Eviction

The City Council approved a temporary moratorium on rent hikes to try to stop the avalanche of displacements impacting many renters throughout the city. The council voted unanimously for the moratorium after first hearing from hundreds of speakers Tuesday night and into the wee hours Wednesday.

The moratorium, a 90-day emergency ordinance that ties the annual allowable rent increase to the consumer price index, provides the city an opportunity to do outreach so tenants know and can exercise their rental rights, City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney said.

Every morning for weeks, Meagen Limes made the same phone call: to a court in Washington, D.C., to see if that day was the day she'd be evicted from her home.

Limes faced eviction because she couldn't pay rent on her three-bedroom apartment in Southeast Washington, where many of the city's poorest residents live.

It can sometimes take weeks before the marshals actually show up at your door, and Limes fully expected to be homeless any day.

Hundreds of tenants at a rent-controlled San Jose apartment complex are about to be displaced by a new high rise development.

The tenants at Reserve Apartments on Wednesday took action to try to get financial help for their unexpected move as as protect other tenants during forced removal.

Many residents at the old 216-unit apartment complex on Winchester Boulevard said they knew it was an uphill battle to save their homes. A huge new development to replace the Reserve apartments by next year will offer more than 600 units, as well as retail shops and a parking garage.

A San Francisco Board of Supervisors committee gave its seal of approval this week to legislation that would protect teachers, school employees, child caregivers, and their families from evictions during the academic year.

CBS 5 reports that while families with kids under 18 are already protected from owner move-in evictions, the new legislation, introduced by Supervisor Campos last month, seeks to extend the same assurances to educators, shielding them from no-fault evictions, Ellis Act evictions excluded.

Mariella Morales has lived at 1561 9th Avenue, San Francisco for 35 years. Born in Lima, Peru, Mariella came to the San Francisco at the age of nineteen and realized her dream of walking over the Golden Gate Bridge and the streets which she had seen in the TV series “the Streets of San Francisco.” It is from her home at 9th Avenue where Mariella worked for decades as a caterer and house cleaner and raised three children as a single mom.

Evicting a teacher during the school year could become illegal if a San Francisco supervisor gets his way.
Under a new proposed ordinance, teachers who live and work in San Francisco could not be forced out of their homes for reasons beyond their control. But for a gym teacher at a Bernal Heights school, it might be too late.

Allison Leshefsky may soon be forced to leave her beloved job as a P.E. teacher at Paul Revere Elementary School.

Last year we reported on the surge of evictions devastating this city. As 2015 began, San Francisco’s Rent Board reported that increasing numbers of tenants were facing evictions. Over the previous four years, eviction notices had increased an average of 13% a year with no sign of abating. The previous fall, Realtor dollars had defeated a central tenant initiative, Proposition G, the anti-speculation tax. Tenant advocates were regrouping and looking for new solutions to what appeared to be an intractable problem.

Evicting teachers who live and work in San Francisco for reasons beyond their control could soon become illegal during the school year under a proposal that will be discussed by supervisors today.

The ordinance amending The City’s administrative code to prevent educators from seeing certain no-fault evictions — owner move-ins, condo conversions, removal of a rental units, capital improvements or substantial rehabilitations — aims to quell increasing worries among teachers that they could lose their home during the school year and fail to find new housing they can afford.

Anahi Cisneros, a business major at Sonoma State University and the first in her family to attend college, is trying to focus on her studies. Instead, she has spent most days for the past month and a half helping her parents search for a new apartment after they received an eviction notice in February.

The family’s search in Sonoma County’s increasingly tight rental market has been frenetic.

For America’s poorest renters — particularly black women — evictions are disturbingly common, trapping them in a cycle of poverty with long-lasting repercussions for their employment, health, relationships and overall stability.

Harvard University sociologist Matthew Desmond captures a riveting and heartbreaking portrait of the growing problem in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book, published this month, comes out of his ethnographic field work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as well as his research on tenants and evictions.