For the last two weeks of December, San Franciscans facing eviction get a break. Deputy sheriffs, who usually make their weekly round of door-to-door evictions on Wednesdays, won\u2019t be going out for the rest of the year.<\/p>\n
For some, the temporary reprieve lets them stay in their homes at least until Jan. 7, the first Wednesday of 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But ahead of the holidays, they\u2019re still busy pleading their case. Lawyers who provide pro-bono eviction defense say the number of clients walking through their doors has been \u201cstaggering\u201d as the year comes to a close.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sheriff\u2019s deputies may pause enforcing evictions for the holidays, but the courts don\u2019t stop ruling on them \u2014\u00a0they close down only for Christmas and New Year\u2019s Day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a full calendar,\u201d said Ora Prochovnick, the director of litigation and policy for the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a non-profit providing free legal assistance to tenants facing eviction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prochovnick has 19 cases scheduled for the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Often, the court sees nearly 50 cases each day during the last two weeks of December, Prochovnic said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Across two Tuesdays in December, the seats in San Francisco Superior Courts Evictions Department, the city\u2019s eviction court, were lined with dozens of tenants facing imminent eviction. They all plead to stay just a little longer, sitting quietly alone or with a lawyer by their side.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each took their turn at the podium to defend their request to stay before a sheriff\u2019s deputy knocks on their door.<\/p>\n
Francisco, who only speaks Spanish, did not understand that he was being evicted at first. Later, he had trouble understanding why.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He shares a one bedroom apartment with his cousin and another roommate and has attended eviction hearings nearly every day since early December. Because he could not find a lawyer in time for the hearing, alongside him sat Chris Meuse, the owner of Cafe Meuse, a Russian Hill wine bar where Francisco has worked for the last 14 years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t pretend to know a whole bunch or be an attorney,\u201d said Meuse, dressed in a grey suit and studying a stack of documents related to the case. \u201cI just know what strikes me as not fair.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking through his translator, Francisco said he received an eviction notice weeks ago from the landlord of his one-bedroom Tenderloin apartment. The notice claimed he owed months of rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not so, Meuse said, interpreting for Francisco: He had paid the rent to the property manager. But the property manager, apparently no longer worked at the company.<\/p>\n
The judge put a hand up, stopping Meuse mid-sentence. In order to continue, she said, Francisco would need to find a lawyer to assist him, granting him some more time until he could find an attorney.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They do this each time: Meuse tries to interpret what Francisco is saying to the judge, and what the judge is saying to Francisco, before heading over to the wine bar for the evening shift. He\u2019s helped to file his complaints, email back and forth with the opposing counsel, and navigate an often confounding court system. The pair got some relief last week: While trying to get an emergency stay to keep Francisco housed, a lawyer from the Eviction Defense Collaborative overheard him and walked over, volunteering to help.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re going after my guy because he\u2019s the easiest target,\u201d Meuse said. Francisco and Meuse are worried that in order to stay at his apartment, he will have to pay his rent twice over to his new property manager. \u201cThey\u2019re just squeezing the little guy,\u201d said Meuse. \u201cI just kind of hope justice will prevail, but I\u2019m not so sure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since the city\u2019s pandemic-era eviction moratorium ended in 2023, and the AI boom caused rents to skyrocket, evictions in San Francisco have begun to rise again<\/a>. The current total<\/a> of eviction notices filed in 2025 stands at 1,469, the city\u2019s highest since 2018, though they have yet to reach the heights they did in 2016 (when landlords issued over 2,000 notices) or 1998 (when the number neared 3,000).<\/p>\n The number of lawsuits filed to formally evict tenants is lower \u2014 856 as of Dec. 16 this year. But those have increased by nearly 60 percent since 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n During Tuesday\u2019s eviction proceedings, a woman approached the podium, citing that she has tried to find housing since mid-September, but has been unsuccessful, and needs an emergency stay. She is disabled, she told the judge. The judge, looking at her papers in front of her, told her she had no evidence of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI have my doctor\u2019s note in front of me,\u201d she said, holding up a printed out document. The judge informed her that any evidence needed to be filed in court. \u201cI emailed it earlier,\u201d she protested, but hadn\u2019t sent it to the right channels. Her stay, said the judge, was declined.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Dief Dexter, the holiday pause on evictions was useless: The knock on his door had already come.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dexter, who lives near Mission Bay, said that the rent in the building at 785 Brannan St., which he has lived in for 20 years increased \u201cdramatically\u201d after it was transferred to a new owner. Finding a new apartment has been a nightmare, he said: He can only afford to live in a place with roommates and, at 60, he\u2019s been repeatedly rejected, he said, for being \u201ctoo old.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Dexter managed to get a temporary stay on Dec. 3 for seven days after telling the judge that he was actively searching for housing and is on disability. He hoped he would be granted a longer stay after that, and have time to pack his belongings over the holidays.<\/p>\n But on Dec. 10, he was told he had to leave immediately by a sheriff\u2019s deputy. He hurriedly packed away his possessions into a storage closet and found a friend who would take him in until he could figure out what to do next.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Several of Dexter\u2019s former neighbors in his old building, who are also struggling to pay the new rents, may soon be in his shoes, he said. \u201cNow that the moratorium is over, a lot of people are being pushed out,\u201d said Dexter. \u201cMe included.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the last two weeks of December, San Franciscans facing eviction get a break. Deputy sheriffs, who usually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107626,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[28175,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-107625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-evictions","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}