Lily's Diary
by Lily
April 6
Feeling masochistic, I perused a leftie blog and came across a quote about how owners who invoke the Ellis Act were recklessly reducing the rental-housing stock. Pardon me? Are we, as individual owners, responsible for maintaining the city’s housing stock? If a mom-and-pop grocery store goes out of business, are the owners held responsible for the city’s stock of food stores? Is there an expectation that they will continue to operate the grocery store until they are completely broke? If anyone really cares about maintaining the city’s housing stock, they could soften the restraints of the San Francisco Rent Ordinance and immediately reduce the number of landlords emptying their buildings.
April 7
Last week, Maggie and I dragged ourselves to a Rent Board Commission meeting to offer suggestions as to how the Gonzalez Ordinance (bring in the relatives) might be made less onerous. But after all the testimony was heard, Commissioner Becker (representing tenants) said that since SFAA and others were going to challenge the legislation in court, it was a waste of time to mitigate it. With that, he called for the vote. The neutral commissioner voted his way, which means the ordinance goes ahead as written (gulp). But what happens if the lawsuit loses? Then we’re stuck with the current version of Gonzalez, which has loopholes big enough to drive a landlord, if not into bankruptcy, certainly into an Ellis action.
April 13
I figure the hair on my head is worth about a thousand dollars. After having my hair colored every three weeks at a trendy Cole Valley salon, and not cutting it for a year, there’s now easily a thousand dollars worth of dye on my head. Okay, enough background. A couple of weeks ago, I was down on my hands and knees painting a baseboard and I apparently leaned into some wet paint on the wall above. The next morning, I saw that the top of my head was covered in beige paint. Not only was my hair ruined, I looked like I had turned gray, exactly the reason I had paid all that money to have my hair colored in the first place. I put a hot wet towel around my head and, after four changes, used my fingernails to scrape the encrusted paint off each and every strand of hair. A week later, friends were still telling me that I appeared to have lint in my hair. Moral? Save those free hotel shower caps and put them with your paintbrushes.
April 24
I’m stunned. You know the fee paid to the city when a residential building is turned into a hotel? The money (typically $500,000 for a small building) goes into a fund for affordable housing—the logic being that you are paying to replace the housing you have removed from the rental market. Well, hold on to your hat. The Board of Supervisors recently ruled that this money could also be used to pay the city’s legal fees. So, when the lawsuit challenging this legal extortion by the city (San Remo Hotel v. San Francisco) was finally brought to the U.S. Supreme Court in March, the city hired Seth Waxman, former Solicitor General during the Clinton administration, to present the oral argument. His fee is estimated at around $250,000—paid out of the same fund that the owners of the San Remo Hotel were forced to pay or contribute to in order to do business as a hotel. Talk about adding insult to injury.
May 5
I’m currently in the process of completely renovating a unit and was complaining to a clerk at Cole Hardware about the paint-coated hinges I was struggling to strip. He said, “Try putting them in a solution of TSP and boiling water and leave them overnight. In the morning, you can usually just brush off the remaining paint.” No kidding, it worked. The water has to be really hot and you have to be generous with the TSP. I used about a quarter cup and just enough water to cover the hinges in the bottom of a bucket. No more gummy little balls of steel wool. I’m letting time and caustics do the work. Better living through chemistry.
May 25
My friend Joanne, who lives in her three-unit building in Bernal Heights, has just gone through a full-blown eviction and she’s exhausted. Aches and pains have racked her body, she has to take pills to sleep at night, and she has had her phone number and email address changed. The tenant, who had originally been a friend with a hard-luck story, became a user of the worst stripe. Finally, she got so far behind in her rent that Joanne gave her a three-day notice and, with an attorney, started eviction proceedings. The sheriff served an unlawful detainer and the locks were changed. A court date was set. The tenant demanded a jury trial but when she didn’t show up at the routine settlement conference, that right was automatically withdrawn. Then, just before she was due to vacate, she applied to the judge for a two-week extension. It was granted. Two weeks later she applied for a second extension. This time Joanne contested, and it wasn’t granted.
At 6 p.m. on the tenant’s moving day, Joanne could see that the tenant and her pals were still carting things out; but the next morning, she was relieved to see that their truck was gone. She couldn’t believe that the ordeal was finally over. It wasn’t until she went to put out the garbage cans the next day that she saw they had somehow gotten back in through the alley door and jammed a dining room set, two dressers and a bookcase into the service entrance. There was no way to reach the tenant. Because the value of the abandoned goods was over $300, her attorney advised her to post a public notice that the goods would be sold in 30 days. In the meantime, she had to hire someone to move all the furniture into the basement. On the day of the supposed auction, the tenant arrived with a truck and carted the stuff away. Two months gone, endless aggravation, attorney fees, and all of it just to execute a legal eviction—and they wonder why we Ellis?
June 4
I’ve always resented master tenants who sublet rent-controlled units at rates high enough to render their own rent next-to-nothing. Besides being illegal, there seems to be something unseemly about turning a profit from a law passed to help low-income tenants. But it turns out that those people are bush league. There are tenants in the Sunset who are growing weed and racking in tens of thousands of dollars a month in the “medical” marijuana business. There’s a woman who, until recently, was running a house of prostitution out of another Sunset home. (And we thought the Sunset was straight-laced.) Landlords, awake! We can be making much more profit from those units.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflectthe viewpoint of SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Lily’s Diary is written by a longtime rental property owner who reserves the right to remain anonymous on the grounds that her tenants might gang up on her. Comments, corrections or ideas are welcome at lilysdiary@aol.com. Copyright © 2005 by the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.