UC Irvine Researcher Protested for Evicting Whole Building of Seniors

Thursday, August 6, 2015
Tenants Together

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE    

Contact: Theresa Flandrich, 415-622-6301, Tenant
Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, 415-375-1972, Organizer with Housing Rights Committee of SF                           

August 7th, 2015   

Los Angeles - Tenant rights activists from San Francisco will join tenant advocates from Orange County and Los Angeles at a 1pm, Friday August 7th protest against landlord Annlia Paganini Hill - a researcher at the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders - to ask her to drop her evictions of seniors at a building she owns in San Francisco.

Where: 2642 Biological Sciences III, UC Irvine
When: 1pm, Friday August 7th

Ironically, Hill works as a researcher at UC Irving studying the question: “What makes people live to age 90 and beyond?” It is well documented in studies that evictions cause serious health problems for seniors, including increased risk of heart attacks. Activists are demanding that she rescind the evictions and walk the talk about caring for the health of seniors.

“We are a community. We take care of each other, but that is being destroyed,” said Theresa Flandrich, one of the tenants that Hill is evicting using the Ellis Act. “I have been watching these evictions take devastating tolls on my neighbors’ health.”

Steven Luftman - a Los Angeles tenant who is also being Ellis Act evicted from his long-term home in the Beverly Grove neighborhood - said, “At first Ellis Act evictions were something we saw in the news about San Francisco, but now it is a huge issue in Los Angeles in many neighborhoods.”

About the tenants in Hill’s building:
Silvio is a 68-year-old, nearly blind, Vietnam Vet and 2nd generation Italian American, who grew up in North Beach; his daughters and grandchildren live 5 blocks away.

Elaine, 88-years-old, passed away in March. The stress of "having nowhere to go" exacerbated her heart condition.

Theresa Flandrich, raised her grown son in the unit, took care of the previous landlord, Annlia’s aunt, from 2006 until her death in 2010 and managed the building for the last year of that landlord’s life. Theresa has been fighting her eviction for over a year and in that time has also worked hard to support others. She formed the first-ever North Beach Tenants Association in her neighborhood in San Francisco.

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