Board of Supervisors President David Chiu introduced legislation
Tuesday that would make it more difficult to evict tenants and then
build a car garage, and also change the number of parking spaces
allowed per dwelling unit in San Francisco’s northeast neighborhoods.
“A recent survey of new garage permit applications show that almost
a half of all permit application to build new garages there have been a
previous mass eviction involving the Ellis Act,” Chiu said. (The Ellis
Act, which state legislators passed in 1986, granted landlords the
legal right to evict tenants if they no longer wanted to rent out their
housing but sell it on the market instead.) “Working class and lower
income tenants have been evicted under the Ellis Act in the North Beach
area so that new owners can build garages and less dense units. We are
talking about less housing and more garage parking.
The legislation would require anyone who wants to build a parking
garage and who evicted tenants using the Ellis Act to have to obtain a
special permit to build the garage. The permit would require public
hearings and would be appealable to the Board of Supervisors.
Also, the legislation would “modernize parking controls in the north
east neighborhoods of our city” by implementing the parking rules
developed in the recent Market-Octavia plan.
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