A Superior Court Judge has officially invalidated San Francisco’s recently adopted law which had expanded eviction protections for tenants with a resident child under 18 years of age and extended said protections to educators – which was defined as any person who works at a school in San Francisco as an employee or independent contractor of the school or its governing body in any role – as well.

While San Francisco’s Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance already prevents a landlord from exercising an owner move-in (OMI) eviction during the school year if the eviction would displace a child under 18 years of age, the new ordinance had extended the protections to include condo conversion, capital improvement and rehabilitation based evictions and eliminated the exception that currently allows an eviction during the school year if the landlord only owns a single unit in the building or has school-age children of his or her own.

From Judge Ronald E. Quidachay’s Order: “Since the Ordinance only regulates when some tenancies may be terminated based on who the tenants are, the Court agrees with Petitioners that it is preempted because it enters the fully-occupied field of the ‘timing of landlord-tenant transactions’ which ‘is a matter of statewide concern not amenable to local variations’.”

The challenge of the ordinance (which had been sponsored by Supervisors Campos, Kim, Mar, Avalos, Cohen, and Breed, and passed unanimously with the Mayor’s signature) was brought by The San Francisco Apartment Association and Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute and argued by Zacks, Freedman & Patterson.