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.
The obvious solution to rapidly rising prices is to increase supply, as described here (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) or here (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis...). I've posted both links before but we keep seeing stories like these and the solutions remain the same.
The technology necessary to increase housing supply (steel frames, elevators) is a century old (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valle...) and well-understood. The problem is almost entirely political.