98-year-old tenant who paid rent on time for 50 years evicted by a loophole | Hacker News Reader

98-year-old tenant who paid rent on time for 50 years evicted by a loophole

rawstory.com

10 pointsjaysonelliot9 comments

I wasn't aware that if you decided to rent some of your property, that you had to do so in perpetuity until the end of time. Did rental agreements 50 years ago not include a right of termination for both parties? Did they not need to be renewed annually like virtually all do now? Or are they only doing this because they want her out a few months earlier than agreed?

Rental agreements carry a no-fault termination option or option to elect to not renew after the lease has expired virtually everywhere in the US except California (and New York City, maybe?), where tenant's rights legislation is very, very toothy.

It is largely an artifact of rent control. You can't have effective rent control if a market for the use of the property exists, so rent-controlled jurisdictions respond by making markets illegal. (And then they are shocked, shocked when they fail to clear.)

I don't get all of the outrage.

Owner uses Ellis Act to declare he is getting out of multi-tenant rental business. Plans to sell and/or renovate. Tenants, who don't own the building, are no longer able to rent said apartments and notified of eviction.

Why is the owner a bad guy?

Because SF rental and real-estate markets are out of control? How is that the owners fault and why should they have to keep renting property when they no longer want to do so?

If the tenants are so shocked they are no longer allowed to rent an apartment, why didn't they buy a place? Too expensive? Move someplace else.

I would love to live in SF but I cannot afford the cost of living difference so I don't. I pay 1/4 what my colleagues in SF pay in rent and I'm BUYING a home.

It's not a loophole.

Are you going to elaborate on that?

The name of the "loophole" is the Ellis Act. It was passed after the California Supreme Court declared that, under existing law, landlords had no right to evict renters if they wanted to exit the multitenant rental business. The Ellis Act has one purpose: to make legal the eviction of tenants if one wants to exit the multitenant rental business. That is not a side effect, bug, or unintended consequence of the law, it is the exact designed intent.

This eviction is an Ellis Act eviction. The reason for the eviction is that the landlord wishes to exit the multitenant rental business, in favor of a condo conversion, something which the Ellis Act was designed to allow. San Francisco tenants rights activists hate the Ellis Act, so they describe this as a "loophole."

The problem is that there are ways for a landlord to technically take the property off the rental market and evict the rent-controlled tenants and then put the property back on the rental market with all new (much higher!) rates.

It's a loophole because the intent of the Ellis Act was for owners to reclaim a property from renters, not to flip it into a new rental market.

Edit to add: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

"Tenants activists say that the Ellis Act is instead abused by real estate speculators, who evict their tenants, turn these rent-controlled apartments into tenancies-in-common and sell them at a profit"

Tenants activists believe all manner of fun things, including that supply and demand is a fiction created by evil capitalist bastards. Be that as it may, that article is (despite being from TechCrunch) pretty awesome for its comprehensive treatment of the issue. Thanks for the link.

Seems like the owner is definitely in the multi-tenant rental business (says so almost word for word)

http://urbangreeninv.com

Either that or it's personal for the CEO. Wasn't clear to me from the article.

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