We’re approaching a news desert in the San Francisco Bay Area. This little-noticed story ran in Monday’s edition in the San Francisco Examiner, which is now online-only four days per week. Paper editions run Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday only. Please support local news! If you prefer paper media, please consume it without guilt, recycle (obviously) and spread the word — papers make more off of ads that run in print.
Now, to our story — five long-time tenants, “which includes three drag queens, a gay man and a straight woman, scoffed at the owners’ $50,000 offer, split amongst the five tenants, to vacate their homes under threat of the Ellis Act, which allows California landlords wishing to exit the rental market to evict residential tenants.”
“I go to work every day in drag,” said Fredy Miranda, who for 30 years has managed Divas SF, a transgender bar located in the Tenderloin District, and goes by the drag name ‘Alexis.’ Miranda lives alone in one of three units in the building.
The five tenants fought an attempted eviction in 2014. But the owners moved in and the landlord has obstructed them from gathering in the yard the way they used to. The tenants “contend that the eviction was motivated by the owners’ disapproval of their lifestyles, rather than an earnest desire to retire as landlords.”
According to Miranda, troubles began shortly after Wan and Keller took over the building in 2014. Two gay men living in a top floor apartment were displaced, and Wan and Keller briefly rented out the apartment for some $5,000 per month before moving into the unit themselves in 2015, he said.
A previous eviction attempt was made against Richard Padilla (a.k.a. Renita Valdez), Donald Branchflower (a.k.a. Logos Branchflower), William Carmichael (a.k.a. Lucille Carmichael), and Padilla’s niece, Jennifer Emperador, who occupy the unit above Miranda’s.
In October 2014, Wan and Keller filed for an owner move-in eviction at that unit, which was later dismissed after the tenants fought back.
Once under the same roof, tensions escalated between the tenants and their landlords.
Read the full story at the Examiner. More on this at 48hills.org.
There is a small minute chance that through a “small sites” program through the city, the tenants or the city could purchase the property and the tenants would not have to move.
With the help of their supporters, the tenants are currently exploring The City’s small sites acquisition program in the hope that purchasing their building will resolve their impending eviction.
I moved back to the city in 2014, just before the market really “woke up” and real estate prices starting going crazy again. What’s so vexing is, $10,000 sounds like a lot to pick up and move over to say, Oakland, but Oakland apartments are much more expensive now than they were even eight years ago. This apparently is happening all across the country and in Canada. Wealthy speculators, in our hyper-connected world, can search and find property in global hot spots to buy and drive up living expenses.
I always think stuff like eviction only happens to people on the outer outer edges. But the edges are thick and there are more of them all the time. Without a robust news media we just don’t hear about them, and people are shy about making their plight known.
What is happening to our world, or rather, what can be done about this?