Re: San Francisco Goes Even More Communist

On 2024-12-29 5:10 PM, shawn wrote:

On Sun, 29 Dec 2024 21:48:12 +0000, BTR1701 <no_email@invalid.invalid>
wrote:
 

The city now rapes landlords for $117,000 in exchange for giving
'permission' to legally evict a tenant.
>
https://twitter.com/wallstreetapes/status/1872837043816103998?s=46

  That may have been the desire (to get more $$$ to the government) but
according to one of the comments on that tweet and it hasn't been in
effect since 2014.
 "The ordinance, written by our socialist supervisors, was struck down
by the district court."
   " The Levins, along with other landlords, challenged the ordinance in
federal court, arguing that it was unconstitutional. In October 2014,
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled in favor of the landlords,
stating that the city’s ordinance crossed a constitutional line by
imposing such substantial financial burdens on property owners. He
noted that while the ordinance aimed to address a public issue—the
housing shortage—it unfairly placed the cost on individual landlords.
 As a result of this ruling, the ordinance was struck down, and
landlords were no longer required to make these large relocation
payments under that specific law."
 

I'm glad to see that sense prevailed in this case!
However, the thing I don't understand about this law is why the city thought it was entitled to ANY money at all in these circumstances. If a fine went to the tenant who was evicted to compensate them for their time and trouble in locating a new home, that would make some sense, although not at the level the fine was set. But giving the city money for a property owner to lawfully evict someone? That makes no sense at all.
The situation described in this case is similar to something that happens here too. A landlord gives an eviction notice to someone, claiming that extensive renovations have to be done to a rental but the renovations would be too long-lasting and intrusive for the tenant to stay in the rental while repairs proceed, forcing an eviction. Then, the landlord charges much more rent to the new tenant on the grounds that it is a much nicer apartment/rental. (I'm not sure if the government ever gets involved to make sure the renovations actually happened; if not, it would be entirely possible to evict someone out and then rent the unchanged apartment for much more money.) Someone has coined the term "renoviction" for this process. Various municipalities have written bylaws to make renovictions harder but I'm not sure that any of them have been tested in court yet.
Another version of a renoviction is when a landlord evicts someone to move a member of his own family into the rental unit. When I was living in Toronto, a woman in an adjacent apartment told me that the landlord had threatened her with that when she refused to pay the major rent increase that he wanted. But she took him to the Rent Review Board - we have rent control in Ontario - and won, which forced the landlord to dramatically REDUCE the rent on the apartments: mine went down from $800/month to $300/month!
--
Rhino