From the July 2009 Newsletter:

Legislation hostile to S.F. housing providers just keeps on coming!
By Noni Richen, SPOSFI President

In our newsletter, we strive to provide our members with accurate information on the laws emanating from our governmental bodies which dictate how we may conduct our businesses. In two recent examples, we find regulations originating from beautiful domed buildings, but no one inside seems to know how we must do our part to uphold them.

New San Francisco policy dictates that our efforts to be green and minimize garbage going into landfills include placing a green bin among our trash toters to collect all compostable materials—a laudable goal. For rental property owners, this opens up a whole new can of worms. Noncompliance with the law means that scofflaws will eventually be fined—maybe. We have spent far too much time on the phone with city officials asking if we will be responsible for sorting our renters’ garbage, or if we will be fined for noncompliance. The answer is that no one will be fined right away, and that multifamily buildings will be exempt, although that is not specifically stated in the ordinance. What about 2-6 unit buildings? No one really knows for sure. Of course, no one is sure who is going to pick through our garbage to make sure we’ve properly sorted our banana peels in order to penalize us, either.

Another proposal, which would be heard in a different domed building—the State Capitol—is our Assessor-Recorder Ting’s possible legislation to alter Prop. 13 to “split” the tax rolls and change the tax rates for commercial buildings. We naturally ask, “Are our small rental buildings residential or commercial?” The answer we received when the first hints of this reassessment surfaced was that we are residential, but that the question has yet to be thoroughly addressed. In preparing the article in this issue of the newsletter, we again posed the question to the Assessor-Recorder’s office. We asked a number of sincere, hardworking people who truly wanted to help, but who really didn’t have a definitive answer because there is none. In a presentation to the Coalition for Responsible Growth, Mr. Ting referred to buildings with “a storefront on the ground level and maybe offices or apartments above,” and indicated that he’d consider them to be commercial. We are in a forgotten niche. We plan to invite Mr. Ting to address us in the fall, giving him a couple of months to research his proposed legislation to provide us with an answer. We can only hope that the framers of the legislation will look at the total tax burden that businesses face. California recently lost its first-place position in income taxation to another state. Many large employers have already left. My husband’s employer once had over 18,000 employees in the Bay Area; they now have just 200 in San Francisco, having moved their offices elsewhere. This is not the time to add new taxes on business.

We’ve been doing some research to frame legislation of our own: to remove high-rent units and high income households from rent control. Our Executive Director has sent e-mails and made numerous calls attempting to obtain statistics on how many such dwellings we’re talking about. A Planning Department official finally called back to say that our claim of over 45,000 households in San Francisco with income over $100,000 was wrong, as was our assertion that about 25% of rent-controlled units are occupied by households in that income bracket, despite the fact that these figures come directly from the San Francisco Databook (available on the SFgov.org website), from a study commissioned by our own Board of Supervisors using 1998 figures. Surely after 11 years there must be more—not fewer—of these high-income households living in owner-subsidized housing.

Ironically, there is a political faction in San Francisco that knows precisely how it wants us to run our business: the radical tenant lobby and its minions on the Board of Supervisors. They freely spew out endless legislation dictating every aspect of our business behavior. No ambiguity from them! They simply want unlimited accommodations at little or no charge to tenants. Fortunately, four supervisors voted against the latest legislative barrage from Chris Daly’s office, and one recused herself. Thankfully the Mayor vetoed the three pieces of legislation, giving us a measure of security—for now. But the far left faction of the Board of Supervisors isn’t satisfied, and threatens to put the three vetoed measures on the November ballot. As if that weren’t enough, this same faction is considering two additional measures that would expand eviction controls to units not now covered. It just never seems to end. We will be watching these developments very closely.

We will have no meeting or newsletter in August, but stay tuned, because we’ll be back in force in September. Thank you very much for all your comments, suggestions, and criticisms. We exist for you, our members, and are grateful for your continued support.
 

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