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SPOSF is a diverse, grass-roots organization promoting fairness for small property owners and sensible housing policy for our city. Our members come from all neighborhoods and from all walks of life, religions and ethnicities, and are united in the common goal of restoring and protecting the rights of small property owners in San Francisco. We help our members navigate the treacherous waters of the SF Rent Ordinance and educate the public about regulations that are strangling small property owners. We work together to affect legislation, endorse and campaign for candidates sympathetic to our cause, and strive to increase home ownership opportunities for all San Franciscans.
Through SPOSF, we mount legal challenges to issues that threaten our property rights; through our educational programs, we reach out to our members and the community at large; through our Resource Guide, we offer a list of service providers used by our members.
In 1999, eight very frustrated owners of small properties in San Francisco met to discuss the increasingly harsh regulations that were squeezing them out of the rental business. The impetus for their meeting was an ordinance that would have allowed tenants to pass their apartment on to new tenants without landlord approval. The implications were clear: small landlords, most of whom lived in their buildings, would have no say in who would live literally on top of them.
These eight founding members soon found they had tapped into a wellspring of equally concerned and frustrated small property owners. For many years, many had lived harmoniously with long-term tenants in buildings that give the city its special character: Graceful Victorians, handsome Edwardians and 1950s bungalows, brown-shingled faux Maybecks and stucco Mediterraneans.
In 1994, Proposition I passed, placing 2-4 unit, owner-occupied buildings -- formerly exempt -- under rent control. Overnight, small property owners, from seniors on fixed incomes to young couples just starting out, were lumped together with the bigboys, many of whom had cadres of experienced property managers and lawyers on call to decipher all 60+ pages of the Rent Ordinance. While some of the ordinances were challenged in court, others cropped up in their place. In this new climate of acrimony and often inexplicable legislation, some small property owners simply gave up and took their properties off the market. (It's estimated that 10,000 - 25,000 units have been taken off the rental market.) Others decided to stand up and fight.
Today, our members number more than 2,500, and SPOSF is heard in City Hall, in Sacramento, in the news media and anywhere the rights and interests of San Francisco small property owners are challenged. Here's just a small sampling of what we've accomplished thus far:
- Created San Francisco's first grass roots organization devoted solely to the concerns of small property owners.
- Changed the law for tenancies-in-common (TICs), enabling renters to join together and buy their own building.
- Initiated a class action suit by small property owners forced to pay 5% on security deposits to tenants at a time when money market accounts were paying less than 2%.
- Went to City Hall to speak out against proposed amendments to the Rent Ordinance that would force landlords to pay $2,000 per tenant (including babies) for relocation or eviction, and allow tenants to sue the current owner for action of a former owner.
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