“Who evicts a 98 year old woman?” a post on the Vanishingsf Facebook page asked. “Feel free to let Urban Green CEO David McCloskey, who’s evicting her, know what you think, ask him how he sleeps at night and if he’d put his grandmother on the streets. David@urbangreeninv.com (415) 651-4441 http://www.urbangreeninv.com.”

When are we going to say enough?

If my brother and I lived in SF, I know my brother would take her case, for sure.

is being charitable.

I'm not sure if they are pro bono or not.

I hope that company gets castigated over it and rethinks this. Just abominable.

WILL collapse or devolve into a civil war...

enough is

you know

a splash page that is either a wonderful moment of serendipity - or a deliberate slap in the face to everyone who thinks the company is its own ring of Hell.

Or do I understand the implication that she has to choose to leave in order for the landlord to stop renting to her?

...If you live in a bubble in the foothills of Bullshit Mountain.

Maybe you know or maybe you don't, but there is no need to be an ass.

he can evict the renters, and use the building in any way he wants.
In this case, he wants to sell it to make a profit in the market.
So legally, he can kick her out.

david@urbangreeninv.com

Give them a few lines in support of Mary. I did today.

I'm a fellow rental property owner who would never consider doing this for all the money in the world. I gave him a piece of my mind

The problem with renting, is always the threat that the landlord doesn't renew the lease and you get kicked out. That's the fact of renting whether you're 98 or 18.

Good luck with that!

With the new inflation of the electonics/aps/all things digital bubble, people are paying $ 1,100 for a small dingey studio. And upwards of $ 3,500 for anything that is liveable.

Although this is good for the younger techie crowd, who are now moving to the Bay area as fast as you can say "Yo!," there are not many ways a 98 year old could compete in this market. Now if only she had learned how to create aps, a year or two back...

When a bubble exists, and the place to be is Silicon Valley and Silicon Gulch and all the rest of it, then there is tremendous pressure on housing market.

But at least the techies are making good pay. Sell an app and you can be fixed for a good five years or more. Look at the folks who brought about "Yo!" and how much they will be getting from Facebook.

And apps are not even hard to figure out.

The people who really get screwed over are the people who can't deal with the exorbitant costs of the rent inflation, as they don't work in that industry. I know that during the last tech bubble, I lived in Sausalito Calif, and watched many boat builders go out of business as the rents for their warehouses went up by a factor of five or six. Some of these people were second or third generation boat builders, but they simply couldn't deal with the bubble's effects on rental increases. But a 98 year old is in the worst situation possible - she is on a fixed income.

Many elderly women have truly scrimped and saved for their retirement, but few people in America can handle living beyond age ninety. And the thing is, if you live to be 90, you have a good chance of living to be a hundred!

and live in hip SF rather some boring suburb that looks like the suburbs where they grew up. Their companies send luxury buses to pick them up in these hip areas and bring them to their jobs at suburban "campuses" in Silicon Valley. It's nirvana for young techies

That's a really great idea. You should offer to help her...

And no, it isn't a fact depending on where you live, which is why rent control exists in those places. Using a loophole to get around it and evict a 98 year old 50 years long tennant is scumbaggery in the extreme.

and cost.

Makes you lose confidence in mankind. 98 years old for God's sake!

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/07/10/3458591/san-francisco-evict-98-year-old/

The company is using a 1986 state law called the Ellis Act to boot Phillips from her apartment in a building at 55 Dolores Street. That property was bought in late 2012 for about $2.5 million, according to Trulia.com, marking a nearly $1.2 million profit for the previous owners who had bought it in early 2011. In April, 2013, the new owners served Phillips with an eviction notice.

Urban Green Investments (UGI) ranks 19th on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s “Dirty Thirty” list of property developers. The group says UGI and other developers are abusing the Ellis Act to push disadvantaged people out of their homes in order to flip the properties and cash in on the city’s hot real estate market. The man behind the company has used the Ellis Act 43 times in the past 10 years, according to the group. Ellis Act evictions fell in the wake of the financial crisis, but have been on the rise again as the economy has recovered and San Francisco property values have spiked over the past two years.

http://news.kron4.com/news/video-update-company-evicting-98-year-old-s-f-woman-still-wont-talk/



SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A 98-year old woman who has lived in the same San Francisco apartment for a half century has now received an official eviction notice, despite having never missed a rent payment.

In a follow up to the story we first brought you Wednesday, KRON 4?s Dan Kerman reports the company that is ordering Mary Phillips to move, Urban Green Investments, has done this sort of thing before.

“They’re finding rent controlled buildings, theyre flipping them, they’re evicting the tenants first and then they are selling them as tic’s or tenancys in common,” Erin McElroy with the anti-eviction mapping project tells Dan. “They have bought at least 385 units with cash over the last few years in San Francisco. They have Ellis Acted at least five buildings.”
Lawyers for Phillips say they have now received both an eviction notice and notice of an ejectment lawsuit.

“I cant believe people can be so uncaring,” Phillips tells Dan. “I don’t expect any special privileges or anything. I can understand from his standpoint how they’d want more income, but they should have looked into that before they purchased the property.”

This is such a heartless thing to do to her, or anyone in her her position!

If you don't like it call on the city to take the building by eminent domain and convert it to public housing.

"The law was intended to protect landlords who wanted to get out of the business from being forced to continue renting properties they would prefer to sell. But the majority of Ellis Act evictions in recent years have been initiated by speculators rather than landlords"

That paragraph is nonsense.

If you don't want to see rental properties taken off the market, get the city to buy them and make them public housing.

You can't seriously expect any privately owned rental property to remain one in perpetuity. That's ridiculous.

Where are they going to find housing in ridiculously expensive San Francisco on a fixed income?

It should be invested in new public housing rather than subsidizing a stagnant rental stock.

Then there is all the money spent coddling crackheads and shithead drifter kids.

I've had one and currently have the other, plus a 96-year-old never married great aunt.

People that age simply cannot cope with moving the way younger people can. Sometimes they go from being functional to remembering almost nothing when moved, and shortly find themselves in the dementia sections of nursing homes.

Get yourself to the emergency room, because I think that your heart stopped beating.

And their housing issues, although different, keep me up at night.

If the City of San Francisco feels this is a problem they should step up and buy the properties in question as they come on the market.

so I guess you're okay with extreme capitalism being visited upon a 98 year old.

I have no more to say.

but Sen. Mark Leno (D-SF), who's been spearheading efforts at Ellis Act reform, appears to have been intimidated by the real estate lobby.

Most of SF's problems in one form or another go back to too many people being deeply invested in the status quo on any number of issues, obviously housing is one of them. But at the same time while cities all over North America are racing one another to see who can build the next generation of high density future slums the fastest, hindsight probably won't find much fault for SF not partaking.

The real elephant in the room is the age of the rent controlled housing stock, even if there were never another condo conversion these are buildings that are nearing the end of their useful lives.

I understand there are differences of opinions on this topics, but renting for 50 years is totally nuts. Buy. Own the place you live in. Do not be beholden to someone else who can choose to evict you for any reason whatsoever.

In the past there have been discussions here on DU about the benefits of renting vs owning, and while I do understand that owning is not always the best solution, this is a very good example of why owning has benefits.

Fifty years. Most mortgages are for no more than thirty years.

Now at age 98, she's probably a tad frail and may not move anywhere very well. Your point is well taken.

and even if she owned the place they'd probably use eminent domain to kick her out?

Although properties are affordable, here is one ploy that happens to older people.

The Local Housing Association makes notice of how old you are. They conveniently "forget" to send out an older person's notice for payment of yearly Housing Associatin fees and dues.

So the fees and dues do not get paid, and next thing you know the elderly person or couple is forced out of their home, which has had a lien served on it. And the Housing Association is now the owner!

Only 11% of the population of San Francisco can afford to buy their housing and that statistic has remained steady for decades.

couldn't save up the down payment. A 20% down on a place out here is in the tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

you can still lose it. Lose your job, get behind on payments, etc. Easier to lose a rental than a house. I will never buy. I don't want the added maintenance and ins. costs. With renting, you are free to move if some jerk moves in next door, or someone with kids. Owning is not for everyone.

You might have heard of it.

As a country we don't do enough to provide affordable rentals either. This woman was fortunate to live in an area with rent control but unfortunate to have her building purchased by an owner who makes his money by converting rentals under the Ellis Act.

then what?

us we had to leave where I'm living now.. twice in 2 years. I don't want to live anywhere else and we have fought to stay. I love it here and we're still here. Fingers crossed!

Good Luck and Best Wishes to Mary Phillips~

Mahalo Matariki

Some people's greed knows no bounds. I hope the publicity this case is getting helps this poor woman find a suitable place to live.

she would probably have to move well outside of SF. At her age, I don't see a good outcome for that. Maybe someone could rent her part of a condo for a very low price or for free ? Hell, maybe some nice billionaire could buy the damn building and rent it out to other people like her and allow her to keep her home.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/housing-activists-take-aim-at-cow-hollow-company-over-eviction-of-longtime-elderly-tenant/Content?oid=2846929

Anti-eviction activists have blamed San Francisco's housing crisis on a number of entities, from landlords to tech companies to commuter shuttles, but they staged their most recent protest against a self-described green-friendly company that they and some city politicians claim is one of the largest local real estate speculators particularly quick at flipping properties for resale.

Urban Green Investments, at 1746 Union St., had several dozen Eviction-Free San Francisco protesters outside its office Wednesday morning. The activists with Eviction-Free San Francisco decried the property owner's latest Ellis Act eviction involving 98-year-old Mary Phillips, a 50-year resident, and Balboa High School teacher Sarah Brant, the only two remaining tenants at a six-unit complex at 55 Dolores St. in Mission Dolores.

"There are other notorious speculators who have evicted perhaps more, but these evictions have happened very rapidly," Eviction-Free San Francisco organizer Erin McElroy said. "It's not like Urban Green has been sitting around 10 years, periodically evicting. They just came on and started evicting really quickly."

The real estate company, which closed its doors during the protest Wednesday, and its lawyer could not be reached for comment. On its website, Urban Green Investments states that it "invests in multi-family, commercial and entitled land real estate in California," and "adds value by increasing efficiencies, enhancing entitlements, and employing carefully calibrated green renovations."

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/07/11/landlord-will-not-evict-98-year-old-woman-after-all/#25025101=0