SAN FRANCISCO — Every day, Richard Silver sifts through his mail in fear, worried he will find an eviction notice. After 35 years in the increasingly chic North Beach district here, Mr. Silver has watched as one neighbor has been pushed out.

Now, his rent-controlled building has been sold to a developer, who is trying to clear out all the tenants.

“What am I going to do,” said Mr. Silver, 68, a semiretired entrepreneur who pays $832 a month for his one-bedroom apartment, “just throw my stuff out the window onto the sidewalk?”

With real estate prices in the Bay Area soaring to unseen heights, evictions across San Francisco have hit their highest levels in more than a decade. The convulsion of anger from tenants has taken any number of forms — including protests outside the homes of Google employees and at bus stops where technology workers board commuter vans — but the latest battle will be waged at the ballot box. Next month, voters here will decide on one of the most aggressive anti-eviction efforts ever attempted here: a withering tax on property owners who resell residential buildings within five years of buying them.