It’s always fun to watch someone in politics talk about creating to solutions to a problem they created. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who was so determined to “bring downtown back” that he threw out the welcome mat for every AI company around, now has to admit there’s a “rent emergency.” That problem exists to a great extent because of AI company money.
So he’s got a plan, he says, to address it. He calls it a “rent relief” package. It includes not one dollar of rent relief.
It includes nothing to prevent evictions, except this:
Legislation sponsored by Mayor Lurie will increase by 25%, nearly $3,000 per person, required payments to tenants being displaced under the Ellis Act to reflect the increased cost of finding a new apartment in San Francisco.
For starters, the Ellis Act is an evil piece of legislation that allows speculators to buy up rent-controlled buildings, evict all the tenants (for no cause at all), and flip them as tenancies in common, a form of condos. The threat of an Ellis eviction is often enough to convince a long-term tenant to accept a buy-out—that is, to take a lump-sum payment in exchange for moving out.
If tenants fight the eviction and lose, they get a tiny pittance in statutory transition payments, and the mayor’s proposal will add so little that it’s worth almost nothing. You can’t even pay one month’s rent with $3,000, much less first, last, and security deposit.
Former Sup. David Campos got the board to approve a law that would have discouraged Ellis evictions and given tenants a chance: His bill would have mandated that landlords doing Ellis evictions pay the difference between a tenant’s current rent and market rent for four years.
The landlords sued, and a bad court determined that the law was unconstitutional.
Former Mayor Ed Lee supported efforts by former state Sen. Mark Leno to reform the Ellis Act. Lee said that “all roads [to preventing evictions] lead to Sacramento.”
Leno’s bill never got out of committee. Back then, the real estate industry owned the state Legislature.
Today, Big Tech has a lot of influence. If Lurie really wanted to protect tenants, he could get his billionaire backers to help fund a massive campaign to overturn the Ellis Act and Costa Hawkins.
But that’s not happening. Instead, we have a performative press conference that won’t create a single piece of legislation (other than Sup. Jackie Fielder’s bill that prevents evictions over less than a month’s late rent) that will protect a single tenant from getting displaced by the AI boom that Lurie encouraged.
We have seen this so many times before. A mayor loves Big Tech so much that they open up the city for companies that have such deep pockets they drive up the rents for everyone—and gee, great surprise, that leads to evictions.
Then the mayor wrings their hands and says we need to do something to protect tenants—except doing anything that would actually protect tenants.
