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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

I really don't agree with this guy at all. This makes no sense at all:

> Don’t ever move into an apartment, TIC, condo, or house that has been cleared by an eviction

So landlords should be forced to rent to people forever who can't pay? That makes no sense. It is just stealing the property from the property owner.

I know a lot of landlords and they hate doing evictions, because the tenants aren't paying their rent the entire time they are being evicted. The ones I know often say to the judge, I don't want money back from this person (which is generally impossible anyway because the person is poor), I just want to be able to rent my property to someone who can pay. Landlords with a lot of property have to do this regularly.

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People who don't pay their rent constitute a minor fraction of all evictions in SF. And when someone doesn't pay their rent there is an effective process for getting rid of them in a finite length of time. Most evictions in SF are not for this cause.

Can you share your data? I'm curious what most evictions in SF are about.

http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=46

164 of 1977 evictions in 2014 were for late or non-payment of rent. Almost all of the rest were for pretexts classified under "breach of agreement" which tenants groups have shown to consist of things like parking outside the lines or cooking at night.

This is one of the things I really hate about California rental laws: there's not a standard lease. When I rented in Texas there was a statewide standard lease so there weren't weird clauses and other surprises.

The Rent Board's report notes that evictions for non-payment aren't required to be reported to them. So that's a floor, not a cap, on the actual number of non-payment evictions.

You can't sweep all 607 "breach of agreement" evictions away as "pretexts" – those can involve serious issues too, and it's a large category even in years like 2002-2004 when rents were declining. (That suggests it's not just a catch-all for wanting-richer-tenants.) There's also 349 "committing a nuisance" and 42 "illegal use" evictions. Some tenants are truly problematic!

What the author is alluding to is the phenomena of landlords forcing a resident to leave outright, or raising rent beyond the level that existing tenants can pay, resulting in the existing tenant being forced to leave. This is usually done to make more money.

However, I agree with what you're saying: what did people think would happen?! In renting a place, the landlord does not have to keep the rent the same. This is a risk that comes with renting.

> Don’t assume that because you have more money that you have to right to take someone else’s home away. Don’t treat an existing community like your personal playground.

I just... what? No one here is playing dirty, no one is targeting anyone else. The rules of the economic system that we all live in say that these things are possible events, and maybe ones we should all be prepared for.

Also, you can't destroy a community. Communities exist when people exist. Communities can change, like when the people that exist in a community change. But humans will still be there, doing their human thing. And I think that's what this is really about; change that the author doesn't like.

"Also, you can't destroy a community. Communities exist when people exist." If a neighborhood block has the same residents for 20 years, who have street parties and have their kids play and grow together, and then all those families leave (for whatever reason) and the new residents never talk to each other (for whatever reason), yeah I think you could say a community died there.

I'm not totally sure, let's explore this a bit.

There are two definitions for "community" when I look this up:

1. "A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common."

2. "A feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals."

By the first definition, I don't agree with you. If there are people living near one another, then a community exists. By the second definition, you're at least somewhat correct. When the people are gone/have changed, then that "feeling of fellowship" has disappeared/become unrecognizably different.

I don't think it's wrong to be frustrated or saddened when we lose things like relationships. But I don't think we should demonize others.

> Also, you can't destroy a community. Communities exist when people exist. Communities can change, like when the people that exist in a community change. But humans will still be there, doing their human thing. And I think that's what this is really about; change that the author doesn't like.

Clearly you've never lived through the process of gentrification then, because this shit happens a lot.

I will admit, I have not lived through the process of urban gentrification, but I have lived through a significant cultural change due to an influx of people.

I grew up here[0], in a house from the 70's surrounded by other houses from the 70's, all of which was out in the middle of the woods. There was a nice culture that came with living there.

Starting in 2000, what had been many square miles of forest starting just 1000 feet north of our home was logged and in just under 2 years the huge housing development called "Redmond Ridge" went up. It was all cookie-cutter houses, tiny yards, and Microsoft employees. You can see all of this if you zoom out of the location I linked here[0].

With this came more traffic, which brought more road construction, and more development. It put a lot more strain on the surrounding schools, which had to expand, and generally alienated what had been a very woodsy, cowtown sort of people. As you can see, the entire area is a mix of extremely suburban mixed with the remains of a more rural community.

I realize that this doesn't come close to the experience of being pushed out of your home. But I do have a very small understanding of having large cultural changes thrust upon you. Having gone through that, why would one be angry with Microsoft, or their employees, or local government, etc?

Doing something that frustrates you doesn't make them evil.

[0] - https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6738223,-122.0327392,18z

Isn't your "communities cannot be destroyed, just changed" argument just a semantic point?

I'd imagine that few would describe "Redmond Ridge" as a "very woodsy, cowtown". It's fine to say that "woodsy, cowtown" community has just changed, but if you can no longer see that community it's pretty easy to argue it has gone (aka been destroyed).

I strongly agree that change isn't necessarily bad, and I think gentrification often gets a bad rep for what is often a significant improvement. But I don't see how you can argue that communities don't get destroyed by it.

The rules of the economic system that we all live in say that these things are possible events, and maybe ones we should all be prepared for.

The author's point is that the community system is more important (to him) than the economic system.

It may surprise many who are mostly familiar with the economics-based system we all live with, but prior to the 1980's economics was usually a second-order concern when talking about city (and even country) development.

In some places you still see this - there was a recentish HN discussion which talked about some particular issue in Spain, and the cognitive misalignment between people who had lived in Spain and considered the society impact first and those who lived in the US and considered the economic impact was quite striking.

At some point unfortunately many will want a answer as to which way of thinking is right. Generally the economic view will win then, because it's easy to measure and reason about the economic impact of things, whilst alternative models of thought tend to be less based on metrics.

(I wish I knew if the downvotes were because I offended "economic-system thinkers" by pointing out other world-views or if I offended "non-economic-system thinkers" by pointing out that non-economic systems tend to be hard to measure)

Even before you get to the landlords' property rights, it's obvious that the strategy isn't going to work. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma game where you know someone is going to defect (and take the now market-rate apartment).

It's all well and good to encourage the principled stand, but it only takes one person (per rental) to defect and, given the supply/demand imbalance, that seems a perfect certainty. So, your principled stand only serves to lock you out of a significant part of the available rental market, make you a more difficult client of real estate brokers, and not provide any lasting change or inflict any lasting pain on the nefarious landlords who have the audacity to charge market rent for the properties they own/manage.

Take into account that at one time these people could pay their rent and now, because of gentrification, they can't. A person too poor to afford a home and has been renting the same place for decades is getting evicted because the wealthy moved in next door.

This never happens in san francisco, the rents go up very little every year.. less than inflation, so in real terms your rent gets cheaper every year.

I don't think what you've written is exactly true. At least some of the rental property in San Francisco is rent controlled (possibly a lot of it if you believe this site: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html). If a person/family lives in a rent controlled unit, rent increases aren't necessarily tied to the rental market, but rather are limited to a percentage of the CPI (1.9% increase for the current year - http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=1501). Wealthy neighbors don't have much to do with it in these cases.

If you look at the actual data, poor people are less likely to move out after gentrification than before.

Nice article that covers this: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

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