Housing crisis taking toll with no-fault evictions

Jennifer and Dean Jameson pictured in their living room in a home they have lived in for the past seven years November 14, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif. They found out their rent had been doubled in August and once they informed their landlord they would not be able to afford it, they were given until December 31, 2013 to move out. The two have been searching for a new place for a few months and have not found one yet. less Jennifer and Dean Jameson pictured in their living room in a home they have lived in for the past seven years November 14, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif. They found out their rent had been doubled in August and ... more Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Housing crisis taking toll with no-fault evictions 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Jennifer Mieuli Jameson isn't the kind of person you would expect to be losing her home.

The middle-class, 48-year-old Sunset District resident has manicured nails, well-coiffed hair and neat clothing. A paralegal who was laid off during the economic downturn, she now runs a nonprofit dog rescue organization. Her husband works in information technology for a law firm. She is not elderly or disabled. She has not lived in her rental for decades.

And when she and her husband are forced out of their Sunset District home because their rent is doubling, they will not be counted among the city's evictions.

Jameson's plight underscores the challenges San Francisco leaders are facing as they attempt to tackle the city's housing crisis. It is a situation rooted in limited housing stock and a surge in demand that has pushed the median rent up from $2,968 in 2010 to $3,414 this year and more than doubled no-fault evictions over the past year.

While activists, politicians and the public's attention have been focused largely on Ellis Act evictions, the problem appears to be much more widespread.

Rent to double

Mieuli Jameson, whose family has lived in San Francisco for three generations, is simply being priced out. This summer, her landlord informed her that he was going to double the rent from $2,000 to $4,000, after he successfully petitioned the city's Rent Board to exempt the 21st Avenue home from rent control.

While the home has an in-law unit - making the house subject to San Francisco's strict rent control ordinance, even though it's a single-family home - a little-known state law allows owners to seek an exemption if they can prove the unit is not being used. In July, an administrative judge declared the home is not subject to rent control under the Costa-Hawkins Act.

"This is an outrage to me. I don't think I am more or less entitled to be here than anyone else ... but those of us who have not made a lot of money are being punished by being removed from our homes," she said. "The crisis has fallen on normal people like us, with normal jobs and normal incomes. ... It's my community, and it's hard, at almost 50, to think of having to leave."

The housing issue has come into sharp focus in recent months and attracted increasing attention from City Hall policymakers. This week, Mayor Ed Lee, Supervisors David Campos and David Chiu and several state lawmakers announced they are pursuing changes to state and local laws in an attempt to curb Ellis Act evictions, which more than doubled to 116 between March 2012 and February 2013 compared with the previous year.

Yet during the same time period, there were 611 no-fault evictions in total. The discrepancy indicates that even if these officials are able to deter Ellis Act evictions, they won't be able to solve the city's housing crisis overnight.

Such evictions are only one part of the displacement problem. Owner move-in evictions are much more common, and housing experts representing both landlords and tenants agree that there are probably two to three buyouts, in which an owner offers a tenant money to leave, for every one eviction. Under state and local law, landlords may evict tenants if they violate the terms of their lease; if the owner wants to move into the property; or, under the Ellis Act, take it off the rental market.

Lot of jobs, few units

It also seems likely that the Costa-Hawkins Act will be increasingly used as rents rise in outer neighborhoods, where there are more single-family homes.

"The big issue, above and beyond all of this, is that we created 68,000 new jobs last year and added something like 120 new housing units," said Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, which represents building owners. "It's a supply-and-demand problem. How do we get out of this? Well, next year 6,000 new rental units will be coming online ... and a lot more are coming on."

There are 6,168 housing units under construction in San Francisco, with about 20 percent of those set up as affordable housing, according to the mayor's office. An additional 3,902 have construction permits, but building has not yet begun. Thousands more are planned.

Under city law, developers constructing market-rate buildings with 10 or more units are required either to make 12 percent of those units affordable, build the equivalent of 20 percent of those units as affordable housing at another site, or pay a fee so the city can build affordable housing.

"This is going to help - not today and tomorrow, but within a year from now," New said. "My owners are already seeing rents plateau and drop as more units come on."

Not everyone is so optimistic about prices leveling out, but activists representing tenants agree that more housing stock is the long-term solution. But they are concerned that without city intervention, developers will build expensive, small homes that don't serve the needs of low-to middle-income San Franciscans, particularly families. Any new housing will not fall under the city's rent control ordinance, which applies only to buildings constructed before 1979.

"There's enough housing in the pipeline, both approved and in the approval process, that if there was a commitment to build affordable housing, it would begin to make a difference," said John Eller of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a community organization that advocates for housing opportunities.

"But everything has been at the whim of the market, and if you allow developers to put $11 million into off-site housing, that won't create affordable housing for five to 10 years," he said. "If you instead build (it) on-site, that affordable housing will be built in two years."

Development money

Many developers are opting to pay the fee rather than building affordable housing themselves. In the past fiscal year, the city received $17 million in affordable housing fees, while so far in the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2014, that amount is up to $20.6 million.

The money collected since July 2012 alone is enough to support financing for almost 4,000 affordable housing units, according to Lee's office, but only 106 of those units have been completed, with an additional 70 under construction. Those are expected to be done in early 2015.

Lee also won voter approval a year ago for a package of changes to spur housing production that included lowering the amount of required affordable housing for developers from 15 percent to 12 percent and setting up dedicated funding that provided an additional $20 million out of the city budget for affordable housing this year. So far, $13.8 million of that has been allocated to four projects with a combined 265 units of affordable housing. Construction is to start next year.

As they wait for more affordable housing to become available, tenants say they will continue to talk about the households being pushed out of San Francisco each year by Ellis Act evictions, said Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee, which offers free counseling to tenants. In part, she said, Ellis Act evictions are troublesome because they remove a building permanently from the city's rent-controlled housing stock, driving rents up more.

"Ellis Act evictions are just a small part of the problem ... but they are really emblematic of the crisis, because they tend to target vulnerable tenants - the elderly and disabled who are in long-term, rent-controlled apartments," she said. "The other reason they are emblematic of the crisis is that they tend to be done by speculators, corporations coming into the city to prey on these folks for greed ... and it causes a total displacement of community, because rents are so sky high that when you lose your home, you have to leave the city."

Some owners say they are being unfairly vilified for simply wanting to make a return on their investment.

Landlords vilified

Josephine Zhao, who owns a two-unit building in the Inner Sunset, said the fever pitch of concern over displacement has created a situation where landlords are portrayed as evil simply for owning property.

Zhao has not had to evict a tenant, she said, but understands why some property owners with rent-controlled units want to get out of the business, especially when tenants are paying only a fraction of what the unit is now worth.

"We made a lot of sacrifices, saved every penny," to buy a building, she said. "I am not a charity service, to take care of you until the end of your life - I couldn't even do that for my parents."

On the other side are tenants such as Patricia Kerman. A senior on a fixed income, Kerman has lived in her Mission District apartment since 1986 and got an Ellis Act eviction notice in August. Because she is elderly, she has a year from the notice date before she has to leave.

"I haven't had a good night sleep in weeks. I am terrified," she said. "They offered me a buyout, but I didn't take it because a roof over my head is more important than money. I have 9 1/2 months. I don't know what I am going to do."