From the June 2008 Newsletter:
By Noni Richen, President |
Fellow small property owners and supporters, thank you for all the effort and dedication you put into working for Prop. 98. Prop 98 would have ushered in the beginning of the end of rent control, clearly a government taking that forces a group of private citizens to assume what should be government’s role—supporting needy renters. | Read More  |
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From the May 2008 Newsletter:
By Noni Richen, President |
Recently, one of our members renewed his
membership at a lower level than last year and
noted on the response form that he had not
found his SPOSFI membership of sufficient value. | Read More |
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From the April 2008 Newsletter:
By Noni Richen, President |
Throughout the seven years I've been updating our database and entering your dues payments, I've often wondered what our Board of Directors does with the information and money. In the last month I've discovered that there's a lot more to being on the Board than just planning entertaining and informative meetings. | Read More |
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From the March 2008 Newsletter:
By Noni Richen |
The beginning of my term as president of SPOSFI coincides with a year of great opportunity for us. Proposition 98, the ballot initiative that could end the destructive practice of using eminent domain to force private property owners to give up their property for the benefit of other private property owners, is on the June ballot. | Read More |
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From the February 2008 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
Since 2003, SPOSFI’s Sacramento Committee has monitored proposed legislation and addressed housing fairness issues at the state level by meeting with legislators and their aides. | Read More |
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From the January 2008 Newsletter:
By Andrew M. Zacks |
Small property owners and landlords won another major victory recently when the California Court of Appeal agreed with SPOSF that the decision in Birkner v. Lam should be certified for publication, making it a precedent for similar cases. | Read More |
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From the November 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision, there has been much discussion about government’s right of eminent domain to seize private property. | Read More |
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From the October 2007 Newsletter:
By Gideon Kramer |
The Sept. 20 TIC Homeownership Summit sponsored by Plan C San Francisco and the TIC Coalition had phenomenal attendance. | Read More |
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From the September 2007 Newsletter:
By Andrew M. Zacks
Local eviction controls are invalid when they conflict with landlord’s good-faith intent to litigate; LA Appellate decision ignores Supreme Court’s ruling |
On August 2, the California Supreme Court decided that Santa Monica’s tenant anti-harassment ordinance is invalid in most respects because it conflicts with and is superceded by the California Civil Code. In striking down the local law, the Court opened wide the doors to the courthouse for small property owners, who have lived in fear that an effort to evict tenants might lead to financial ruin through lawsuits against them for wrongful eviction. | Read More |
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From the July 2007 Newsletter:
By Phil Ting, San Francisco Assessor-Recorder |
As the Assessor-Recorder, I am honored to serve you by valuing your property in a fair and equitable manner according to California Revenue and Taxation Laws, recording your documents with integrity, and providing you with superior and courteous service. I am committed to improving our services and collecting every tax dollar owed to the city. The taxes we generate fund crucial city services including police, fire, public schools, health, neighborhood services, libraries, and social programs. | Read More |
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From the June 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
"Third rail” is a metaphor that denotes an idea or issue so politically charged and “untouchable” that any politician or public official who challenges it risks political suicide. Social Security is often considered the third rail in federal politics. No surprise: in San Francisco politics, the third rail is rent control. | Read More |
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From the May 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
If you think new regulations for rental units are
coming faster and faster, you are right. To understand
where we are today, you have to go back to
the beginning. | Read More |
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From the April 2007 Newsletter:
By Peter Reitz, Executive Director |
In the February newsletter we published this year’s
interest rate to be paid on security deposits held by
the property owner. Many of you asked why the interest
rate is so high. | Read More |
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From the March 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
As small property owners, we sometimes feel that San Francisco’s supervisors spend all their time passing laws that afflict us. Let’s be fair. That isn’t really true. Quite frequently their desire to regulate leads them to pass bad legislation afflicting other segments of San Francisco’s economy. | Read More |
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From the February 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
One of the main goals for SPOSFI this year is to significantly increase our membership. Our goal is a 50% increase. Crazy? Maybe, but I believe it is possible. Politics in San Francisco have gotten so out of line that every small property owner should be a member. We have a number of exciting new benefits for our members, which are incentives for other small property owners to become members. Only through large numbers and participation will we have any influence at City Hall. | Read More |
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From the January 2007 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
It seems like forever since the November elections. Perhaps it is because some of the local results were disappointing, and I just wanted to put it out of my mind. Passage of Prop H was a disappointment but not a big surprise; Rob Black’s loss was a very big disappointment. Many of us worked for and donated to his campaign. Rob worked really hard in the campaign, and it was a very close race.We had great hope that he would go to City Hall and we would see civility and reasonableness return to politics. However, that was not to happen this year. | Read More |
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From the November 2006 Newsletter:
By Justin Thyme |
The cost of energy—electricity and gas for heating—will go nowhere but up. Another increase is expected in January.
How can you save money? Here are three areas to think about: home heating, heating water and powering lights and appliances. | Read More |
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From the October 2006 Newsletter:
By Scott A. Freedman, Esq. |
In reading the SPOSF Newsletters and in my experience representing property owners in San Francisco, I have repeatedly heard the same complaint, “there’s nothing I can do---the law is simply not on the property owners’ side.” To help in some small way to level the playing field, I offer three steps that small property owners can take. | Read More |
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From the September 2006 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
In our last newsletter I said that the summer would be quiet and we would rest for the election season that is beginning. Little did I know what was in store. Proposition H is, once again, an extreme measure brought to us by the Tenants Union. It is officially called “relocation assistance for no-fault tenant removal.” As you should know by now, if you need to make significant capital improvements, want to occupy your own property, or need to move a family member into the property to take care of them or for them to take care of you, you must pay each tenant who has lived there for at least one year $1,000 to relocate. Whenever I mention this to someone outside of San Francisco, they are incredulous that one would have to pay to live in one’s own property, but we have learned to live with the ridiculous. | Read More |
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From the July 2006 Newsletter:
By Andrew Zacks |
After suffering through years of uncertainty and ambiguity, small property owners enjoyed a major victory last month when the San Francisco Superior Court Appellate Department held that a 25% owner of record may occupy his or her property under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance’s Owner Move-In (“OMI”) provisions. Ironically, two years earlier the same appellate court had required that a property owner be a 50% owner in order to perform an OMI, even though the Rent Ordinance specifically uses the 25% figure. | Read More |
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From the June 2006 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
The Board of Supervisors is constantly nipping at us with more and more regulations. Some are big bites, such as the latest Peskin legislation, and some are smaller nips, like Mirkarimi’s latest proposal. Supervisor Sandoval plans to introduce legislation that will limit the formation of TICs and condos. The Land Use Committee may hear this piece of legislation as early as June. Watch for announcements from SPOSF asking for your help in letter writing or speaking at the hearings. The Tenants Union is also proposing legislation to prevent the Sheriff from carrying out Ellis Act evictions. The list goes on and on and on.
It is the cumulative effect of these bites that will eventually destroy the small property owner-based rental housing stock. Until the Board of Supervisors adopts a more balanced housing policy, more and more small property owners will get out of the rental housing business. They will either leave their units vacant or sell them as TICs. Studies indicate that well over 10,000 rental units are now being kept off the market in San Francisco due to overregulation. While TICs are great for renters who want to be homeowners, it is unfortunate that this overregulation is forcing many of our long-time small mom-and-pop landlords out of their homes and their neighborhoods. Apparently, the Board of Supervisors is only concerned with keeping long-term tenants in place, not long-term small property owners. | Read More |
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From the May 2006 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
The Board of Supervisors is at it again. Supervisor Aaron Peskin is sponsoring a piece of legislation again attacking the Ellis Act. While no one likes eviction, it is important to protect our right to control our lives and property.
The proposed legislation would make it impossible to convert a unit to a condominium if there were multiple evictions in the building, i.e. Ellis Act evictions, or if even one senior or disabled person was evicted from the building. The Board cannot eliminate the Ellis Act–it is state law–so this is its attempt to go
around it. What is particularly punitive about the proposal is the retroactive portion of the law to 1999!!! Also, the ordinance uses an overly broad definition of “protected tenant,” defining senior” as anyone over 60 who has lived in the unit only one year, or a disabled or catastrophically ill tenant without any residency requirements at all. This is an excessively broad definition of a “protected” class of tenants. For an owner move-in (OMI) eviction, a senior over 60 years of age or disabled tenant must have a 10-year residency, or a catastrophically ill tenant, five years, to be considered protected.” | Read More |
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From the April 2006 Newsletter:
By Kim Stryker |
It’s never a surprise when the SF Tenants Union and their friends raise their hands in the air and run around screaming that the sky is falling. The usual rant is “too many evictions,” and they’re doing it again. The Rent Board web site shows a slight (5%) increase in total evictions this year, primarily for breach of rental agreement and nuisance evictions. However, the evictions the Tenants Union seems most concerned about, Ellis evictions, are about the same this year as last – 280. This is based on the Annual Report on Eviction Notices prepared by the SF Rent Board for the Mayor and Board of Supervisors. | Read More |
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From the March 2006 Newsletter:
By David Fix |
On February 21, 2006, the California Court of Appeals upheld the San Francisco ordinance sponsored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin in 2005 requiring owners to pay “relocation” expenses to every tenant when an owner invokes the Ellis Act to exit the rental property business. SPOSF sponsored the challenge to Peskin’s amendment in March, 2005. San Francisco Superior Court granted the petition in favor of SPOSF’s challenge. However, the state Appellate Court overturned the Superior Court’s decision. SPOSF, in conjunction with the attorneys for the case, will review whether to pursue the case in the California Supreme Court. | Read More |
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From the February 2006 Newsletter:
By Ted Loewenberg |
San Francisco imposed Rent Control in 1979 because of the general feeling that the economy was out of control and that something had to be done. The outrage of one landlord “gold plating” his building with resulting huge rent increases made a prima facie case for government intervention. Rampant inflation peaked in 1981 at about 12%. Interest rates for home loans were climbing toward their peak of 18%. Companies trans- ferred employees to the West and the South, leaving behind the Rust Belt and 4% mortgages. Oil prices had just doubled again after the second OPEC oil embargo of 1978, and hit record levels not matched until 2005. The deepest recession since the Depression gripped the nation in the early 1980s, with consumer confidence at all-time lows. The government had to do something to help out working people. In San Francisco, one answer was a temporary cap on rent increases. | Read More |
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From the January 2006 Newsletter:
By Ted Loewenberg |
December was an eventful month for SPOSF. Members went to City Hall to speak out against the latest legislative proposal of Sup. Chris Daly. Others were doing the work necessary to switch over to our new website. Our Board also met to revisit the mission and strategies of Small Property Owners. A busy month in all, which raised the question in my mind, what is SPOSF all about? | Read More |
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From the November 2005 Newsletter:
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With all the news today about TICs (also, see our Question of the Month, following) and how the usual suspects on the Board of Supervisors having been working to destroy that market, many property owners have considered selling off their buildings as individual TIC units. Where the building is tenant-occupied, the process of preparing a building for sale as TICs involves the recovery of all units from the tenants, either by buying out the tenant's rights or by eviction using the Ellis Act. Each has its problems. | Read More |
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From the October 2005 Newsletter:
By Ted Loewenberg |
While the inundation of New Orleans and the massive loss of life and property are on a scale without comparison, San Francisco small property owners have suffered from two and half decades of a relentless downpour of bad legislation and ill conceived policies. We are all witnesses to a devastating result for our city. A rising tide of property control has left thousands of renters and small property owners in dire straits. Help for beleaguered property owners and renters, whose lives are in turmoil, is not forthcoming from local government. | Read More |
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From the September 2005 Newsletter:
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In August, the Bank of Marin announced it would soon offer an Individual Tenants in Common (TIC) mortgage loan or "fractional loans." The San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the importance of these loans, stating that they "could substantially change the housing market in the City." | Read More |
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From the July 2005 Newsletter:
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IN THE THIRD VICTORY FOR GOVERNMENT REGULATION of property rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the City in San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco. That decision followed Lingle v. Chevron, which held that gasoline station rent control is constitutional, and preceded Kelo v. City of New London, which held that the government can take your home and give it to a private developer who will increase the city's tax base. | Read More |
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From the June 2005 Newsletter:
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Small property owners were stunned last month when the Board of Supervisors refused to allow the owners of a six-unit building on Vallejo St. to convert to condominiums. The owners, who had won the condo lottery and had their project previously approved, knew nothing about the upcoming vote and were out of town when the board's action occurred. Citing a little known section of the Sub- division Code, Board President Aaron Peskin spearheaded the vote to deny the conversion. Here's the progression of events, according to David Gellman, attorney for the owners of the building. | Read More |
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From the May 2005 Newsletter:
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In a case brought by SPOSF against the City of San Francisco in Superior Court, the court ruled on April 25 that Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin's recently passed legislation requiring owners who invoke the Ellis Act to pay each tenant $4,500 up to a maximum of $13,500 per unit violates this state law. | Read More |
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From the April 2005 Newsletter:
By Jo L. Biel-Clark |
With annual rent increases in San Francisco held to minuscule amounts, many small property owners are forced to defer maintenance for lack of financial resources. "Pass-throughs" offer a way to pass some of these costs to those who will most benefit, the building's occupants. Yet many small property owners fear the complexities of passthroughs. The good news is that most passthroughs are not as complicated as many property owners believe.
While there are many different types of passthroughs, such as bond passthroughs and PG&E passthroughs, the most valuable are capital improvement and operating and maintenance passthroughs. | Read More |
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From the March 2005 Newsletter:
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On February 22, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Lingle v. Chevron on the constitutionality of Hawaii's rent control for gas stations. The Court's decision (expected by June) may have a serious impact on the constitutionality of San Francisco's rent control ordinance. In fact, Justice Ginsburg asked whether a ruling against Hawaii would mean that all residential rent control laws are unconstitutional Takings in violation of the Fifth Amendment. | Read More |
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From the November 2004 Newsletter:
By Paul F. Utrecht |
We have reached a critical milestone in the fight against rent control. On October 12, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the petition for certiorari filed by the State of Hawaii in Lingle v. Chevron and will consider the merits of that case next year. The Supreme Court receives thousands of such petitions asking it to review the decisions of the lower courts, and only agrees to hear about one percent of the cases. | Read More |
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From the October 2004 Newsletter:
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FOR CONTRACTORS, UNEXPECTED COSTS are a fact of life. But when Thomas Harrington, a respected building contractor, began a remodel of a three-unit building near Laurel Village, he never thought he'd be caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare that would force him to shut down his job site, lay off workers and defend himself against claims that proved to be false. It cost him $25,000 and untold grief. City officials spent valuable time looking into claims that proved baseless. Here is Harrington's story:
In response to a complaint from the Planning Dept., the Dept. of Building Inspection (DBI) issued Harrington a complaint on November 13, 2003 that his job, which he had been working on for six months, was in violation of the City Planning Code as an Unlawful Demolition. They also suspended his construction permit. "An inspection proved that there was no illegality," Harrington wrote in an email, "but we still wasted weeks." | Read More |
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From the September 2004 Newsletter:
By Karen Crommie |
THE CITYWIDE FREE-FOR-ALL in which some 65 candidates are fighting for seven supervisorial seats is generating strange alliances, profligate spending and a geyser of opinions, platforms and positions. Like most SPOSF members, I'm struggling to slash through the forest of hackneyed phrases to determine who the candidates are and what they might do if elected. This is an uphill fight because 90 percent of the rhetoric is interchangeable and, typically, a recital of the city's wish list preceded by the words, "will support...will work for... or will encourage..." | Read More |
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From the July 2004 Newsletter:
By Andrew Zacks |
On June 22, 2004, a scant week after oral argument was held in the case, the California Court of Appeal soundly affirmed the judgment in Superior Court that invalidated Supervisor Jake McGoldrick's ordinance limiting the formation of tenancies in common ("McTIC"). In a scathing rebuke of the City's position, Justice Lawrence Stevens, joined by Justices Jones and Gemello, decided that McTIC infringed on TIC owners' fundamental right of privacy guaranteed by Article I, section 1 of the California Constitution. | Read More |
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From the June 2004 Newsletter:
By Ava Swartz |
IN ARMISTEAD MAUPIN'S BELOVED TALES OF THE CITY, the legendary landlady Mrs. Madrigal tells the very green-from-Cleveland Mary Ann that she "had no objection to anything" (in response to a query about pets) and later takes her favorite tenant Mona out to North Beach where the following dialogue takes place:
"Are you all right, Mona? Financially, I mean?"
"Yeah, sure, I can pay the rent."
"I didn't mean that."
Fast forward to today: Mrs. Madrigal wouldn't dare say she had "no objection to anything," lest it be interpreted as a waiver of all her rights as a landlady; Mona could interpret her query about her financial status as harassment. | Read More |
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From the May 2004 Newsletter:
By Paul F. Utrecht |
THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE - but it just might be an early Christmas for small property owners. On April 1, 2004, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in Chevron v. Lingle that Hawaii's rent control for gas stations is an unconstitutional "taking." While "takings" law is complicated even to those steeped in constitutional law, the implications of this decision are not: It is a startling and remarkably good step towards finding that residential rent control is also unconstitutional. | Read More |
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