Half a block from Washington Square and its chic cafes, where the
residents smirk at the tourists and the tourists scoff at the price of
coffee (a cup can that set you back $2.50), 84-year old Li Shui lives
with seven others in a shabby single-room occupancy building,
sequestered for decades from a go-go world of surging tourism — and
land values — transforming just beyond their dilapidated walls.
For more than a year, Ms. Li’s landlord, Jim K. Ma, has sought to
evict his tenants, all of whom have lived in the building for at least
20 years under rent control and pay a few hundred dollars’ rent every
month.
But with community groups joining in the tussle and countersuing Mr.
Ma, the fight on Jasper Street is getting a higher profile just as the
debate over tenants’ rights begins to reclaim center stage in local
politics.
Score a win for the city’s tenant advocates this week. On Tuesday, the board of supervisors voted by a 7-to-4 margin in support of a bill
— sponsored by Supervisor John Avalos —that would streamline housing
rules so that units built after 1979 are subject to the same laws as
buildings that went up earlier. If the bill passes, landlords are
barred from evicting tenants without just cause. Mayor Gavin Newsom
said he would veto the bill.
The fight on Jasper involves something else—the Ellis Act, the state
law that allows a landlord to evict all tenants of a building if the
landlord is “going out of business.” Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he
hopes to pass a bill in Sacramento that would forbid Ellis Act
evictions if the landlord has owned the building for less than three
years.
To see seniors protesting is to realize that the optics of this
particular eviction are not great for Mr. Ma: the tenants themselves
are all between the ages of 69 and 89.
“This is a Grinch that stole a bit of humanity here,” Mr. Ammiano
said by telephone. “The weather is cold, the tenants are older. It’s a
very, very crass abuse of the Ellis Act.”
Steven A. MacDonald, the attorney representing the landlord, told
The Times that Mr. Ma intends to sell the building out of economic
necessity. “The rent barely covers insurance on the place,” Mr.
MacDonald said.
He added that the Chinatown Community Development Center is suing
his client on behalf of the tenants on two fronts — “hypertechnical
stuff,” he said — such as failing to maintain the building in the past.
He said his client had already given the tenants an extra 12 months to
move out because they claim to be old or disabled. The lawsuits are an
“unseemly type of behavior,” he said, “while we’ve been in complete
compliance this whole time.”
After watching the recent rally unfold from a staircase window, Ms.
Li retreated to her third-floor common room, a cluttered, yellow space
interrupted by splashes of the bright red of Chinese trinkets. Paint
peeled on every wall.
“I can’t imaging moving now,” said Ms. Li in Cantonese, her only language. “I’m old.”
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