This week, New York magazine, which is rather popular in (wait for it…) New York, decided to do a special series of articles about San Francisco under a banner that asks, “Is San Francisco New York?”
Your Bernalwood editor has deep Manhattan DNA (and a birth certificate to prove it), so we do not believe this to be a sincere question — no matter how much change-induced anxiety might exist at the present time. Nevertheless, included within New York’s story package is a piece by Mac McClelland entitled “Bernal Heights: A Gold-Rush Eviction Tale”:
It was a day last May, more than six years into my residence in the city, when I realized I was soon going to be out of a place to live. Our landlord—a shady, nonsocial guy I heard barking at his wife sometimes in the apartment where they lived above me—had sold our house. It wasn’t even on the market. San Francisco has some of the best tenants-rights laws in the country, but there were still ways we could be ejected. The buyers could move a family member into our apartment. They could take all the units—in our building, there were a total of three—off the rental market through the Ellis Act, which people had lately used to turn formerly rent-controlled units into exorbitantly priced for-sale condos. Ellis evictions were up 170 percent over the previous three years, evictions overall up 38 percent.
But there were other, uncounted cases. In ours, our new landlord, a hip-looking gal around my age who worked at Google, asked us if we would just leave. She said she just didn’t really feel like having tenants. Then she filed a lawsuit against us, alleging we were “causing substantial interference with the comfort, safety, and enjoyment” of others in the building. She said if we signed some papers and vacated, the lawsuit would go away. She called it a “dummy lawsuit”; it sounded so friendly.
“You said you didn’t want to fight, but here we are fighting!” she yelled at me when I called her to talk about this, her voice cracking.
… you know where this is going, right?
Bernalwood reached out to writer Mac McClelland to follow-up on the particulars. Where did she live in Bernal? And where did she end up?
On the bright(ish) side, Bernal celebrity author (and homeowner) Liz Weil also has a piece in the package: Ocean Beach: New-Money Surfers Wipe Out Old S.F.
MAP: Via Visual.ly
Bernalwood 
The area designated as Brooklyn actually was once called by that name. It was later annexed to Oakland. You can see the “Brooklyn” designation in the area now known as East Oakland.
Aren’t we in Bernal more of a Williamsburg or a Park Slope in Brooklyn?
Stardust
If I had to make an analog, I think comparing Bernal Heights to Greenpoint works in some ways (more than others). But really, San Francisco is smaller and less dense than Brooklyn alone, much less Manhattan, so comparisons to the cities-at-large are be pretty tenuous.
“can be” that should read
very sad way for a person (the landlord) to act
EAST OAKLAND was originally incorporated as the city of Brooklyn in the 1850s (it was Gertrude Stein’s childhood home), so the map isn’t really inaccurate. As for the other comparisons the NYC, one has to go back only to the Bechtel postwar plan to see that zoning and development of the Bay Area under its model is not far removed from the NYC plan.
Sorry, but what you write-off as my “change induced anxiety” in practically every other post on this blog is no such thing. Sky-high housing prices, gentrification, eviction, displacement, increased disparity between the haves, have littles, and have nots… That’s what I’m anxious about. Your alienating word choices–in even the most innocuous articles–are very revealing. Speaking just for myself, I’m not afraid of change at all. The change I’m after will make you a bit anxious though.
I don’t think fear of eviction or inequality is what is being “written off”. What is being written off is the knee-jerk opposition to new construction, development, population growth, or the appearance in the city of people who aren’t necessarily your kind of people.
Bingo! The question is: Do we look at the present and develop solutions to make the future better, or do we look at the present, and wish that it was more like the past. That, for me, is the defining question. Either way, it’s an anxious process.
With all this grousing about high rents, high housing prices, congestion, and whatnot I’ve decided to become a hipster and make lots of money. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Well, maybe you can beat ’em, too, since the Citadel has been taken over by hipsters…
“had sold our house ”
It was never “your” house. You rented an apartment in the building. If you rent a car it’s not “yours” simply because you drive it a certain number of miles.
Money talks, and BS walks. Even in SF.
FWIW… I was suspicious about the author’s assertion that Ellis Act evictions in SF are “up 170 percent over the previous three years.” I didn’t doubt her facts, but I thought it rather conspicuous that she didn’t cite the absolute numbers — just the dramatic percentage increase.
Anyway, I just located her likely source:
Question: Is that an epidemic?
It’s a little unclear what actually happened to the writer. No lawsuit was filed against her, or at least not one that’s in the records of the San Francisco Superior Court. What seems to have happened is that a proposed legal complaint was drawn up and shown to her, but never filed. (Maybe that’s what the new owner meant by a “dummy lawsuit”). That complaint apparently said the writer was causing a nuisance, a very, very difficult basis on which to evict an innocent tenant, especially if the tenants are educated, sophisticated and wealthy enough to fight back, as this one with an admittedly healthy savings account was. Plus, winning a wrongful eviction suit in this town (I’m assuming the tenant didn’t cause any nuisance) would have probably resulted in a judgment big enough to have allowed the tenants to own the property themselves. While it doesn’t say so, the usual price for signing the kind of papers mentioned in the article is a pretty hefty payout.
It would be interesting to know more about this than the writer has so far shared. I think part of the story has been left out.
Look up Cynthia Boedihardjo in the Superior Court filings. Suit was filed against “Tenant One”.
Thank you, that explains it. That is very strange, a complaint against the tenants, whose names were actually known to the landlord (and crossed off the attached lease document), named as Tenants One and Two, claiming they should be evicted because they were causing a nuisance that they refused to abate after a three day notice.
That’s a case they would never win in San Francisco, unless the tenants were total miscreants, which isn’t the case here. I’ve never heard of this eviction technique, but I can imagine that the landlord could threaten to change the names in the complaint to the tenants’ real names if they wouldn’t agree to move out, and hence they would have an eviction suit on their public record. If that was the strategy, it was a really nasty move by the landlord’s attorney. If I was the tenant, I would file a complaint with the State Bar.