Renter battles renewed
Landlord group comes out strong against tenant-friendly reforms while even bigger fights loom this fall

By Savannah Blackwell

Just two days after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took their first look at a set of tweaks to the city's rent control law that would add some protections for tenants, the Coalition for Better Housing – a longtime political heavyweight group representing property owners' interests – ran a full-page ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian blasting board president Matt Gonzalez's proposal and urging readers to call their supervisors and complain.

The ad blared, "San Franciscans BEWARE! Supervisor Matt Gonzalez is proposing dangerous legislation that will affect all San Franciscans."

In reality, Gonzalez's legislation, introduced at the board's land-use committee meeting April 14, contains only modest changes to the city's existing ordinance, according to Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union.

"The whole package is relatively minor stuff," Gullicksen told us. "It's shocking to see the landlords go crazy."

But that's exactly what's happened. The Small Property Owners of San Francisco, a shrill advocacy group representing the interests of landlords who own buildings with only a few units, fired off a press release April 11 claiming the reforms will result in more owners taking their properties off the rental market.

"This is the most sweeping anti-housing, anti-owner change to the rent ordinance since small properties came under the ordinance in 1994," Kim Stryker, the SPOSF's cochair, stated in the release. The SPOSF says it is urging all 2,300 of its members to "no longer rent out their properties" if the legislation passes. "If necessary we will bring a lawsuit," Stryker's fellow chair, Tom Ramm, stated in the release.

Gonzalez's proposal calls for increasing from $500 to $2,000 the amount a landlord must pay a tenant he or she evicts if that owner decides to move into an apartment. It would reduce the amount of time before a unit in a residential hotel is governed by rent control and stop landlords from taking away storage, parking, and recreational space from tenants without their knowledge or reasonable compensation. It would also place property owners' secondary homes under the rent control ordinance and would prohibit landlords from banking annual allowable rent increases and then raising the rent in one big chunk. It would also reduce restrictions on the number of people who may occupy a unit.

Gullicksen figures that part of the saber rattling is due to the landlord groups' dismay over not getting a chance to "negotiate" behind the scenes with Gonzalez's office and tenant activists before the legislation was introduced. In a few recent cases they were given that opportunity.

For more than a year, Sup. Tom Ammiano worked with both tenant activists and property owners' representatives to hammer out an agreement, reached last December, over what portion of capital improvement costs landlords may pass on to tenants.

"The landlords would like for negotiating behind the scenes to become standard procedure (for dealing with disputes)," Gullicksen said. "But that is exactly what we don't want. The differences (between the two sides) are so vast in terms of what's at stake. We're trying to protect our ability to keep our homes. And they want to make more money. We want this worked out in public, because otherwise, we don't get meaningful reform."

Gullicksen said the package does contain some "wiggle room" for hammering out details. Brook Turner, who heads the Coalition for Better Housing, said Gonzalez seemed willing at the hearing to at least consider some of the landlords' concerns.

Turner and other representatives of landlord groups went ahead and declared war, he told us, because Gonzalez refused repeated requests to meet with them and consider their objections before he introduced the legislation.

"We had to presume it would get passed to the full board as is," Turner said.

But there's more to the latest skirmish: the property owners groups have caught wind of tenant activists' plans to place on the November ballot an initiative that tenants believe will greatly improve the public's influence over important decisions affecting rental rates and policies in San Francisco. The measure would change the composition of San Francisco's Rent Board from five members appointed by the mayor to seven elected by the public.

"[The Gonzalez] package is minor compared to what this would do," one longtime tenant activist told us.

Turner agrees that the proposed ballot measure is a big deal, and he said his group is preparing to push hard for its defeat. "This is the worst thing that could happen," he said. "It will totally politicize the process."

The Tenants Union first asked Gonzalez to introduce the package of tweaks about a year ago. But after initial slaps coming from the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the activists retreated, realizing they could not afford to get embroiled in such a dispute at a time when they needed to build momentum to defeat Sup. Tony Hall's proposal to lift the annual limit on the number of rental units that can be converted to condominiums for sale. The tenants succeeded when that measure – Proposition R – lost on the November ballot. In addition, tenants were hoping Eileen Hansen would win the District Eight supervisor seat over Bevan Dufty. They lost that one.

In addition to strengthening protections for tenants, Gonzalez has plans to sponsor a measure increasing the minimum wage in San Francisco by about $1.75 an hour to $8.50. The idea would be to put it before voters on the November ballot. Taken together, the two proposals represent a renewed effort by progressives to stop the city from falling victim to further gentrification.

The idea is to protect what's left of the city's diverse population, in particular those who earn lower incomes and are in danger of being forced out, Gullicksen and other activists said. The move seems destined to refuel San Francisco's age-old battle between wealthy, downtown interests and those of working-class residents and neighborhoods.

Ammiano, who spearheaded a long and hard-fought battle to force nonprofits that contract with the city to pay their workers $10 an hour and who hopes to succeed Willie Brown as mayor, has already said he supports the idea of increasing the minimum wage locally, while Sup. Gavin Newsom, who is also running for the city's top post, opposes such an increase.

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