12 Reasons for SF Tech Workers to Vote YES on Prop G
Love this city? Let’s put our votes where our values are. Proposition G is a financial disincentive against evictions in the form of a real estate speculation tax. This strategy was originally proposed by late Supervisor Harvey Milk prior to his assassination in 1978.
It can and will work.
Here’s ten good reasons to vote Yes on Prop G:
1. It’s effectively targeted.
Right now, SF is at the height of its worst housing crisis in decades. In this kind of market, real estate speculators are making a killing by buying up a rent-controlled buildings, evicting the tenants using the Ellis act, spending a year remodeling the building, and then flipping it for a HUGE profit. We need more and better housing, but evicting grandmas to flip units doesn’t solve the problem, it’s only a way to make money. Prop G goes to the root cause of why this is happening, short-term profits, and disincentivizes real estate speculation by imposing a significant tax on people who property-flip in four years or less. The quicker you flip, the higher the tax. The goal is simple: to make it less lucrative to engage in predatory, eviction-happy, house flipping.
2. Prop G only impacts rental property-flippers, not regular homeowners.
There is a lot of misinformation floating around about this point. Real estate groups (both national and local) have dumped almost $2 million into No on G campaigns to convince you that Prop G will hurt mom and pop homeowners, but this simply isn’t true. Prop G is a financial disincentive against Ellis Act evictions only in the case of flipping of multi-unit buildings. If a new owner actually lives in one of their units and then has to sell within those first five years for any reason, or if they own the building for more than 5 years and then resells, the tax doesn’t apply. Single-family homes, condominiums, new units, Tenancy-In-Common (TICs), buildings over 30 units and committed affordable housing are also exempt. For real.
3. Proposition G will provide immediate impact.
Regardless of where you stand on the build-or-not-to-build debate, there is one thing we can all agree on: building housing will take time. When eviction rates are peaking, we just don’t have time to argue about building, vote on building or not building, and then build (or not). We need other solutions that address immediate circumstances that are destabilizing neighborhoods and displacing existing residents.
4. Yes, you can still buy a house.
If you are dreaming of buying a home in the next few years, you probably want to know how Prop G would affect you, right? Ok. Say you are an engineer and pull in 160K/year (lucky you). Suppose next year you purchase a duplex, live in one of the vacant units and decide to sell the property three years later. Guess what, Prop G won’t apply to you. Why? Because your unit is owner-occupied. But if an absentee landlord buys the unit, doesn’t move in, evicts tenants, remodels, and flips the units for triple or quadruple the price? They gotta pay for that.
Just don’t evict somebody if you buy a house, ok? See #10.
5. Real estate speculation is not innovative.
SF’s tech boom is bringing a wave of talented and brilliant young skilled workers to the city. Prosperity is good, but we need to ensure our presence does not drive out the existing working class and low income residents who have called this place home for decades. SF must continue to grow and change, but the systematic, serial evictions targeted by Prop G are not an innovation solution, they are a huge problem. Predatory speculators are drunk driving through the city and leaving behind a huge wake of displacement and hardship. Tech workers like to solve problems, not exacerbate them. We know it is not smart growth to have other people’s lives as collateral damage of the real estate industry capitalizing on our desire to live and work in the city. As the largest wave of newcomers to San Francisco, tech workers can promote a vision of smart growth that also protects people from being displaced and ensures that everyone benefits from an economically prosperous city.
6. Over 10,000 SF tenants have already been displaced. (1)
The Ellis Act, passed in 1985, was intended to allow landlords to exit the rental market. Unfortunately, it is now being abused by real estate speculators that repeatedly use the law to evict long-term good standing tenants (either by actual use of the Ellis Act, buyouts, or by mere threat).
As a Tenants Together report earlier this year noted,
“An exhaustive review of all records since 1997 revealed the following: 30% of units were Ellised by an owner that has used the Ellis Act on another property. These are referred to as “Serial Evictors.” Some of these Serial Evictors have used the Act to evict tenants from many properties. For example, Kaushik Dattani has invoked the Ellis Act on 25 units and Urban Green Investments has invoked the Ellis act on 28 units.”
This is not why the Ellis Act exists or how it should be used. Prop G can actually help stop it, without affecting regular homeowners.
7. The Ellis Act won’t be reformed in Sacramento anytime soon.
Trying to get urban housing reform out of the California Legislature has been a futile struggle for years. Sacramento has such a diversity of geographic representation, (and more monied set of real estate lobbyists), that state representatives continue to fall short of the number of votes needed to win Ellis Act reform to curb evictions. Senator Leno tried to pass Ellis reform in the California Legislature earlier this year, and even sf.citi endorsed the bill along with a respectable number of tech companies. The bill fell short. Now these companies (and us, their workers) should support Prop G to address the same problem here in San Francisco, but from the more surgical tactic of a real estate speculation tax.
8. Proposition G is endorsed by every housing rights group in SF.
Let’s give credit where credit is due: housing rights activists have been working around the clock to fight evictions, and they certainly aren’t going to waste time supporting propositions that won’t work. Prop G isn’t going to drive down rent, but it’s not going going to raise rent either. That’s why they support it. We should support the groups fighting to protect the most vulnerable communities in SF. After all, Prop G will help, but these groups still have their work cut out for them.
9. More Giants fans, less Ayn Rands
Ok, ok, let’s talk about the invisible hand. Yes, rent control and other preventative municipal measures that aim to stabilize housing mean that SF is not a free market petri dish that allows us to show just how robust the market can be. But let’s be honest… SF will never be that way. Many families, poor folks, the queer community, and other less privileged groups depend on regulation to keep their homes safe and their city affordable. Tens of thousands everyday workers in restaurants, retail, and services industries that support tech rely on rent control to stay in their homes and ensure housing stability for their families. Let’s not pretend that the invisible hand would make everything ok if we just had less market regulation, and instead keep SF renters secure in their homes. So we can all focus on the Giants. #evenyear
10. Eviction is literally dangerous.
So what is the big problem with evictions, anyways? A lot of people wonder if losing your apartment is really the worst thing in the world. “Can’t they just move somewhere else and move on?” you might ask. Well, the answer is not really. Did you know that multiple San Francisco studies consider housing instability a major negative health risk? The AIDS Housing Alliance/SF supports Prop G due to the dangerous and harmful slippery slope that eviction can have on SF residents with HIV/AIDS.(2) Stable housing for people with HIV has been shown to reduce emergency medical visits by 35% and hospitalizations by 57%.(3) So the eviction = death sign at that one protest actually wasn’t really exaggerating.
Further, even if it doesn’t kill you, eviction is disruptive and dangerous. Displaced individuals suffer from anxiety, depression, and have a harder time finding or keeping a job, registering to vote, and don’t experience the positive benefits of a local community.(4a) Frequent family relocation is associated with children repeating grades, school suspensions and emotional and behavioral problems.(4b) For elderly, African-American, Latino and immigrant communities, the negative impacts of displacement are magnified.
Let’s be frank. For people who experience less discrimination, it’s easier to imagine picking up a new life. It isn’t like that for everyone. So let’s not impose our world view, and instead let’s be good neighbors and value everyone who is part of what makes SF the best damn city in the world.
11. Prop G won’t solve the whole housing crisis, but it sure will help.
You may have noticed that a lot of these posts are about eviction being bad. You may wonder to yourself, “Well, why don’t we just restrict evictions then?” And maybe one day that will happen. However, it’s extremely unlikely. As much as we want to stop evictions of tenants who don’t deserve it, we haven’t found a policy as specifically targeted at serial evictors, the greediest group of speculators, as Prop G. Any broader anti-eviction policy would be politically difficult and even more challenging to implement. What we need are strategic, impactful policies that go to the root of the problem of evictions and displacement, lucrative profit from real estate speculation. Prop G will make house-flipping less profitable and thereby less attractive, but has zero impact on regular homeowners and landlords.
12. Supporting Proposition G is about being a good neighbor.
If you or anyone you know has not enjoyed a burrito in the Mission, smiled at a kid on Muni, or saw something you’d never seen before in the Castro, then you can stop reading.
Ok. Thought so.
People make San Francisco San Francisco. These people are our neighbors, our friends, and our community. It’s time for us to pitch in too, by supporting common sense solutions that allow our neighbors to stay our neighbors. Sure, some problems are solved by the market. This is not one of them. In the case of SF’s complicated housing crisis, we need every disincentive for evictions we can find, so long as it doesn’t hurt individual homeowners who live and contribute to the city we all love.
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And while you’re at the ballot box, be sure to support a living wage for your fellow colleagues who clean, cook, drive, and provide security for your company. How? By voting Yes on Prop J. These people work hella hard each and every day, and many have families to feed. All workers deserve a wage that allows them a fair chance at being able to afford living in SF. Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hr. So can we.
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More info:
Read a non-biased description of Proposition G on BallotPedia.
Search for campaign contribution data for Prop G from MapLight.
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Credit:
Thanks for the input, fact checks, and feedback from dozens of SF residents who are leaders and members of Tech Workers Against Displacement. Thank you for the feedback and accuracy checks from individuals who work with San Francisco Housing Rights Committee, Causa Justa, and the Council of Community Housing Organizations. Thanks to Tenants Together, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and AIDS Housing Alliance for their research and data. Data matters. Last but not least, thanks to dozens of tech workers (including folks from Google, Facebook, Twitter and three SF startups) who offered multiple rounds of feedback, content ideas, and suggestions.
Also: no one was paid for writing this article. We just care.
Sources:
- Tenants Together arrived at this statistic by taking the SF Rent Board average of 3 tenants per household and applying it to the 1251 buildings and 3610 units that have been Ellis filed since 1997. They note this is actually a conservative estimate as it does not include those displacement by the mere threat of Ellis eviction. See page 2: http://tenantstogether.org/downloads/Ellis%20Act%20Report.pdf
- AIDS Housing Alliance/SF: http://www.ahasf.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=78&Itemid=208
- (a)Bekele T, et al., 2013. Direct and indirect effects of perceived social support on health-related quality of life among persons living with HIV/ AIDS: Results from the Positive Spaces Health Places Study. AIDS Care, 25(3):337–346; Aidala A, et al., 2007. Housing need, housing assistance, and connection to medical care. AIDS Behav. 11(6)/Supp2:S101-S115.
(b) Cooper, Merrill. Housing Affordability: A Children’s Issue. Canadian Policy Research Networks Discussion Paper. Ottawa, 2001.
(c) Jelleyman, T and N Spencer. Residential mobility in childhood and health outcomes: a systematic review. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. 2008; 62:584–592.
(d) Childhood residential instability has also been found to predict lifetime risk of depression.f f Gilman SE, Kawachi I, Fizmaurice GM, Buka L. Socio-economic status, family disruption and residential stability in childhood: relation to onset, recurrence and remission of major depression. Psychological Medicine. 2003; 33: 1341–55.
