While Mayor Lee debates whether to veto a new tenant protection law, one former San Franciscan argues why it’s needed
OCTOBER 6, 2015 — Editors’s note: Mayor Ed Lee is considering whether to sign or veto legislation that would require landlords to accept additional roommates in an apartment or flat as long as the legal occupancy of the unit is not exceeded. Some supervisors, led by Scott Wiener, argued that the law would be unfair to landlords.
At the board hearings, Ross Psyhogios. a tenant-right’s attorney at the Law Offices of Eric L. Lifschitz, presented the story of one of his clients; it’s a tale the mayor might want to consider as he makes his decision.
The story is as follows:
I am an HIV positive gay Pharmacist. I cannot be present at this meeting, but wanted to share my story with you.
After receiving my doctorate in Pharmacy at Purdue University, I moved to San Francisco in 2007. I found an ideal one-bedroom apartment in the Panhandle neighborhood of San Francisco, where I made a life for myself for the next seven years. I had an active social life and was part of San Francisco’s vibrant gay community and developed relationships with doctors whose offices were close by. As a single, HIV positive gay man with no children, being a San Francisco resident was the culmination of a lifetime of hard work – a dream come true.
I was what one would describe as a “model tenant.” I paid rent on time every month, I was friendly with my neighbors, I had a good relationship with my landlord, and I rarely complained about anything. In 2009, my landlord gave me permission to have my then-boyfriend move into my apartment with me. After that relationship ended, I eventually met someone new, and, after over a year of dating, requested permission to move this boyfriend into my apartment in December 2012.
At this point, rents in San Francisco had literally skyrocketed and we would not have been able to afford a market rate apartment together. Also at this point, my landlord had decided to make her son, who was otherwise unemployed, an on-site property manager for the building I lived in. After some back and forth, my landlord’s son asked that my boyfriend fill out a rental application, asked that I sign a new lease with new terms, provide a new security deposit, and pay an increase in rent. I immediately agreed to all of these terms. Unbeknownst to me, these were all pretexts used by my landlord to try to prevent my boyfriend from moving in.
Soon after the application was submitted, my landlord told me that my boyfriend’s application was denied without explanation. I told my landlord I would be solely responsible for abiding by all lease terms, including payment of the full rent. My landlord would not budge, so I let my boyfriend know we would not be able to move into my apartment. Nonetheless, I believed in my right to have my boyfriend stay overnight at my home as long as it was not his permanent residence.
Over the next year the landlord began a campaign of harassment, constantly asking about any kind of noise he thought he heard, and would use these communications to also comment on whether he had seen my boyfriend around, and ask whether my boyfriend was living at the apartment. He even demanded that I give him my boyfriend’s landlord’s contact information, which I did. He then started harassing my boyfriend’s landlord. He eventually also installed a security camera to monitor all our entries and exiting of the property.
After this went on for over a year, I received a three-day notice to quit, accusing me of violating the San Francisco Rent Ordinance in 12 different ways, most of which were related to my boyfriend. The notice included accusations that I was subletting to my boyfriend, allowing him to “use and occupy” my apartment without the prior written consent of the owner, and that I exceeded the occupancy limitation of one person set forth in the lease agreement and the Guest Policy, limiting the number of nights a guest could spend in my home to ten nights in any six-month period. According to my landlords, this meant that I had to leave my home of seven years within three days or risk a lawsuit being filed against me and eventually being forcibly removed from my home.
The landlords then filed the lawsuit and escalated their harassment by deciding to perform major unnecessary renovations to my unit while the eviction action was ongoing. They gave me 24-hour notices to enter my home for every day between the hours of 9am to 5pm for over two consecutive weeks while maintaining the eviction action, but not pursuing it to trial. I had to incur legal expenses to defend against the eviction and to object to the invasion of my privacy and would return home to partial demolition work of my home throughout this period.
Eventually, the harassment persuaded me to abandon my rent-controlled home. I was unable to find any housing that was remotely in my budget as a pharmacist for Rite Aid and had to seek a transfer to work in Sonoma county so I can afford another place to live.
Eviction Protections 2.0 would have drastically changed the outcome of my life by creating protections for tenants, like me, who want their significant others to move in, or even someone who could help pay for rent. My relationship with my boyfriend has since ended and I did not want to be forced to enter into a marriage or domestic partnership solely to maintain my home and should not have been forced to do so.
My story is just one example of how landlords abuse their ability to evict and harass tenants based on lease agreements that limit the number of occupants of a unit in an manner inconsistent with fundamental rights to develop relationships in a measured manner. They are then given a carte blanche to take whatever steps they can argue are necessary to make sure such an absurd lease provision is being followed, including monitoring tenant activity, using the threat of eviction to force tenants to divulge private information, and, as in my case, eventually beating tenants down until they abandon their rent-controlled homes (and, consequently, their lives in San Francisco). I am hopeful that if I have the opportunity to return to San Francisco I will not again be forced to accept the demands of a landlord to limit my ability to date and build a relationship in a normal manner until I find a permanent life partner.
