Re: San Francisco Goes Even More Communist

On Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:58:46 -0500, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

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.

It wasn't just over the eviction. Apparently there is a fee for
evicting someone that is around a few thousand dollars. The fee was
the apparently either a way for the city to benefit from the increased
rent or to try and penalize someone who is evicting someone to
drastically increase the rent. In this case it looks like they were
doubling the rent from $2k/month to over $4k/month.

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!