lily's diary

by Lily

July 17
It always irks me how the people who insist rent control is needed to protect the poor think nothing of keeping a rent controlled apartment for themselves long after they’ve moved on to another living space. I know one person who is using his old apartment for an office, another for her kids’ infrequent trips to the city, and still another to hold his record collection. Case in point—on the front page of the New York Times this morning it was revealed that New York Congressman Charlie Rangel is keeping four rent controlled apartments for his Harlem campaign headquarters. Paying about half the market rate for each, he said he had no idea he was doing anything wrong. But Rangel’s indiscretion seems particularly galling because, well, there were four. Plenty of celebrities keep a death grip on rent stabilized apartments, but are usually satisfied to have just one. The greatest strides in ending Massachusetts vacancy control came when landlords started “outing” high-profile tenants and the press picked up on it. Suddenly, the average person paying market rate rent understood the unfairness of the situation.

July 30
Two of my regular bowling pals are talking about installing solar panels on their roofs. Good for them. But neither owns a multiunit building. For us, the savings is a little less certain. The attractive rebates offered by federal, state and local governments have to go to the ratepayer, which, in most cases, would be the tenant. So what’s the upside for us owners? That’s where the hems and haws begin. Johanna Gregory Partin, head of Renewable Energy for the San Francisco Department of the Environment, says that there is at least one building in town where the owner handled the problem by taking over all PG&E payments temporarily, until the solar package was installed and the rebates delivered. Then, the accounts were put back in the tenants’ names. The problem with that, according to San Francisco Rent Board regulations, is that the action of the owner paying for electricity and then stopping these payments would constitute a diminution of service and be subject to a rent decrease. Why haven’t the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Rent Board dealt with this obvious disincentive by this time? To find out more about the city’s program, go to www.sfwater.org/gosolarsf.

August 5
My friend Maggie downloaded Supervisor Chris Daly’s November ballot measure banning “landlord harassment.” She calls it “the tenant enthronement act,” because it will mean even more catering to the whims of tenants—including their emotional wellbeing—lest it appear to be “harassment.” That’s how broadly the term is defined in the proposed revamping of the ordinance. Whereas harassment was previously defined as an action causing the tenant to move out, it is now anything that prevents the tenant from the quiet enjoyment of the premises. In another section of the revision, it defines harassment as failing to take measures to minimize things like noise, dust and mold. Although such conditions may indicate careless management, they are hardly harassment by any common definition. In still another rewrite, Daly makes an attempt to prevent tenant buyouts. (Oh, how he hates it when people take it upon themselves to make an agreement without the government getting a piece of it.) If you offer a buyout to a tenant for vacating a unit and there is a whiff of a “threat,” you are in deep merde.

Also considered harassment are things like not cashing a check within 30 days, asking for proof of citizenship and asking for a social security number (what?). The penalty for breaking these and scores of other rules is, of course, a decrease in rent. But, more than that, the owner becomes guilty of a misdemeanor and, if convicted, has to pay a fine capped at $1,000 or “imprisonment for not more than 6 months” or both. Then there are the damages—three times the actual damages suffered by the tenant (and “emotional distress” is part of the package). Plus, if you lose your case, you pay the tenant’s attorney fees. And they wonder why we keep units off the market.

August 12
You know those emails we all get from the California Apartment Association? Do you read them? I usually keep them in my current mail with great intentions but rarely get to them. On the other hand, my friend Robin reads every word. We were walking in the park on our way out to the Beach Chalet for brunch last Sunday and she told me about the results of a poll she had read on line. It seems renters are not as interested in becoming homeowners anymore. Some 79% say, “No way.” This saddened me as it has always been a talking point in my crusade to push more homeownership in San Francisco that most renters would really rather have the security of their own home. (How else can we stanch the unfailing success of anti-owner legislation at the polls?) Well, this may have been true in the past, but in these tough economic times, your average Joe is not eager to take on a mortgage and is quite content just to hang on to his rental. And with the new privileges soon to be decreed by Chris Daly, frankly, I don’t blame him.

August 20
Those who went to SFAA’s August meeting got a very depressing primer on Section 8 housing—depressing from a property owner’s perspective, of course. Oh, it wasn’t that the tenants were bad. No, it was that the federal program that subsidizes renters in private sector housing has been corrupted by San Francisco’s rent laws. By applying the San Francisco Rent Ordinance to Section 8 subsidized tenants, there is practically no way building owners can withdraw from participation, even though they are promised that right on their federal contracts. In theory, Section 8 is the very best way to help low income tenants. Forget the inclusionary housing mandates on new buildings, forget rent control laws that force private owners to subsidize tenants—Section 8 would keep housing in the private sector based on supply and demand, integrating the poor into market-rate housing and rewarding their responsible tenancies by continued subsidy.

As an incentive to accept tenants with iffy credit into your building, you are given the right to evict them and terminate your contract with the government, with 60 days’ notice to the tenants. That’s the way it should be and, if it were, landlords would willingly participate. But, in 1998, the Board of Supervisors extended the protection of the city’s rent ordinance to Section 8 tenants, virtually erasing any control a building owner has over these tenants. At the meeting, all we heard were complaints directed at the San Francisco Housing Authority for unresponsiveness, incorrect information and out and out lying, to which Tony Ucciferri, the new Housing Authority administrator, could only reply, “Speak to me personally.” In the agency’s yearly inspection, owners reported being cited for things they have little control over, like a greasy stove. The truth is that Section 8, one of the best federal programs for low-income Americans, has been made so unpalatable by the city that there was not one SFAA member who had a good thing to say about it.

August 22
Frank stopped me in the hall to talk this morning. He is my oldest tenant—a single man who retired several years ago from Bank of America. He has taken to reading the newspaper a little too closely and seeing certain conspiracy patterns in the reporting. He stays up late at night listening to KSFO and, if you’ve ever done it, you’ll know that the late and early morning hours are devoted to calls from people who are capable of “distant viewing,” time travel and communicating with the “near dead.”

He frequently stops me on the stairs with warnings of little-known phenomena that are pointing to disaster. This advice comes with a certain amount of literature, which I politely accept. The problem is that he is stockpiling this “data,” as he calls it, at a rapid pace. The last time I had to enter his unit, the boxes full of clippings and pamphlets were beginning to make alarming inroads into the living space. Hoarding is, as we all know, an emotional disease fully protected by the rent ordinance and I see where this is heading. As the number of boxes grows, I get the feeling that Frank is ever so slowly slipping out into the galaxies…where no man has gone before.

 

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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF 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 © 2008 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.