We don't have a strong enough social welfare net (or enough resources there-in) to care for folks that need care; but, we're not comfortable letting them starve on the streets either.
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.
I don't even think a stronger safety net would have helped in this case. It sounds like she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle (e.g. stop hoarding).
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.
>she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle
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.
The problem is that, via rent control, she was given 20 years protection from reality evolving around her. That is the issue here.
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.
that is the point - it is basically a definition of diagnostable situation when reasoning machinery doesn't function well (i'm not a doctor of course).
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.
Honestly... if some random limping guy (not my family) fell and hit me with his stick every other day and often fell and hit my neighbors too... I would certainly want that guy out of my house. If I tried to help him get out of my house and he kept falling and hitting everyone that tried to help him... well at some point I would stop caring and just want him gone. Based only on what is in the article, since that is all we have, I feel they did start out with compassion. But you can only get hit with a stick so many times before you start losing that compassion. When they bought the house, they knew they were getting an illegal rental unit... not a one bed mental hospital. It wasn't their job to make sure she got help. It seems like they did more than they should have to.
What more could be done? The courts bent over backwards to accommodate her, going so far as to award her $14,000 after patiently exhausting every other option. 14k and a moving crew seems pretty generous as far as evictions for hostile, unsanitary, non-paying tenants go. Her story is depressing because she is clearly a troubled woman, but you can't just ignore reality and expect everything to work out, it's unsustainable to allow every person with poor reasoning skills live rent free.
The courts didn't award her $14k. She agreed to it in arbitration and signed a contract specifying that she'd get it in return for moving out. She then declined to move out, and I assume didn't get any of that $14k (because... why would she?).
The story mentions later on: "Her settlement money comes in small increments, so it is difficult for her to save up." So she got the 14k even after she refused to honor the contract she signed.
$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.
He wasn't talking about just rent, you have to figure in food costs and medical costs etc. Though I do agree that you can make it on that much in certain parts of the Bay.
As mentioned in the article her medical care is already taken care of by a union-sponsored health insurance plan run by a big HMO. These typically require very low or zero payments by the insured.
From the American Community Survey (ACS), $1,300 per month will put her in the 13% percentile in San Francisco household income. This looks like a decent safety net to me.
It's too bad that we're focusing on this kind of event, because it gives people a false impression of the reality on the ground. The fact is that right now there are whole families that are being displaced out of their homes and communities with absolutely no fallback net. And as we all know, it's hardest to bounce back when you're down low.
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.
It happened to my family. We're definitely not a wealthy or well-connected family. We lost our home in the recession, my dad's business went from doing great to completely closed. We moved to a tiny house in a cheap neighborhood. Started a new business and worked and saved and now we're almost back to where we were before the recession.
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'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.
Grow at the expense of what though? So you tear down anything you can to increase SF's ability to hold all the things techies enjoy... and then one day, all this booming goes away and you're left with... http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/3433 ...kinda like the real-estate boom. Build houses anywhere & everywhere because everyone suddenly can afford a house(or at least get the loan)... then one day that isn't the case and you're left with a bunch of empty houses everywhere in places that could have been schools, parks, community centers, living areas for those of low-income.
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.
Reading socialistworld.net will only make you more confused about economic issues like these. I'd suggest any basic economics text as a good place to get started.
Build where? SF is hemmed in by hills and ocean. Housing is mostly low rise, but dense and very much in the style of Tokyo given similar issues (earthquakes). Then you have a bunch of beautiful Victorians to tear down before you can build some dense high rise housing.
SF is quite dense already, not like the exclusive suburbs to the south.
In a normal place this is accomplished by increasing building height, increasing the building's footprint and reducing the unit size. No additional land needs to be used and higher density increases efficiency of services such as mass transit as well reducing environmental impact.
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.
I mentioned Tokyo, which is as low rise as SF. You can build up on faults, but the construction costs (use more steel) are much higher, so it happens less often than geologically more stable locations (like NYC).
It's almost as if excessive regulation and NIMBY-ism in San Francisco has created an artifical bubble of hyper inflated housing prices that causes the most harm to the people who are in most need of help. Damn.
It's not NIMBY. The problem is between California law and San Francisco law renters have far too many rights. A person who knows how to play the game can stay in your rental for more than a year without paying rent. You shouldn't need to hire a lawyer everyone thinks is an asshole (think about that - someone who's an asshole even for a lawyer) to get rid of someone who isn't even paying rent.
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.
This comes up every now and then. I'm really not sure there is as much NIMBYism in SF relative to other cities as many people believe. By the way, by "not really sure", I mean not really sure. I just view it as more of an open question than many people here on HN do.
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.
San Francisco is twice is dense as Los Angeles. 17,620/sq mi vs 8,225/sq mi. New York is the only city of a s similar size or larger that is more dense than Sn Francisco. San Francisco is more dense than Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia...
That's just a historical accident of municipal lines. For whatever reason San Francisco didn't incorporate its inner suburbs while those other cities did. SF isn't functionally similarly to NYC or Chicago, it's more like Manhattan or the Central + North side. Both are considerably denser.
It's true that the Bay Area as a whole needs to get denser, but SF proper needs to lead the way.
Correct - that's the basis of my thesis. That "SF" isn't necessarily more NIMBYistic than sub-regions of other cities that have had "high" (say, 15,000 residents/sq mi or more) density for an extended period of time. If those other areas had experienced a similar historical accident of municipal lines (ie, only those parts of a Chicago that have exceeded 15,000+ residents per square mile since the 1950s were considered "Chicago"), the thesis is that SF and those sub regions wouldn't show on average dramatically different levels of opposition to new development.
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.
My thoughts too. As soon as the DBI saw that the unit was illegal, I would have assumed the occupants would have been removed almost immediately. It should not have taken that long for the owner to be able to do what he was legally required to do. But instead he was legally prevented from doing what he was legally required to do. Makes no sense.
San Francisco almost always looks the other way regarding these 'illegal' units. Many of them are in plain sight and the rent/tenancy control laws still apply. I would guess the unit must have been a serious health/safety hazard for them to do anything.
Which actually makes sense if you think about it--if it was an instant eviction it would be very valuable to the landlord. They can rent and take your money for years and whenever they want to get rid of you and flip the property they report the unit and boom you are gone without any rights.
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.
Actually, a prospective tenant probably has no idea if the unit is "illegal" or not. It is an apartment for rent and there is a line going out the door, so don't ask any annoying questions.
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.
Yes, according to the article there is a long standing "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But it does say that when they are reported, the city takes serious action. And it sounds like it was a health hazard the way she was living.
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.
My guess is that the owners were well aware of the situation when they purchased the property. The owners stated that they were warned by "pretty much everyone" not to purchase the property, and the fact that the property came with someone living in it should be a pretty big red flag. For those that have been around SF long enough, it's easy enough to recognize when someone is playing the 'sf housing regulatory lottery'. The basic gist of the game is as follows:
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.
I don't think the owners are saints... but they get way more sympathy than that rotten tenant. We don't know what they thought the end game would be. It sounds like to me that they were willing to keep the tenant but then started to see she was a nightmare. I have no doubt they knew the unit was illegal. But once it got to the point that they were required to take action to do something to fix the situation... they were promptly met with incompatible laws that would not allow them to do what they were ordered to do. Also... $500 a month is not really "bank" in the context of this $1.4M house that was purchased by two families (that lived in it for 10 years). And they gave her over 2 years worth of rent back in a relocation settlement.
They could have insisted that the original seller fix the violation/evict the tenant before the sale of the unit. This of course would mean a much higher sales price (or no sale), so they didn't. They could have reported the illegal unit to the DBI at anytime in the 10 years that they lived there. Instead they waited until they were basically ready to move out and sell the property.
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.
The problem was someone filed a complaint. Like any bureaucracy, once you put something down on paper they have to do something. If she hadn't been such a difficult person to get along with she'd still be living there.
The article states that, but it is semi-official policy to let these units be. I think that if you made some random complaint about your neighbor's mother-in-law unit, you would likely not get any action from the city. Therefore the complaint must have been fairly serious (or the developer pulled some strings).
I don't think this story has anything to do with social welfare or a safety net. Free health insurance, $1,300/mo stipend from Uncle Sam, pays no utilities, and stopped paying rent entirely. Is there something in the constitution that I missed about a right to live for free in someone else's garage in San Francisco Mission District? There are actually plenty of places in this great country where you can rent a 1-bedroom apartment for $500/mo and not exactly have to duck bullets.
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.
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.
If you read the end of the article, it turns out she is actually a German citizen, which has "a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage." In fact Germany has a very strong social welfare net, she just chooses not to take advantage of that.
How can you say that we don't have a strong enough welfare net with the amount of funding California dumps into it? "34% Of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California but only 12%
of the U.S. population resides here". http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Jul/28/welfare-capital-o...
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).
I have no sympathy for the owner. He knew he had a tenant when he bought the property. The fact the unit was illegal was caveat emptor, yet she's the one who had to pay the price.
Ah, yes; how dare she be evicted for threatening to burn the building down, refusing to pay rent, refusing to attend court summons, complaining about her neighbors for having the temerity to turn on a sprinkler, and turning her home into a disgusting pit? Clearly those are all natural rights of tenants, and the landlord should have just accepted her with all her quirks when he bought the property.
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!!".
Disagree. I think the existing social welfare system in your country is hugely destructive, and you need to weaken and dismantle it as much as possible.
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.
I think you'll have a hard time convincing the majority of Americans (or even just humans in general) that we should literally let people die on the street.
Yet that is what happens on the streets of America every single day. I think your statement should be "you'd have a hard time getting your average American majority to understand that people are dying on their streets today".. because, it is happening.
But that's exactly what we should do. Or, more accurately, we should leave it to private citizens to decide, of their own free will, to render assistance (and prevent anybody from using the state's threat of violence to force an entire society to render assistance.)
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.
You advocate, in your own words, allowing people to die on the street unless private citizens decide to render assistance. I would far, far rather have state aid than that.
You imply that, left to their own devices, free to serve their own self-interest, private citizens would not decide to help "people dying on the streets."
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?
I deny that a state that taxes its citizens and provides services to all in return is necessarily tyrannical. I also deny that I said what you think I said, because your black and white view of the world appears to preclude shades of gray. If it suits you to use scary words, however, then my answer is yes - it is still preferable to your alternative.
In a world where what happens to you in your old age is entirely determined by the choices you make when you're younger, and where the correct choices will absolutely guarantee that you have the proper resources available, this would be an excellent idea.
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?
Sorry, what? Risk and uncertainty are universal. Everyone has to deal with their existence.
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.
The existing systems were created out of necessity, and were fundamental to the establishment of the middle class.
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?
1) Life-expectancy in Roman times was very low. 50 is a more appropriate age for your rhetoric.
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.
If your pure Darwinian vision of the future were to manifest and hence there was no threat of prosecution, I'm pretty certain you'd be offed rapidly due to your savage annoyingness. The rule of law and the social norms that you decry are actually what is protecting you.
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]
Nonetheless, it’s a good time to be a Bornstein in San Francisco: in the past year alone, Ellis Act evictions have risen 170%; since 1997, there have been 3,811, and that number is constantly rising.
It's amazing how so many people refuse to accept that out-of-control housing prices are due to artificial scarcity, and that the solution is deregulation, rather than even more idiotic rent control and eviction regulations. David Campos is now trying to enact legislation to penalize Ellis Act evictions.
More than two decades after the USSR collapsed, and people are still clinging to socialist ideologies.
Oh for god's sake, just because you don't understand what the word means doesn't mean you can use socialism for any government action in the economy. Rent control isn't stupid because it's redistributive or whatever you think "socialist" means, it's stupid because it arbitrarily redistributes from long-standing tenants (rich, middle-class or poor) to those who move more often (rich, middle-class, or poor), while introducing a massive amount of uncertainty and overhead for landlords and reducing the quality and quantity of housing stock. A little understanding of economics goes a long way; the fact that rent control is distorting the price mechanism per se is not the reason that it's retarded (by that logic, Pigovian taxes would be just as disastrous as rent control).
You can be as sarcastic as you like, but Marx isn't the only one who gets to define socialism. Coercive government action can rightly be lumped in with socialism. It does not mean that only socialist take coercive government action, but it does not disqualify socialism from this type of activity.
Sometimes people use it to buy a property with a tenant in it (at a reduced rate, usually), then evict the tenant and move into the property themselves (typically after a renovation). It's much less convenient/more time consuming than buying an empty unit and moving into it, but it can be less costly.
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).
If people want to KEEP SAN FRANCISCO THE SAME, they could just build in other cities and amalgamate/improve the existing transit infrastructure, too. I have a working theory that people would be less obsessed with living in San Francisco if it was a mere 10-15 minute transit ride away
Some of us do live a 10-15min transit ride away, but during busy times that can easily become an hour or more.
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.
The crazy thing is that San Fran homeowners have essentially tried to increase housing supplies in the past, by creating in-law units such as the one in the story. However, it's now more lucrative to get rid of them than to keep them on and collect rent on them. It would seem to make more sense for zoning laws to require multi-family homes (or in-law units), or at least to incentivize creating more of them. If there are 10,000 illegal in-law units, and say, the next mayor decides to crack down, rental prices will go up like crazy, even in places like the Tenderloin.
Give the landlords incentives to legalize the dwellings (rebates on the work for bringing units into compliance for example). In some cases this would require lowering the legal size of a unit, which I believe they are planning to do anyway to allow developers to build sub 300 square ft units. It's not as if San Francisco is above sweet heart deals to get what it wants (see mid Market development).
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.
> First came the arbitration hearing, where Inge’s lawyer and the landlord’s lawyers tried to strike a deal to avoid any type of elongated legal dispute. This ended somewhat peacefully: Withrington agreed to pay Inge a settlement of $14,000 in resettlement fees, and she signed a contract agreeing to vacate the property within 60 days. The first eviction notice was issued.
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.”
Inge has an amalgam of health issues, the most serious of which is her high glucose levels. She has to take daily insulin shots, which must be chilled on ice.
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.
> 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.
I just don't get how you can defend this tenant at all. She was constantly unpleasant, didn't pay rent, didn't even bother trying until the last possible second at which point it was "well what options do I have?" It's as if she believed she deserved to live in a house she didn't own for the same price in perpetuity. How does this belief make any sense and why should people sympathize with it? The idea that the owner had to pay his tenant 14k to get her out while she was refusing to pay rent and didn't leave anyway is absolutely maddening. These laws need to change.
It wasn't until she was aware the owner was trying to evict her that she stopped paying rent. Why would anyone continue to pay rent in that case?
> 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.
Are you referring to the person who bought a property knowing about an illegal rental unit and ultimately took their money for years until it was opportune to kick out the nearly destitute leasee?
They "took her money" because they were providing her a place to live at far below market. The only reason they kicked her out is she didn't give them any other option. If you're such a pain in the ass your neighbors report you to the city it's hard to get may people to show up for your pity party.
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.
... Or the person profiting from it. If there was a fine of something like 3x all rent you have collected on an illegal unit to the current owner it would take care of itself--no one would buy a place with an illegal apartment in it (like this guy did, fully willing to keep taking the money for 10 years) and no one would be tempted to make any more illegal apartments. Just make it easy to check with the city about the legalities.
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.
1. The Bay Area as a whole has pretty good public transit.
2. There are plenty of cheap single room rentals outside of SF.
3. She wasn't living on public property. It's private.
Sure. It's just the knee jerk reaction that the person not paying rent is the one "screwing someone over" and not the landlord who has collected illegal rent for years and gets to skip out on the responsibilities that entails.
I'm pretty sure that was the best he could at the time. If it was possible, he probably would have evicted her sooner. It's also not like she's completely helpless or didn't know about the home being for sale, and there are plenty of cheap rooms near public transit for rent in the Bay Area.
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.
Are you actually missing the point this badly or just ignoring it on purpose?
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.
I'd expect a hefty fine... It seems like there's no penalty for being the landlord of an illegal unit other than having to cease and desist. He should have had to C&D and pay up a multiple of all the rent ever paid on the unit.
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.
"According to Inge, she pursued some of these options, but was turned off by the no-guarantee nature of the wait-lists, and felt she was entitled to stay where she was."
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.
Even worse- "Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage."
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.
It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there?
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?
There might be many cases of rich vs. poor in San Franscisco and I'm not disputing that your arguments might be perfectly suited to those. However, if the case presented in this article is the best the author(s) could find, then we're seeing an example of sloppy journalism. Here's why:
"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 not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there?
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
It's not about her being poor so much as uncivil. When you stop paying your rent and you've destroyed the value of the building you live in and fight with the neighbors, it makes it very hard for anyone to want to help you. If she had been cooperative, I don't think this would have even been a story.
> It's not easy for people to just pack up and move. What if you've lived there your whole life? What if your friends and family lived there? What if your job was there?
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.
You echo a lot of other comments. Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain." That's not a valid argument. Being forced to move sucks, no matter who you are.
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.
> Boils down to "I've had to relocate, so nobody else gets to complain."
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.
From the sound of the article she has no family and whatever friends she has don't like her enough to let her live with them.
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.
That's what the majority of people in this thread seem to say, and this lack of empathy is disheartening. There's some dick a few comments up that said people uproot themselves all the time, "he did it when he was 18 and left for college". Unbelievable. It's sad to slowly see where all the techie-hate comes from, the entitlement and lack of basic empathy demonstrated in this thread is eye-opening.
There 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.
I 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.
What point were you trying to make? I assumed you weren't talking about rich assholes getting evicted for unconscionable behavior, since that would be completely irrelevant to the discussion about gentrification (at least, as far as I could tell). Instead, I fuzzily matched your argument to the nearest one that I thought made sense in context ("they could have found an even less sympathetic postergirl for evictees if that was their agenda") and I answered the fuzzily matched argument.
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.
> 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.
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.
I 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).
It 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).
I 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.
I 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.
The article is a Rorschach test for housing policy. Do you see yourself as the vulnerable elderly tenant, forced to move and abandon your longtime existence? Or the kindly landlord, trapped between two contradictory legal regimes?
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.
Granted it is very hard to evict a rent-controlled tenant in San Francisco, so I can understand your trepidation, but San Francisco rent control already works pretty much like your prescription: there is an annual allowed rent increase, and rents reset when the tenant moves out.
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.
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.
I am sorry to hear you feel like that. To offer a counter perspective: I found the article to be unusually well-balanced. It was sympathetic to both her and the landlord.
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).
a) These articles and discussions of them routinely talk about homeless people in very negative terms that are akin to racism, sexism, or similar. I find that personally frustrating because my status as a homeless person gets used as an excuse to be dismissive of me personally. I feel that is one of my biggest issues as a person on the street. I can manage to keep myself safe, fed, etc. But the stigma when people realize I am homeless causes me problems. I get looked upon with suspicion, etc. This is true both online and off. (Yes, I realize I could in theory keep my big mouth shut about my housing situation online. I have my reasons why I don't.)
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.
How come they never write articles like this profiling the 22-year-old who's just starting out in the world and is desperatly trying to make ends meet while paying market rate for a tiny apartment?
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?
The reality is that none of us deserve anything. The so called social welfare is nothing but a government's excuse to reduce our liberties.
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.
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 ?
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.
I do not think government can take away citizen's liberties just because it wants to make government's life simple. This is even more applicable to the weaker sections of the society because they are far more vulnerable. I am sure government can be more creative to come up with better enforceable laws in these cases. It is not in the interest of both tenant and landlord to frequently find themselves visiting a court. They are likely to come up with their own settlement in most cases.
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 ?
Government regulations are the villain here. Is it legal or stay in a car with cat litter around but living in a room with height less that 7' is illegal ?
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.
> Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage.
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.
> When the current owners, the Withrington brothers, purchased the property in 2002, Inge came with it.
> 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.
> 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.
While everyone focuses on the main problem, I'd say the moral of the story here for home buyers is to avoid buying any problematic homes. When my parents recently purchased a new home they made it damn sure the home has no existing warrants/tickets/legal issue to handle and they ensure no one lives in the house. They visited several homes before they could settle one that was nice, cheap and problem-free. Sometimes it's better to take less risk than having to scratch your hair for years.
I had a friend who bought a house with an elderly renter and she ended up going through months of running around to find her a new place to live. I imagine that some locales make relocating an existing renter easier or harder but it can clearly be a real nightmare. Obviously it's not pleasant for the elderly renter wither but I'm not sure I see the reasonable alternative.
The intersection of Mission & 16th Street is price-equivalent to Greenwich Ave & Jane Street. Assuming price per square foot is a proxy for the ratio of demand to supply, these are the most coveted locations to live in the world.
Should a retired taxi driver be able to afford such a ___location? Should we be upset that she cannot?
Indeed. From the fact that we should care for the poor, it simply doesn't follow that we should give them luxury goods. We'd scoff at someone who suggested giving the poor vouchers for caviar. But do the same thing with housing instead of food, and ...
After seeing some eviction processes myself, I'm not sure what more one can do for someone like this.
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?
The article is very carefully written, such that the reader can take issue with whatever fits their own bias. Its a very well done article in general, and provides ammo for both sides to sling each other with.
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.
Unproductive people can be unproductive anywhere, and it does not make sense for them to take up precious space in places like San Francisco or New York City. They should move to cheaper areas.
The real issue is a systems issue caused by an artificially induced shortage of housing caused by "rent seeking" (politics that induce artificial shortages) through zoning ordinances.
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.
You can change the rate, but with an expanding planet and continuing flight to cities there's no end in sight. So ultimately, old people quit being able to afford where they live. It's not going to change soon, but as you observe you may be able to change the rate at which it occurs.
A nice fair seeming but utterly slanted portrayal of the gentrification process. Real life is eccentric. All the polished startups and gadgets in the world won't permanently pave over the fact that focusing on the needy as disheveled and ratty is as insidious as an author can be.
This story tells the tale of a capitalist's hassles.
Within a few weeks of the eviction, the landlord put the property on the market for $1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002.
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 would think a property owner would have an implicit right to "go out of business" when a lease term expires. Every lease I've ever signed had a clause that at the end of the least it can only be renewed, with notice, if BOTH parties agree.
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.
You made a mistake in your calculation because you ignored leverage. Most people buy a house using some combination of equity and debt (usually 20% / 80%).
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.
If you don't count the rent during that time... It housed her illegal apartment as well as two other families. Her $500 rent alone would be $72,000. I'm sure the other units (non rent-control) were fetching quite a bit more.
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.
Another whine story. I do feel sorry for those people that legitimately deserve it. You know, women in the middle east who are beaten or stoned to death for not wearing berkas, or orphans in Africa dealing with genocidal warlords.
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 sounds like she moved there when it was cheap. Is it reasonable to expect her to leave her friends, contacts, etc that she's built up over decades because the city is changing? Housing isn't widgets: it's not easy to move to a cheaper type if your current type gets expensive. There isn't an easy answer to this sort of problem, but to imply that she should simply "move somewhere else" is simplistic in the extreme.
>Is it reasonable to expect her to leave her friends, contacts, etc that she's built up over decades because the city is changing?
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.
Well, there sort of is a right to live exactly where you want for the rest of your life. It's called buying the property. There are very few exceptions to this (something about property tax, and prop 13 mitigated that pretty well).
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
Exactly. She has no more right to live in SF than I have to live in Malibu. If she is entitled to 500/mo rent in SF, why am I not entitled to some nice 500/mo rent on the beach?
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.
Lets say that I was once struck very hard in the head by a frisbee, and the moral center of my brain now causes me to believe myself entitled to live in Malibu.
Wanting something is not the same as deserving something.
My entire point is that I reject this ridiculous premise. People who currently live in SF don't have any more of a "right to SF" than anybody else. Thinking otherwise is just plain old xenophobia.
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.
The ironic part here is that it was an illegal unit and the owner of that unit is making nearly a million dollars while the person who has paid rent for decades is homeless. Why isn't there a huge fine for renting an illegal apartment for years? Seems like a great gig to collect money from someone until you want to report yourself and get permission to evict them and flip the property.
The tenant is also aware of the legal status of the unit.
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.
Actually there is. It's called Rent Control and it protects the elderly from stuff like this (because they need the protection). As far as I'm concerned, the landlord simply found a loophole.
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".
Think of it this way: she was renting a room in the house, except as a courtesy to each owner she would to come in through the garage.
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:
There was never any question if the unit was illegal. Everyone involved knew that it was (hence my absolutely minimal sympathy for everyone involved, except perhaps^W the cat.) The new owner did not declare the unit to be illegal, the city did.
> hence my absolutely minimal sympathy for everyone involved, except perhaps 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.
I like how you can read an article that details all of the ways in which this woman was a terrible and destructive tenant and then say "Oh yeah, she was definitely evicted because the asshole landlord wanted to flip the property".
and they owned the place (and let her live there) for 10 years before they had had enough of her. 10 weeks is a pretty long flip.... 10 years is not a flip at all.
My parents bought their house in the 1980s. They paid it off 100%.
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.
>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?
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 )
In theory yes, in their specific case they are a lot happier. Moved to a warmer climate, their neighborhood has a lot of people their age and they have many new friends and enjoy it. They still come back and see the old friends & family often enough. Overall a great decision, but definitely influenced by the fact that paying for the house they had owned the last 30 years did not make sense for 2 people - and there aren't really cheaper options in the area.
It's not that I don't feel sympathy for her, but yes, cities change and it's something you simply have to be aware of if you're living in one. If you're planning on being a life-long renter, you're really taking a risk that this will happen to you, too, if the prices ever experience a big boom as they have in San Francisco. If she had bought property back when it was cheap, she might be a millionaire today. If over the course of her life she could never afford to buy anything in the city, though, then evidently it wasn't ever really "cheap" relative to her income (or else she just wan't frugal enough).
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.
San Francisco has Rent Control ordinances, so as long as the unit was legal, she could have stayed there for the rest of her life (which she probably expected).
Saying that if you change the details of a story, then the details are different doesn't actually mean anything and doesn't have any bearing on the story as it happened.
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.
I live in Hayward amongst plenty of people making her income or less. She can come be my neighbor if she wants & still be within a bart ride of her friends.
Is it reasonable to expect her to move out when she can't afford it? I can't think of anything more reasonable. Housing isn't guaranteed. This isn't simplistic. It's how the housing market works. It might not be fair, but that doesn't make it wrong. Plenty of us have had to face a move because of cost. It's not easy, but we don't whine about it, we accept the consequences and we deal with life.
It looks like the Entitled do not consider it to be a privilege. To them once you rented a place somewhere for x years, you are entitled to live at that place indefinitely.
Blaming this on politicians is lazy and narrowsighted. Compromise is a two way street:
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 :)
In an SF rent control unit, if the tenant signs a 1 year lease, are they able to decide if they stay or not after the 1 year initial lease term is over?
Yes, unless their landlord is able to evict them for whatever reason. (And, to be clear, all or essentially all rental units in SF are subject to rent control).
I hadn't realized the post-1979 thing! Sorry for the misinformation above. I guess that every place I ever considered renting in SF was an older building.
The comments here are a good example of how the predominantly white male upper class tech population that is moving in is changing SF's culture from a unique semi-socialist one to the same capitalist-uberalles culture of upper class white males everywhere. It's the latest colonization.
"Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage. But for 50 years, she has built a life for herself in San Francisco, and that’s something she doesn’t want to give up."
The empathy deprived Randian hordes that flock to these stories on HN to display their superiority over those less well off than them make me physically ill.
What empathy is one supposed to have for this person? She lived in their house, refused to pay rent, filled it with trash and feces, started fights with neighbors and refused any help. What empathy are you expecting people to have at that point?
I'm sure plenty of people, including myself, have sympathy for everyone involved, including the tenant, landlord and social workers. I don't have any sympathy for the lawyers who got to profit from other peoples suffering.
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.
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.