(02-24) 11:04 PST SAN FRANCSICO -- San Franciscos housing crunch has reached Sacramento. Faced with a surge in evictions and stratospheric prices for homes and apartments, two San Francisco lawmakers are now pushing separate bills in an effort to amend the state law that property owners used to evict hundreds of households in the city over the last year, often to put the apartments up for sale. State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, is introducing a bill Monday at the request of Mayor Ed Lee that is designed to prevent speculators from buying up apartment buildings, kicking out the tenants, and flipping the units for sale. Lenos bill, which would apply only to San Francisco, would force buyers to own a building for at least five years before they evict tenants using the Ellis Act, a state law that allows an owner to kick out renters if he or she takes the building off the rental market. The law was originally intended to allow owners to exit the rental business rather than be forced to remain a landlord. But what Leno describes as a loophole in the law is now being exploited by cash-hungry buyers who were never in the rental business to begin with. In recent years, speculators have been buying up properties in San Francisco with no intention to become landlords but to instead use a loophole in the Ellis Act to evict longtime residents just to turn a profit, Leno said in a statement. Many of these renters are seniors, disabled people and low-income families with deep roots in their communities and no other local affordable housing options available to them. Our bill gives San Francisco an opportunity to stop the bleeding and save the unique fabric of our city. Bill to allow moratoriums State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, on Friday introduced a bill that would allow local jurisdictions - through the Board of Supervisors or a public vote - to enact a moratorium on Ellis Act evictions when the housing supply cant keep pace with demand. Ammianos bill, AB2405, would also hide no-fault evictions from tenant records or credit checks. Experience shows you cant build your way out of an affordable housing crisis, Ammiano said. We have to do what we can to preserve what affordable housing we have. This is one piece of that effort. San Franciscos housing situation, which Lee described in his State of the City address last month as a genuine crisis, has mobilized elected officials across the citys Democratic-dominated political spectrum, although their approach has been different. Lee, among other things, has called for 30,000 units of housing to be built or refurbished in the city by 2020. Its unclear whether that will have a meaningful impact on rents, which are the highest in the nation, or home prices in a city where the median price for a two-bedroom home is around $970,000. Preserving the existing rental housing stock where units in older, multiunit buildings are protected by rent control, which regulates rent increases and keeps them well below market rate after a few years, is also a priority of Lee, Leno, Ammiano and others. The citys rent-control housing supply has decreased by 1,017 units in the last two fiscal years for various reasons, including apartments converted for sale, taken off the rental market by the owner or replaced with new construction not subject to rent control, according to a report by the city controller in December. Tenant advocates and some analysts said the report was undercounting the units lost. In the meantime, development has been stagnant for years, in large part due to the economic recession, but also political opposition to taller, denser development in they city. What kind of traction Lenos and Ammianos bills will be able to generate in Sacramento remains to be seen.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 05:23:59 +0000
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