The Beginning of the End of the Middle
A month into our 60-day eviction notice, I’m a touch overwhelmed
Thirteen months ago, our new landlord introduced himself. When I met him at the door, he simply said, “I’ve bought your building. You’ll be paying your rent to me now,” and handed me a piece of paper with the address of an LLC on it. The name of the LLC was our neighbor’s address. He didn’t say hello, he didn’t offer his hand, and he had the lightless eyes of the playground tough.
A few days after that, he came back, all charm and questions, wanting to know: Who all lives here? Are you the master tenant? Can I look around? (4 people, no and no.) He was solicitous and charm-filled, if not actually charming.
He met that weekend with Dan, the master tenant (in San Francisco legal terms, the leaseholder and the one who writes the checks to the landlord). As we had discovered from a cursory Google, our man here was a notorious real-estate speculator, and at this meeting he enumerated the various methods of eviction he could use to remove us from our home, and said, “Or we could work something out.” He spent the next 6 weeks texting Dan and asking him if he was going to “accept my offer,” which in his haste he apparently forgot he had never actually made.
A year passed.
I plan on writing in more detail what all transpired in that year, but for the purposes of this post, the propelling events included a failed eviction attempt on his part, followed by a constant oscillation between buyout offers and threats of eviction. This flurry of activity subsumed all six units in our building, until everyone had taken a buyout but us.
We thought about it. We said yes. Then we rethought, had house meetings, consulted lawyers, slept on it, and looked at San Francisco apartment listings on craigslist. Then we said no. The money he was offering, although it was over six figures, would not last long in this rental market. Divide it by three (one roommate fled), subtract 30 percent from each share for state & federal capital gains taxes, deduct lawyers’ and accountants’ fees, subtract moving expenses — the money would last 2 or 3 years, if it was all spent purely on rent.
We opted instead to cooperate with a capital improvements eviction. Under San Francisco tenant law, if a landlord has to perform renovations that would be so disruptive to make a unit uninhabitable, the landlord can temporarily evict the occupants. He has to give you 60 days to move out, and he then has 90 days to perform the renovation.
Our move-out date is March 15, although technically 60 days lands on the 17th. We’re not going to squabble over time. We’re going with the Ides of March. It’s a Sunday; it’s simpler.
The eviction notice stipulates that if we move out “on time,” then we move back in on June 15.
Let me just say here that some of my friends think I’m nuts. We’ve been fighting for a year to keep our apartment in the Mission District; aren’t we tired of fighting? Don’t we just want it to be over? Don’t we want to take the money and move to the suburbs and buy a place? Don’t we realize the neighborhood we’ve lived in for a collective 50 years between the three of us is evaporating around us and being backfilled by the young Turks of the New Greed?
I’ll close this installment by saying that we may be nuts, but that we consulted lawyers; we may be overly optimistic, but we laid out a grid of pros and cons and thought this gamble was worth it.
