Six North Beach households could lose the apartments they’ve called home for decades after new owners bought their building last year and soon began trying to evict them.
Faced with soaring San Francisco rental prices, the tenants say they face an uncertain future and could be forced out of the city they love if they lose their rent-controlled apartments.
Yok Lin Chui has lived in the building on Powell Street for more than 50 years after immigrating from Hong Kong in 1971. She said she uses neighborhood buses to get around and has easy access to Chinatown.
“I’m so old now, where should I go?” she said through a translator, growing visibly upset when asked what she would do if forced to move. “I don’t know how to take a taxi.”
Chui’s neighbor, Meagan Cunningham, moved into the building in 1987 as a child and still lives there with her adult son, Max. She’s a voice-over artist and used to work in a neighborhood restaurant.
“This is such a big part of my history, this neighborhood,” she said. “Good times, bad times, but I’ve been here for so long.”
But decades of shared history could be coming to an end.
Seven new owners bought the building in February of last year through a tenancy in common (TIC), an arrangement that allows each buyer to own a share of the building.
Last fall, the new owners invoked the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to evict their tenants if they want to withdraw the property from the rental market.
“The Ellis Act is such a disgusting thing,” said Bernard Dethiers, a building tenant of more than 30 years who described Cunningham and her son as family. “It’s just immoral to do the Ellis Act. I mean, it’s perfectly legal. But it’s immoral.”
Two of the new owners previously rented a unit in the building before buying into the TIC, according to Cunningham, which she said makes the ordeal even more uncomfortable.
“It’s neighbors evicting neighbors,” Cunningham said.
Dethiers – originally from France – said he also received an offer from the ownership group to buy into the TIC, but refused.
“What was going to happen to my neighbors?” he said. “I just couldn’t do anything that would hurt them or be involved in any kind of eviction.”
Under the terms of the Ellis Act, the tenants are supposed to move out by November. But they decided to fight the eviction, seeking help from the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a nonprofit that offers legal aid to low-income San Francisco residents.
Steve Collier, the organization’s managing attorney, said he believes the Ellis Act shouldn’t be used as an eviction tool for brand-new owners.
“We find that the Ellis Act primarily is used by people who just bought a building,” Collier said. “It’s simply used as a vehicle to displace rent-controlled tenants.”
If forced to leave, Collier said his clients would be hard-pressed to find a home in the city that they can afford. One of his clients currently pays about $600 a month, he said, and nobody in the building pays more than $1,300.
While the Ellis Act requires landlords to offer relocation payments to their displaced tenants – which vary in amount depending on the circumstances of each renter – Collier said they’re not enough for many rent-controlled tenants to afford market-rate housing.
According to Zumper, the median rental price for a one-bedroom apartment now hovers north of $4,000.
“I think this would be absolutely the end of the North Beach life for sure, and perhaps even San Francisco,” Cunningham said.
Chui said she’s hoping to find housing assistance from the city, but Collier said that’s in short supply and even harder to find for multigenerational households like hers.
“I am very flustered,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
In a statement shared with NBC Bay Area through their attorney, the owners of the building described themselves as “long term North Beach renters” who are legally pursuing home ownership “in a city with an evergreen housing shortage.”
“[The owners] are not developers speculating on the A-I bubble,” they said in the statement. “They are families looking for a way to raise their young children in the city they love.”
“The city provides housing opportunities for tenants who are displaced in this way, and the owners hope that the tenants avail themselves of these opportunities,” they added.
Both sides now find themselves fighting over the eviction in court.
The building’s owners filed a lawsuit against their tenants in April – before the tenants were required to move out – seeking to resolve several disputes over the eviction and limit some of the potential legal defenses the tenants might later raise in court.
This week, the tenants filed a cross-complaint against the building’s owners, accusing them of housing discrimination and other civil violations.
According to the cross-complaint, “only the caucasian tenants in the property” were given offers to buy into the ownership group.
“We believe that kind of discrimination, either in effect or on purpose, is illegal,” Collier said. “None of the Asian families were offered to buy into their unit. Meagan Cunningham and her family, who are also of mixed heritage, were not offered, even though they expressed an interest.”
NBC Bay Area requested comment from the owners on the allegations in the cross-complaint, but it was not addressed in their statement.
For Dethiers, the fight represents something beyond his own fate.
“We do it for us,” Dethiers said. “We do it also for other tenants all over the city who are under rent control.”