Evicted in San Francisco
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
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.
Clearly he should have moved out of the house and let her live there.
The owner seemed to be caught in the middle of two incompatible laws: 1) You can't have that person living there. 2) You can't make that person leave.
Step 1 - Buy a property that is impacted by certain regulatory constraints (which depresses it's market value heavily). Step 2 - If you are cheap, sit, wait, and pray that natural forces relive you of the regulatory burden (or make life a living hell for your existing tenant in an attempt to get them to move out). If you have some money, actively spend it to rid your property of regulatory constraints. Step 3 - Once unburdened (or partially relived) of said constraints, sell the property and profit handsomely.
This game is primarily played with rent controlled units and TICs. The owners in question bought property on the cheap, evicted an old disabled lady who is now homeless, and made bank. Sure, the lady was a piece of work herself, but let's not pretend these owners were saints, they knew what the endgame was all along.
They were probably hoping that the tenant would eventually move out on her own so that they could either re-rent the unit for a much higher price, or bring the unit up to code and re-sell it. They didn't let her live there for 10 years because they were being nice, they did it because they were hoping to avoid the messy and expensive legal issues that they eventually had to deal with. Regardless they walked away with ~$770K from the appreciation of their property, so not sure why they deserve any sympathy. As far as investments go, they hit a home run.
What would make even more sense is very severe fines to the landlord for renting illegal units. Something like a multiple of all the rent they have ever collected on it.
Now, if there was a way a tenant could make a legal unit into an illegal unit and then invoke this, I could see that as a problem.
I can understand the confusion because I once interned for a midwestern city's planning department. There if someone built an unapproved apartment above their garage, the city would hit them like a ton of bricks.
In San Francisco, it is not like that, and these so-called "illegal" units are enshrined by law and practice in many respects. As a tenant, you have nearly all the same rights as a legal unit, so this would probably not figure into your evaluation.
I lived through troubled times a few years back, but I always knew in the back of my mind that no matter what, I'll never be homeless -- a nice big paycheck from daddy was only an asking away - at the cost of only a little momentary humiliation that I was the only person not 'made' in my family. It's tough to even imagine what happens to families who're not well-networked or financially secure to begin with. There is a problem right now, as much as this particular story may hint otherwise.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help these people, but if you are complaining about not being able to get by in the most expensive city in the country, I really don't have any sympathy for you.
I have sympathy for them, because the current tech-boom is displacing(or greatly accelerating a process that was already happening much faster than they can handle.) them and I think that's a shame. IMHO, what makes SF great is its diversity. For reasons I won't get into right now(could probably write a book on it), diversity & high-income don't overlap too much... so watching high-income people displace the diversity is sad to me. I believe it to be a worthy goal to preserve SF's diversity of culture & history like this lady carries; preventing events like this from happening. I don't know how though, but I definitely don't think it's okay to lose it.
Basically, San Francisco voters are responsible for the evictions, whether they be natives, long-time residents or recent tech transplants.
When you increase fancy apartments for techies, the businesses/services around them will also appear and take up more land. More jobs sure, but those salaries aren't going to be able to buy a place near their job ...since the location of the job is probably near the high-paid techies. I still don't understand that Gamestop on market street, SF. Someone needs to interview them and blog about it. Where do those employees live? How do they survive?
I almost wish SF would enforce a limit on how many tech job holders are allowed to live in SF. Not necessarily the ultimate solution, but I think this gentrification needs to be throttled while someone comes up with the ultimate-solution... or just wait out this tech-boom and the problem would go away on its own.
SF is quite dense already, not like the exclusive suburbs to the south.
Unfortunately SF has some of the most restrictive zoning rules anywhere and, as described in the article, construction usually involves evicting tenants paying well below market rent. Given the highly litigious and politicized environment it is much more likely to get worse than better.
SF is 4x less dense than Manhattan, for example.
This is all-too-familiar to me, after having helped a couple older relatives through serious late-life changes like this.
Further, the general lack of safety net doesn't really apply when you're talking about a person with $1300/mo in disability/SSI, 'free' medical and some savings (/settlement payments). She could live, certainly not lavishly, but at least as well as she did before, just not where she did before or how she did before.
Which is the crux of this entire story.
not interested? or not being able to? it starts to look like a diagnosis (as an extreme illustration Rain Man comes to mind). It is not a big stretch of imagination to allow that after 20 years of being in the same situation an elderly person may lose ability for "changes", just like many lose ability to bend and reach the floor or make a split. Brain is just a biological organ and there is a lot of information around about it losing its "flexibility" with time.
Basically the society is very cruel to its members who lose the ability to function above specific level, be it physical or mental abilities.
I mean, was she mean and obstructing by explicit willful choice or was it a panic reaction and collapse of reasoning machinery in response to what she perceived as destruction of her world? Former is ill will, while later would seem to be a diagnostable episode.
to me it does. I think as a society we're at the level when we can allow and thus must allow to cut some slack to disabled people, and temporarily or permanent lack of ability to reason is a disability just like not having a leg for example. When some limping guy with a stick say stumble and hit you while falling, would you deploy your anger like it would be in the case of intentional hit? The same way with people who may not be able to function in the society and manage their societal responsibilities at the level we think of as minimally acceptable. Whatever reason for their current condition, to me these are just ill people who need help instead of full legal violence deployed against them. Though, from pure logical point of view, we can just say to this woman that last 20 years she should have learned her some Python, and thus her situation is her own doing. In my personal view, our ability to rein in such logic and deploy compassion instead of it is what determines whether our civilization goes forward or backward.
How? What action should be taken, given a diagnosis, that should not be taken otherwise?
Do you think she would voluntarily accept treatment that would make the eviction process easier?
Sure, but this condition is called "stupidity", and there's a whole section of society that takes offense at the concept.
There would be much less sympathy for a tenant who moved into a place at below-market rent, and then the rent was adjusted to market. But because a feel-good policy has created a broken market, the day of reckoning eventually had to arrive.
In a city of housing shortages, giving a small minority special protection under the law is a very bad outcome. Too bad for those not under the umbrella, too bad for those when the time comes and the umbrella is removed.
$1300 a month isn't a lot, but I would be really surprised if there's not somewhere in the SF bay area or a nearby city (Sacramento, etc) where it couldn't cover a small apartment or studio, utilities, and normal monthly costs like groceries.
As noted in other comments, it makes the focus of the article feel disingenuous as compared to people who are being priced out of their homes and don't have any safety net at all.
$~1300 will get you a decent Studio/1BR/Shared in the East Bay (Dublin, Livermore). Not bad neighborhoods, close to BART.
Go even a few miles East of these areas, rent drops rather quickly.
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
Come on. It's sad that she got evicted, but to imply in any way that the tenant is blameless seems ridiculous. You don't get a free pass to be an asshole just because you're old; you're still obligated to try and work with the system.
Given the "[a]t first, Withrington accepted Inge’s presence", I would think that if she'd been a clean and polite tenant it's entirely possible the new landlord would have had no motivation to evict her. There may not even have been the complaint, given the article's not-so-subtle way of saying "maybe the landlord submitted it!!".
Here's where I'm coming from - SF is small, old, and largely built. It's in the middle of a very large metropolitan area, but it includes many of the old parts that have had high population densities for a long time. Contrast that with the population densities of most American cities, and the general land area. With the exception of New York, SF much smaller and more densely populated than almost all of the regions used in these comparisons.
Now, when someone builds a large housing development far from the urban center of, say, Houston, that counts as development for Houston. When this happens in Walnut Creek, it goes down as not developing in SF.
So the way I'd answer this question - and I haven't yet - is to look at subregions in major met regions in the US that have had a population density of above 17,000/sq mi for more than 50 years, and try to measure how much development has occurred within those areas in the last 20 years, or what kind of opposition to new development happens in those regions now.
My refutable hypothesis is that SF will no longer show a dramatically different pattern of NIMBYism from those sub-regions outside San Francisco. That doesn't mean it won't show NIMBYism, or that it won't show more NIMBYism than other old, relatively dense regions - I just think that it may reveal that "population density over 17000/sq mi for more than several decades" correlates with general opposition to new construction regardless of whether it happens in SF.
Like I said, I haven't checked, it's just an idea. This would actually take some work to investigate.
The assumption being that I can buy the city block & it's in near other high rises.
It's less dense than LA. If you want to compare it to NYC, it's less dense than the NYC suburbs in NJ and Queens.
Rebuilding at higher densities is definitely practical, they just choose not to do so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_angeles
The Bay Area as a whole is less dense than the LA Metropolitan area.
It's true that the Bay Area as a whole needs to get denser, but SF proper needs to lead the way.
I guess another phrase this thesis is that SF's apparant NIMBYism is a misleading artifact of what you describe as a "historical accident of municipal lines."
This distortion, of course, can make SF look good as well as bad. You can pump SF up by talking about the ratio of <desirableculturalfactor>:Resident compared to Houston, or Chicago, or LA, conveniently ignoring the fact that in Chicago, the residential suburbs are counted, whereas in SF, they aren't. My guess is that this ratio in LA or Chicago's densest 48 square miles would look quite similar to SF. Or, alternatively, you can make SF look bad by excluding the sort of developments that favor the burbs (such as percentage of households with children - when a family moves from SF to Redwood City, SF "loses" a family - in many areas, this would just be considered a move within the region).
Good or bad, my thesis is that these differences are largely an artifact of how the borders are drawn, rather than innate cultural differences between SF and other metropolitan areas. I don't doubt that these cultural difference exist (and they may in fact be driven by the fact that the electorate in SF isn't diluted by the votes in the surrounding areas), but I think they may be greatly overstated.
Property owners sell off places they would otherwise have rented out or just leave them empty because it just isn't worth the risk. That is what constrains the supply. You'd be crazy to go into the rental business unless you had a lot of units to balance out the Inges of the world, particularly since once you finally evict someone like that you have to tear out the walls to get rid of the stench.
Social welfare weakens incentives for individuals to plan and live for the future. People should pay for their own lives with their own dollars, and if they are too foolish and imprudent to account for their old age, they should suffer the consequences of their own actions. They have no one to blame but themselves for not analysing the dangers.
Once people become aware that there are no second chances, behaviour will improve. It's a short-term pain for a major long-term benefit.
Until the full dangers of death and failure operate as incentives, moderated only by the free choice of individuals to cooperate and render assistance, our economies will never grow to their full extent, and our prosperity will always remain limited. In the long term, any society that clings to these dysfunctional social policies will be outcompeted by societies that discard them. In the much longer term, if the planet as a whole is held back by these policies, we may expect to be outcompeted by other, more progressive alien civilisations.
So in essence you imply that the state must act as a coercive mechanism to override the personal interest of its productive citizens.
From where I stand it appears that you endorse tyranny. Can you explain otherwise?
In my world, though, there are layoffs, long periods of unemployment, expensive catastrophic events, and generally a whole heapin' helpin' of reasons why people may need financial assistance for reasons that have nothing to do with their life choices. There are people who have done everything "right" and go into bankruptcy because a family member with insufficient health insurance gets sick. Do these things not happen in your world?
There have been plenty of insurance systems developed throughout time whereby people can hedge their risks. Previously however insurance was informal and consensual - you signed up to a Roman college. You and everyone else in the society engaged in it of your own free choice. If your group couldn't manage its finances it went broke (or more accurately appealed to an aristocrat.)
Nowadays we live in such enlightened times that the elements of choice and freedom have largely been removed.
You talk about Roman College as if it were something available to the destitute, 70-year old serf? Come on.
Today we have millions of people working full-time jobs, making less than a living wage. That is a structural, societal problem, and no planning on an individual laborer's level is going to counter that.
How about you get back to us on your 50th birthday and tell us if the best way for minimum wage laborers to pay for basic healthcare is to beg rich people?
The only thing rich people hate more than taxes is bums. Something about moral deficiency, right?
2) "Serfs" are medieval. And besides, this is an argument about free citizens, so the very concept is irrelevant.
3) The colleges were all independent, spontaneously organised by poor citizens. Anyway, apart from subsidised grain and generalised patronage the Roman ruling classes didn't design social welfare systems akin to anything we would recognise (and again, the comparison is difficult, because the patricians were generally using their own fortunes to win favour with the masses)
4) The colleges insured primarily against the possibility of funeral costs in the event of sudden death - the most important shock financial event the average poor Roman expected to face. There was no effective medical technology in Roman times, but Romans cared a lot about having a good funeral and being remembered.
5) The colleges weren't "available" to anyone unless they paid their way. If you wanted that protection, you paid your membership dues. So yes, if the destitute old free citizen had been prudent and consistently paid their dues before striking bad luck, they would be okay (well, they'd get their nice funeral, but you know what I mean.)
6) Maybe your millions of people making "less than the living wage" (however you define that) should take a leaf out of the book that seems popular to users of this site - looking for ways to improve the value of the services they offer?
7) What is so wrong with the idea of people directly petitioning others for funds to purchase healthcare? Heck, they don't even need to just petition the extremely wealthy. Powerful modern technology allows people to petition the entire world for funds (if they can convince people their cause is worthy.)[1] One of the benefits of living in a more advanced age than 50BC.
8) I feel like you are imagining me wrong. To be clear: I am young, broke, and largely unaccomplished. I have no significant assets beyond my intelligence and my ambition. I have no vested interest to protect. In fact, I am someone who stands to gain the most short-term from these sorts of welfare policies. Hell, I even work for "minimum wage" currently - another thing I would like to see abolished!
I simply want society to reward and encourage people who provide genuine value, and stop forcing productive citizens to subsidise unproductive citizens, without any accountability or metrics for the benefit of their investment, because a) I want to make my way up in the world honestly, by offering true value for trade, and b) because I am concerned about the economic damage caused by pervasive, dysfunctional contemporary policy.
If society got rid of all this terrible policy, the abundance of opportunities from the ensuing economic growth would do more to improve the fortunes of the assiduous in a few years than social welfare has accomplished in decades.
[1] www.kickstarter.com
I'm just speculating, though; perhaps you would be crowned King of All There Is and paid the fealty you are so surely due, as you have responsibly planned whilst the impoverished clearly have not. All hail Nirnira, may the bones of the weak be used to grow his giant throne!
[apologies for feeding the troll, he's just so cute but ideologically dangerous]
Honestly if there were not so many social programs in SF the homeless population would be much lower as they would relocate to other less expensive areas and maybe actually be able to afford a place to live. The current social system in SF mixed with the crazy rent prices actually encourages homelessness.
Even I can't afford to live in SF on "developer" pay, so guess what? I don't I live in SF, I moved south where I could find an apartment at a semi-sane price (still extreme, I could make payments on two Teslas for what I pay in rent).
This read to me more like story about a squatter in an illegal dwelling, trying to cause as much pain to the owners as she could on her way out.
A property owner wants to, god forbid, sell their property, and they have to suffer through this: http://pix-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/632/ScreenShot2014-03...
I'd feel bad for the soon-to-be-prior owners, but the $40k in costs barely dented their 120% return ($723k) over 12 years. It's not like they didn't know she lived there when they bought the place. But it still doesn't mean they are/should be legally obligated to rent to her for the rest of her life.
The obvious solution to rapidly rising prices is to increase supply, as described here (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) or here (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_valle...) and well-understood. The problem is almost entirely political.
That's a lie: http://infogr.am/ellis-act-evictions
While I don't know if I disagree with the law, it is hard to see it being used outside of sale opportunities.
Relatives of mine did something similar in Berkeley (I don't think that they actually used the Ellis act per se, but another eviction exemption).
More than two decades after the USSR collapsed, and people are still clinging to socialist ideologies.
FTFY. Seriously, there's two parts of a fraction. Why are we subsidizing immigration and children?
Broadband, people .. it works[1]
[1] Outside the US, in the US monopolies may apply.
News Flash: people in those other communities have similar worries, transit should have been expanded/extended at least ten years ago - it would have been a lot easier when the bay wasn't in a boom - but that still wouldn't solve everything. The entire bay area doesn't want SF to sprawl all over it. Part of the beauty of the bay has always been the diverse types of areas to live in, and their distinct personalities.
People are worried that SF's personality is changing, and though this story has been told before, they're right to be.
On the one hand, noone should expect a rental arrangement to last forever, but the bay area has spent decades developing a culture that is renter-heavy, and whatever the laws say, our hearts need to understand that these buildings largely owned by speculators who benefit from our infighting have been occupied by lots of people who made them homes, who opened businesses and threw street festivals and painted murals that made us all feel like more of who we are from the first minute we stepped into SF.
And we should be careful not to leave it an empty husk if our industry faces a downturn again, if nothing else.
Would also be good for the local economy as it would generate work for electricians, plumbers, builders, painters and decorators etc.
After a suitable period of time (say 5 years) and ton of publicity then start cracking down on the remaining non-compliant units.
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.”
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
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.
> 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.
Sure. Sometimes it's pretty smart to screw other people over. I guess it just depends on what kind of person you are.
At the end of the day, it's private property. She's not entitled to live there if the owner doesn't want her to.
That's not how it works in many places, including in SF. She was not entitled to live there because it was not a legal dwelling.
Currently it appears while the unit is illegal, there is no penalty for having rented out an illegal unit for a dozen years. The "penalty" is that you get to evict whoever you had been renting to (which means they lose on their renters rights) while you get to keep all the money.
She sounds like an absolute pain in the ass, but neither party was nobel.
And she was "nearly destitute" because she refused any and all offers of help. The landlord even offered to give her $14k in go-away money but she refused.
So what is your actual issue? Are you upset someone bought a property with an illegal addition? Once they bought the house, what would they have had to do to retain "nobility"? Let her live there rent free? Immediately kick her out? Re: "until it was opportune to kick out the nearly destitute leasee", again, what is your expectation here? Allow her to perpetually turn your house into a dump, rent free, forever, because she is old and you'd be taking advantage of her in some way by not letting her live rent free in your house forever?
How you make so many intellectually dishonest points in a row while attempting to mock others is just shocking.
The tenant seems like a giant pain, but the landlord is guilty of illegally renting out a unit for years. She shouldn't have been able to remain there and the owner should not have been able to profit off his illegal dwelling.
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.
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?
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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).
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."
It seems you were talking about rich assholes getting evicted for unconscionable behavior after all. Sorry, but I still don't see what they have to do with gentrification. Explain?
>"this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."
You are correct in your fuzzy logic, I was first making the point that the author could have picked a less sympathetic individual, if the author's intent had been to malign evicted tenants. My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted; criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.
Your specific example was outside the scope of gentrification, which is what we were all discussing. I accused the article of baiting us into falsely generalizing from Inge's case to conclude (fuzzily) that "evicted poor people only mind being kicked out because they're a bunch of ungrateful slobs that turn down the abundant opportunities everybody heaps upon them because they believe they are entitled to something better". Inge's hypothetical wealthy twin evictee would not have been a better candidate to advance this agenda because smearing her would not have smeared the protesting masses who, by and large, are not as wealthy.
> My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted
I gave you three examples. A fourth example would be to choose an evictee at random and investigate them. It's entirely possible that this is how the story came about and that it's coincidental that she is such an unsympathetic figure. My original post observed that the likelihood of interpretation #4 is lowered by the extreme nature of Inge's case.
> criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.
In a world of incomplete knowledge, finite opportunity cost, and human-resource-intensive processes for rigorous inference it's entirely fair to have a complaint that is not mathematically precise.
SF's land use policies are horrendous, but anecdotes (in any direction) are not evidence for specific changes.
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.
In other words, this is "soft" rent control as opposed to "hard" rent control where prices are fixed, essentially forever.
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.
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.
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).
b) There is no similarity between me ripping out carpets and her threats to burn the building down. The similarity in my mind is that the housing itself was problematic for reasons that are largely out of the hands of both tenant and landlord. In her case, she was in an illegal rental, without proper egress, it's own electric bill, etc. According to the article, such places may account for 10% of the rental stock in SF. To me, that indicates a systemic problem, not specifically about this woman or her landlord.
I was training at one time to be an urban planner. I think this is an issue of local laws and policies as well as federal laws and policies.
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?
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.
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.
Also there is an opportunity cost involved here. How much resources are spent directly or indirectly by both city administration and other citizens for homeless people and any problems they create ? How much potential revenue in taxes is City losing because such units are not legal ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Should a retired taxi driver be able to afford such a location? Should we be upset that she cannot?
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?
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.
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.
This story tells the tale of a capitalist's hassles.
It doesn't go any deeper, into the real issues.
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.
You mean, like an illegal in-law unit?
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.
"...$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is like any government handout, except here in the case of money they merely take your rights away to your property.
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 :)
Reminds me of panel 3 in http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-03-01/
When they retired they moved. Would it have been preferable to keep the house the whole family grew up in? Probably. But they couldn't afford the overhead of utilities, maintenance, etc. They moved to a smaller house in a state with lower property taxes.
They too left their friends, contacts, etc. Built up over living there for 35 years. But it was the responsible decision to do it. Why should it be everyone else's burden if they make a stupid decision to stay put in a place they can't afford? Is that a right?
Especially when seniors have the dual safety net of Social Security and Medicaid - they are generally in a better shape than many working class people. The landlord paid her $14k just to move out. That with social security would absolutely cover living expenses in most of the country.
Obviously utilities going up should be considered in rent, but in a property tax-free world, someone staying is not a burden on the owner, except in the "he could be making even more money". The owner ends up making less because they might not be market value, but considering that what he's doing is rent-seeking anyways, there's not that much moral high ground for the guy who wants to increase rent just because of "the market".
Obviously these problems are nuanced (and economists seem to all agree that rent control = bad )
Medicaid is for lower-income folks and the disabled, except some disabled who get Medicare.
However, you can be eligible for both (so called-dual eligibles).
...I'll see myself out....
That's horrendously sad.
YES! Absolutely reasonable. There is no right to live exactly where you want for the rest of your life (especially when where you want to live is an illegal residence). Nor should there be.
noun: Part of a set of laws that I do not like.
Rent control does not give you the right to live in an area for a given amount of rent in any circumstance. The circumstances in which it does not provide assurances are not "loopholes".
New owner decides he's tired and wants her out. If he suddenly claims the room to be an "inlaw apartment", then it would be illegal. Now he can start the process to evict.
Legal loophole.
[Update] The timing is suspicious too, since these units could be legal soon:
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/S-F-in-law-units-law-c...
(edit: I definitely feel sorry for the cat.)
My sympathy rests entirely with the cat. Pets live more or less at the whim of their owner, no matter how unfortunate, and have little choice in the matter (well, I suppose they could escape...). The poor thing likely has no idea what's going on, and it certainly does not look happy. Breaks my heart.
But then, I'm a softy with animals. Cats in particular.
The people? Meh. I'm inclined to agree with the posters here (yourself included) suggesting that she has a choice. I feel bad for her, don't get me wrong, but considering how many people are often forced by economic reasons to move from one area to another and do so without any public sympathy lends me to feel the same in this circumstance. What she's making on SSI a month isn't very much, but I'd imagine her medications are probably paid for in full or in part by her plan, and there are cheaper and safer areas to live in the country than SF. Many retirement communities out here in NM are populated with people who make about what she does a month, but the cost of living is lower.
As someone pointed out (maybe it was you, I'm not sure), if she were of working age, she'd probably have fewer safety nets to fall back on.
It certainly isn't a good situation for anyone involved (except maybe the lawyers), but imagine if this were a story about some programmer/retired programmer who was having to leave his home of 35 years for greener pastures. I'd imagine most of the comments would be along the lines of "suck it up and move."
Either way, the story is still gut wrenching because it's so uncomfortable.
If anyone found a loophole here it's the tenant.
Basically the moral center of our brain, by default, views her leaving as a choice, and you moving as a choice. Rather than her staying vs leaving as a choice. Looks dumb when you parse it right, feels right when you parse it wrong.
Wanting something is not the same as deserving something.
The only land that you ever have an indefinite right to is land that you have purchased. I don't get "special privileges" to Seattle or Philadelphia just because I have rented in those two cities for the past 15 years. You don't have some sort of "special right" to your city either, unless you have seen fit to purchase property there.
Note: comments to the effect that buying property is a big risky deal should pause and consider what that statement imputes about what the landlord offering the place for rent happens to bring to the table
The rental laws seem to be very restrictive over there. Here in Australia you are often given a one year contract which can then go to month to month with a months eviction warning if not renewed into a longer contract. If it was me I would just be happy that I had a good thing going for as long as I did. Essentially the uncertainty is already priced in to the rental price, it is well below market value.
Besides, I moved away from my family, friends, and contacts that I'd built up over the first 18 years of my life in order to attend college. People uproot themselves frequently because they realize that not doing so is just too impractical.
It wasn't, according to this article. She took a risk.
[Update] I didn't see the pic. Yeah, it's clearly in a different building, so an in-law.
Illegal Units are covered by rent control. Illegal units, such as in-law apartments, are covered by rent control.
Tenants can only be evicted for one of 15 "just causes." Most of these deal with allegations the tenant can dispute (e.g., tenant is violating the lease) but some are "no-fault" like owner move in or Ellis.
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.
This entire situation is quite a shame for all involved - it's a dreadful problem without a good resolution.
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.