Two types of eviction are rising in San Francisco. Advocates fear there’s ‘something else going on’

https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/eviction-notices-san-francisco-17553841.php

Danielle Echeverria, Susie Neilson

Nov. 3, 2022

A year after the state’s COVID-19 eviction moratorium expired, the number of eviction notices filed in San Francisco has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, a Chronicle analysis found.

Data from the San Francisco Rent Board, which monitors the nearly three-quarters of San Francisco rental units that are rent-controlled, shows that eviction notices have been on the rise since October 2021, when California’s emergency eviction moratorium ended, ushering in a patchwork of state extensions, local protections and rent relief programs instead.

On July 1, a remaining state law protecting against evictions for nonpayment of rent during the pandemic also expired, and eviction notices in San Francisco spiked.

Evictions in 2022 have been concentrated in the Tenderloin, South of Market, downtown and South Beach.

The surge and concentration of evictions captured in the data match what tenant advocates are seeing on the ground, the Eviction Defense Collaborative and the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco said.

Landlords are not required to report nonpayment evictions to the rent board — though some still do — which means that the data is likely an undercount of the actual number of eviction notices provided to tenants, according to Christina Varner, the executive director of the San Francisco Rent Board.

The rent board data also does not include evictions from single-room-occupancy residences, which an earlier Chronicle analysis found are also approaching pre-pandemic levels.

“What you see at the rent board only scratches the surface,” Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, told The Chronicle. While she didn’t know exactly how many landlords report nonpayment eviction notices to the rent board, she said that her team is seeing about 40% of evictions for nonpayment, 40% for nuisance and 20% for other reasons, including owner move-in or illegal use.

Eviction notices also don’t always lead to an eviction. Landlords can only legally evict tenants after going through an additional court process. Once a notice is posted on someone’s door, tenants can make an agreement with their landlord and stay, pay off any back rent and stay, or the notice can be withdrawn. But in many cases, the tenant simply leaves.

“Notices don’t prove displacement, but a high percentage do, with or without the court,” Prochovnick said.

If none of the above happen, the landlord can sue for unlawful detainer. A Chronicle request for data on unlawful detainer suits for 2022 has not yet been answered, but Prochovnick said that the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which defends tenants through the city’s tenant-right-to-counsel program, is also seeing pre-pandemic numbers of lawsuits.

Prochovnick said she’s also been surprised by the continued rise in nuisance evictions, a loosely defined category that landlords used relatively infrequently before the pandemic.

Landlords can file nuisance evictions for many different reasons — under California law, it’s anything that interferes with the comfort and enjoyment of the landlord or other tenants on the property. That could be loud music, an incessantly barking dog or strong odors coming from a tenant’s unit.

During the pandemic, nuisance evictions were still allowed under the eviction moratorium if they were related to health and safety. In 2020 and 2021, the percentage of eviction notices for nuisance went up over pre-pandemic levels, which tenants’ rights advocates suspected was because landlords were broadening their own definitions of what they considered nuisance.

Prochovnick said she expected nuisance evictions to drop back down as the moratorium expired and evictions for nonpayment were allowed again. But instead, they have continued rising in 2022, the rent board data shows.

“During COVID, it was all nuisance all the time,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that they are continuing” as nonpayment evictions also ramp up.

Maria Zamudio, the executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, added that because nuisance is such a broad category, landlords who used it during the pandemic to evict tenants they don’t like, or tenants in rent-controlled units, are continuing to do so.

“Usually, for us, when we see an increase in nuisances there’s something else going on,” she said.

But Janan New, the executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, which helps property owners, disputed this. She said that landlords are hesitant to issue nuisance evictions, as they are difficult, costly and time-consuming to prove in court. It often involves getting testimony from other tenants, for example.

“No one is going to waste the time and money to do that because you wouldn’t be successful,” she said. “Most cases are pretty egregious when they get to this point.”

She cited increased complaints from other tenants during the pandemic, as well as a backlog in processing of nuisance eviction notices, to explain the rise in numbers this year.

The high number of evictions is affecting many who have not recovered financially from the pandemic, Prochovnick and Zamudio said, and tenants’ rights lawyers and advocates are stretched to capacity trying to get people help.

“The economic aspects of the pandemic are still very much with us,” Prochovnick said. “People are being evicted at higher and higher numbers.”

“The last thing San Francisco needs is another person who doesn’t have a place to live,” Zamudio added.