No fault Evictions

As we learned from the documentary there is currently a housing crisis in San Francisco. Big tech companies are coming in and bringing lots of wealth with them. With this, there is a whole new generation of rich people who can afford and want expensive housing. Unfortunately, this has made it so the average person living in San Francisco can no longer afford to live there. Homes being redone and rent prices skyrocketing. Many people have pushed for rent control, with a price ceiling. Because the price ceiling falls below the equilibrium price many landlords are refusing to rent the units and are just holding on to them. Or they decide to sell them so they can make a bunch of money in one go.  Because landlords want to maximize the profit they have begun to evict their residents and replace them with new residents who will pay more. It seems absurd that they can just evict people but under the law these no-fault evictions are legal. There are three types of no-fault evictions that are occurring in San Francisco: evictions due to the Ellis Act, evictions due to owner move-in, and evictions due to demolition.

The Ellis Act is a state law that allows landlords to have the unconditional right to evict tenants to "go out of business." To be able to evict tenants under this act the landlord must evict all tenants and remove all units from the rental market. With the new generation of rich people, landlords are realizing that they could be making a lot more money off selling the units to the rich than renting them to those who are currently renting them. Where price ceilings have been set many landlords are also frustrated because they know they could be making more. In both cases, landlords are able to use the Ellis Act to evict all current tenants and sell all the units to a new landlord or sell each individual unit to people who are willing to pay a lot more than what the landlord was getting for renting the unit.

Owner move-in-evictions are where the owners of the unit evict the residential tenant and move into the unit themselves. Landlords will do this to evict current tenants if they believe that they could make more renting it to a different tenant.

Evictions due to demolition is where tenants get evicted because the building they are currently living in is getting torn down and remodeled. The new building could be new more expensive housing or it could be something that isn't housing such as a new company or gym.

These three forms of no-fault evictions have become increasingly common in San Francisco and are receiving a lot of protest and anger from those who are being evicted an others who make up the middle and lower class of san Francisco. 




https://www.sftu.org/ellis/
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/owner-move-in-omi-evictions.html