Comments on: Four More Rent-Controlled Homes Gone: Tenants Settle With Investor Who Admits To Real Estate Fraud

By: stanmill

stanmill — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 19:01:00 +0000

to neutral
I agree with you. My point is that “rent control” is not that noble. People are out for themselves, rich and poor. If people could get free food or a free vacation, they would do it. I include myself. And rent control does distort the market. I PERSONALLY know of situations where single people lived in a two bed apartment and did not move because it was cheap rent.

By: neutral_corner

neutral_corner — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 07:10:00 +0000

Rent control didn’t start in San Francisco to help the poor; rent control in San Francisco came about because wealthy seniors didn’t want to see more of their income go toward the increasing rents on their long-held rental homes. It wasn’t the poor who brought about rent control in San Francisco; it just feels that way.

By: stanmill

stanmill — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 20:45:00 +0000

My suggestion that people share their City apartment with people in Antioch was a little sarcasm mixed with satire.
The point was (IMHO) that people are out for themselves. people want to live in the City because they have the cafes, the museums, the bars to hang out in. Most people want this, who wants to live in Baker, California. So they favor rent control, why wouldn’t they? Someone else (NOT EVEN THE LANDLORD, BUT OTHERS WHO WOULD PAY THE RENT) is subsidizing their life style. God forbid that they can’t have their latte every morning in some hip coffee place.
But with rent control and a cheap apartment (below the true market rent) they can have all the $5.00 coffees they want.

By: mmathers

mmathers — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 19:44:00 +0000

Means testing is something I’ve thought about as well. Have you reached out to your local Supervisor? I pinged Scott Weiner about it and he didn’t think it was politically viable. He also believed that it would give landlords an incentive to only rent to higher income people (which doesn’t make sense to me as higher income ppl are the ones already paying the higher rents anyway). If you feel that this is a viable solution, i would encourage you to bug your supervisor about it.

As far as your suggestion that people split their time between here and Antioch if they can’t live in SF fulltime, well, even I see that your suggestion is probably a non-starter.

-mm

By: bobster1985

bobster1985 — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 17:46:00 +0000

The Ellis Act should not allow speculators to buy properties and flip them. There should be a 5-year minimum ownership required before an owner can apply for an Ellis Act eviction. That would stop a lot of this speculation.

By: stanmill

stanmill — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 07:31:00 +0000

People pay Federal taxes that go for food stamps. That means, society as a whole has decided to aid people to get food. With rent control you have an individual directly subsidizing another. Let the City propose a tax on all citizens, to pay towards rent control and see how far you get. Renters are a majority, it’s easy for them to tax others. Now listen, rent control is a shotgun, it covers all. The person whose grandfather died and left him lets say $500,000, should he get to live below what others would pay? This happens many times and people will take the extra money and buy a new car. Rent control started out to help the poor (obliviously), but now thousands with money live in rent controlled units and spend money on other material things. Think it through, rent control now is not working, it’s arbitrary and distorting. Why don’t you be fair to others who want to live in the City? Let people in rent control units live here for six months and then trade with someone in Antioch who wants to live here. See what I’m getting at. This is not a noble cause. People want good things for themselves, it’s human nature. It is self interest and I’m not really a Libertarian, but it’s true. One more thing, you said people spent their lives here, so when that unit becomes vacant to a new renter, it should become free market forever. There are so many permutations to consider with rent control. The bottom line is, it’s unfair to others who want to live here.
It locks people out and makes newer units more expensive.

By: le_sacre

le_sacre — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 06:51:00 +0000

Rent control is a tough issue to think through. But the food analogy is really inapt. If food prices started to spike because of shortage in supply, it would be trivially easy to bring in more food to meet the demand.

I support mom&pop’s rights, but going into the landlord business shouldn’t be a frivolous thing, as housing is a huge deal in people’s lives (the hugest, by many measures). If mom&pop are upset they can’t raise the rent (to what, offset their oh-so-rapidly rising property taxes??), they should put the property on the market or should never have started renting it out in the first place. I can see the libertarian argument that people who can’t afford to live in SF anymore can always move somewhere else–except for when they can’t because they’ve built their entire lives, families, and responsibilities here. The whole purpose of government is to protect the less powerful from the more powerful, because the health of the society overall is built on the labor, demand, and vitality provided by the relatively powerless majority. It doesn’t take much compassion–or common sense–to see housing as a human right, which means that tenants’ rights must in many cases trump property-owners’.

Do you really think, if we had no rent control, there would be enough extra vacancy available to absorb the current high demand without a huge spike in market rental rate? Seems pretty unlikely–such a system could conceivably work for long term trends, but when you have a massive influx of wealthy young renters like the past couple of tech surges here, it seems clear that a system without rent control would almost immediately price huge numbers of vulnerable tenants right out of their SF lives, to everyone’s eventual detriment. Particularly since we can’t go back in time to prevent rent control from starting and hope that would lead to huge increases in developing new housing supply.

By: stanmill

stanmill — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 04:43:00 +0000

Lipton’s legal problems have nothing to do with this building. I rented for many years of my life and knew I was a tenant. I could give notice and move anytime, if I found a better place. Then years ago all of a sudden, tenants had “rights” to black mail the owner. Food is more important than a place to live and yet we don’t have food control. The largest landlord in Cal probably owns less that 2% of all units, if that. Most owners are mom and pops and yes some are rich dudes, too. Most owners work years to save money to buy an apartment building and then they have to go thru this.
Rent control distorts the market and makes rentals scarce.

By: cedichou

cedichou — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 18:52:00 +0000

Headline is catchy, but a tad misleading. The investor does admit to real estate fraud, but to a different case and for different buildings than the one in question here. “tenants settle with investor who admits to fraud” seems to connect both cases.

I would have loved to see numbers for the buy-out! Oh well. I’m hoping the elderly ones got $100k. At least, they got the 2 years of rent difference with market rate that Campos wants to impose on Ellises…

I find this interesting as well: “Combined, the Inner and Outer Richmond have one of the highest Ellis eviction rates in the city, District One Supervisor Eric Mar told The Appeal.” This does not seem to square with the “Google-is-destroying-San-Francisco” narrative, I don’t think the outer richmond is ground zero for shuttle bus activities…