While working San Franciscans struggle daily to afford necessities like rent, healthy food and healthcare, billionaires and corporations are enjoying record breaking profits. Why then are some of our local elected officials permitting Greystar Real Estate Partners, the nation’s largest corporate landlord and property manager, to conduct business in San Francisco? Greystar has a decades long history of defrauding tenants, of rent fixing and gouging and of violating federal and state housing laws.
D5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood recently announced that Greystar will soon build an eight-story multi-unit luxury building (and manage the rental property once built) with ground floor retail at 400 Divisadero, the former Touchless car wash site. Construction is set to begin on October 19. Only 20 units of the currently planned 203 units are designated for permanent affordable housing.
Some might remember during Mahmood’s 2024 campaign, GROWSF paid for and installed a billboard across from the site promising that then candidate Mahmood “would fix” the stalled project. Former D5 Supervisor Dean Preston had been working on a deal for the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation to buy the parcel outright and build fully subsidized homes. The choice was never housing versus no housing (as YIMBYs fraudulently stated). Rather, the challenge was to build an affordable project with increased levels of affordable homes using affordable housing funds (which then-Mayor London Breed and the city refused to do), or building a luxury tower to be constructed (and managed) by market rate developers.
For decades, Greystar has flouted tenant laws and housing regulations. Greystar’s history includes civil rights complaints involving antitrust violations, rent fixing and rent gouging on a massive scale, discrimination, exorbitant junk fees charged to tenants and deceptive advertising. Greystar became a central focus of ProPublica’s 2022 investigative reporting on RealPage, a software company whose algorithmic pricing tool was accused of illegal price-fixing and cartel-like behavior in the national rental housing market. To date, Greystar owns more than 119,000 apartment buildings in multiple states and manages more than 1 million rental units.
ProPublica investigated and exposed how RealPage’s software aggregated sensitive, nonpublic pricing and occupancy data from competing landlords to generate coordinated rent pricing, thereby artificially inflating rents across major US metropolitan housing markets. Greystar has faced subsequent federal class-action antitrust lawsuits filed by tenants and was investigated by the US Department of Justice. The Federal Trade Commission and seven state attorneys general have also investigated, charged and ultimately fined Greystar
In California’s recent statewide elections, Greystar has consistently contributed millions of dollars to kill multiple ballot measures aimed at strengthening tenant protections and expanding rent control.
- Proposition 33 (2024): Greystar, with a coalition of corporate landlords donated millions to defeat the measure, which sought to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act and allow local governments to expand rent control.
- Proposition 21 (2020): Greystar was a major financial contributor to the No on Prop 21 campaign. The initiative, which would have allowed cities to pass rent control on buildings over 15 years old, was defeated following tens of millions in real estate industry spending.
- Proposition 10 (2018): Greystar and its industry peers collectively shelled out millions to fund a massive misinformation campaign to defeat this initial attempt to repeal statewide rent control restrictions.
In July 2016, Greystar carried out what local advocates called the largest mass eviction in Silicon Valley history, displacing roughly 670 residents from a rent-controlled complex in San Jose to make way for a luxury development.
“We have never encountered a landlord that operates with such brazen contempt and hostility toward the rule of law as Greystar,” Aaron Carr executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative said in a statement. “As the largest landlord in America, Greystar should be setting the standard of best practices for the nation, not systematically rejecting legitimate, prospective tenants.”
With evictions at a ten-year high and climbing, and with San Francisco’s rents skyrocketing to the highest levels in all of the nation, why is City Hall unleashing a predatory corporate landlord into our communities? Decades of evidence consistently show that Greystar has discriminated against, harmed, defrauded, and evicted thousands of tenants across the nation. Why are they allowed—and even encouraged by Mahmood—to do business in San Francisco?
