5 ms·
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.
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoWhy, 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 agoIt 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 agowell, actually not really. Even if you were a perfect tenant, there's nothing stopping you from getting evicted short of human kindness.
- jjoonathan 13y agoI can't help but suspect that this is exactly how this story was designed to read. They could have chosen between any of the Ellis Act evictions in the dabrownstein figure (~4000 of them), and yet the person they chose to interview * has health care retirement benefits * has the ability to go back to Germany and use their social programs * has personal attention from social workers and relatives finding her options * has a car * has a shelter offering a place to stay for the night * is a member of a social group (female, white, older) that is not the bottom of the charity priority list * hoards, smokes, intentionally antagonizes her landlord All of this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."
- woodchuck64 13y agoI think she is likely representative of the kind of undiagnosed mental illness evictees often have.
- nickff 13y agoThere are many working-age, highly-paid individuals who rent housing, and are evicted for various reasons, so this may not be the least sympathetic case of eviction.
- jjoonathan 13y agoA sample can be unrepresentative of the mean/median/mode of a distribution without being maximal or minimal.
- nickff 13y agoI intentionally avoided use of the word "unrepresentative", as I was not sure what would qualify as representative of those who have been evicted. I understand that my use of "sympathetic" may be viewed as similarly vague, but I believe that its meaning may be more well-understood.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
- eqdw 13y agoI also feel that way, but the fact that I'm having an emotional reaction tells me that the article was probably written to trigger that. So I'm trying to ignore it. SF's land use policies are horrendous, but anecdotes (in any direction) are not evidence for specific changes.