If you’re making a good living in the tech industry, you’re smart enough to go to the Rent Board and check the records on the property you’re considering. If there were tenants living at that address, and they got an Ellis Act eviction notice, and that’s why the place is on the market as a TIC …. Just Say No.
In fact, if you’re looking to buy, tell your real-estate person that you will never consider any place that has current tenants, who you would have to evict, or had tenants in the past who were evicted to make the place marketable as vacant.
If you’re looking to rent, ask the landlord who was living there before, and what happened to them – then cross-check that with the Rent Board. Someone evicted? You’re not interested.
I know, I know, you just want a place to live. But the landlords and speculators are ruining other people’s lives and destroying communities to open up a place for you – and that’s not fair.
You follow these rules, and you’re part of the solution. You’re making evictions less profitable. It might mean you wind up living somewhere other than San Francisco for a while, until something opens up here – but that’s exactly what’s happening to the long-time San Francisco residents who are being forced out to make room for you. It’s not fair that someone with 30 years in this city has to flee for Brentwood or Antioch because speculators are making money off of you.
Hard and fast rule: Don’t be part of an eviction. Tell your friends not to be part of an eviction. Post on Twitter and Facebook: I will not be part of an eviction. If anyone you know is part of an eviction, remind them every day of the Karmic implications of what they have done.
You want an app for that? Easy to track evictions and connect them with Craigslist and For Sale listings – and post a list of all the places that nobody with any ethics should buy or rent. Today, in this housing market, in this city, evictions are evil. Don’t be evil.
2. Share the wealth – in ways that matter. Tech companies are not known for their civic largesse – in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Twitter and Salesforce are both beneficiaries of huge tax breaks that cost the city badly needed money that could have gone to mitigate the impacts they’ve created. The Business Times, no less, argues that Twitter ought to give back its tax break, and that would be a nice start.
But we need a lot more. The luxury buses need to pay a reasonable fee to use Muni stops. In fact, tech workers should easily be able to integrate those buses with the Muni system, track which Muni buses are where, schedule stops so Muni never gets blocked, and give the public buses priority. No brainer.
Salesforce and Twitter ought to demand that their landlords pay the Muni fees that were deferred or never paid – and step up if Shorenstein and Kilroy won’t.
And the tech companies need to understand that they have been a cause of the housing crisis, and they are forcing people who built this community to leave, and they need to help fix that. One thing they have a lot of is money, and there are a lot of nonprofits that are fighting evictions that are desperate for money. How about $1 million a year or more to the Tenants Union, the Housing Rights Committee, the Eviction Defense Center, Legal Assistance to the Elderly (full disclosure – I am on the LAE board, but get no compensation), the Coalition on Homelessness, the Council of Community Housing Organizations and a few others who are trying to protect the vulnerable populations that your wealth is threatening?
3. Spend money on affordable housing. It doesn’t take apps or hackathons to build more affordable housing in San Francisco. We have an excellent infrastructure of nonprofits that know how to do this already. What it takes is money – multiples of tens of millions of dollars. How about sf.citi develops an app to track how many affordable rental units have been lost to Ellis Act eviction and threats of Ellis evictions, and how many San Franciscans have left the city because of housing prices, and Ron Conway and the VC people vow to raise enough money to build an affordable unit for every single person displaced by the tech boom?
Remember: There was a time, not so very long ago, that the very rich paid upwards of 70 percent of their marginal income in taxes. And there was a time (funny; it was the same time) when the federal government spent money on housing in cities. Now the marginal tax rate is about half of that and federal spending on housing is vanishing. Maybe an app could compare what Conway and the gang pay in taxes compared to what previous generations of industrial moguls paid – and how much they give to help the less fortunate in the cities where they operate.
4. Use your influence to help us repeal the Ellis Act and Costa-Hawkins. I’ve talked about this before. So has my old pal Randy Shaw. The tech companies and workers are part of a very fragile city community, and they need to help protect it. That, sadly, requires money – political money. Tom Steyer is willing to put a substantial part of his fortune into an oil-severance tax. How’s about Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Mark Benioff do the same for a measure to allow cities to control their own housing stock, with eviction restrictions and rent controls on vacant apartments?
Yes, tech companies and their workers can be part of the solution. But they need to understand that if they want to help – and if they want people to stop attacking their buses – they need to give back, and be humble, and accept that they are in part responsible for some terrible human tragedies and that their money doesn’t entitle them to push someone else out of San Francisco.
Happy holidays.
