property, and 12 years later they want to sell it? Yes, it's appreciated. Has it appreciated that much more than the S&P 500, given the liquidity issues and upkeep? I feel bad for the tenant, and our safety net is imperfect, but "I'm renting here now" shouldn't mean "I'm renting here forever at below market rates." One reason housing rates are so high is that people don't want to invest in housing infrastructure if they can't get their money back.

davidf18 13y ago

The real issue is a systems issue caused by an artificially induced shortage of housing caused by "rent seeking" (politics that induce artificial shortages) through zoning ordinances. While convenient and emotionally satisfying to fingerpoint and blame SV higher incomes for the increased cost of housing, the real cause is the zoning ordinances which help wealthy landowners increase their income not through creativity and wealth creation but through politics. Remove the "rent seeking" political constraints on an efficient housing market and you will go along way towards fixing the problem of people getting displaced by higher rents.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
You can change the rate, but with an expanding planet and continuing flight to cities there's no end in sight. So ultimately, old people quit being able to afford where they live. It's not going to change soon, but as you observe you may be able to change the rate at which it occurs.