Longtime Rent-Control Tenant Shocked to Discover $6,700 Rent Hike Is Totally Legal

[KamaAina]

edit: Not The Onion!!

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/16/longtime_rentcontrol_tenant_shocked_to_discover_6700_rent_hike_is_totally_legal.php

On March 1, Deb Follingstad and her boyfriend were living in a rent-controlled apartment in Bernal Heights, paying $2,145 for a two-bedroom above what had once been a gas station and garage. On March 2, that all changed. Follingstad found herself holding a legal notice informing her that her rent would soon jump to $8,900—a fourfold increase—with a security deposit set at an astounding $12,500 per month. Follingstad, a Chinese medicine practitioner who treats cancer patients at Smith Integrative Oncology on the Embarcadero, had always believed that she enjoyed the protections of rent control. "I understand that a rent-controlled apartment is a ticking time bomb," explains Follingstand, who has lived in the unit, at 355 Bocana Street, since 2004. "But I never expected what I was served, nor did I think that what they gave me could be legal." Over the weekend, she posted a scan from the legal notice to Facebook with an appeal to friends for any leads on open apartments. The post quickly went viral. As of this writing, it's been shared more than 2,600 times.

But the action taken by Follingstad's landlord, Nadia Lama, appears to be legally sound, thanks to a workaround that gives landlords a way to free themselves of tenants without making the relocation payments required under the Ellis Act. According to tenant rights attorney Joseph Tobener, managing partner at Tobener Law Center, the move is known as a constructive eviction by rent increase, and it's just what it sounds like. A landlord raises the rent to an exorbitant amount, far above market rate, so that the tenant is all but forced to leave—but without being formally evicted or collecting a relocation payment. (Current Ellis Act relocation payments stand at $5,555.21 per tenant.) "When there's this moving allowance at stake, that's what incentivizes the landlord to try and get around the eviction protection," says Tobener....

For most of her 11-year tenancy, Follingstad, 46, was protected from large rent hikes under the Rent Ordinance of 1979, because she was living in a multi-unit building (single-family homes and condos are treated differently under the Rent Ordinance). But by 2014, a tenant who had been living in the downstairs apartment moved out, after which, recalls Follingstad, the Lama family ultimately removed the stove, sink, and toilet from the vacant ground-floor unit. "They put down some crappy carpet and now call it a 'storage' space," she wrote in her Facebook post. That change turned her building into a single-family dwelling and effectively dissolved the protection against large rent hikes, or what is known as rent-ceiling-limitation protection.

Normally when landlords want to take a unit out of service, they need to go through discretionary review with the Planning Department, Tobener explains. But because the downstairs unit was not on the books—city documents reflect just one dwelling unit at the address—the landlord needed only building permits to do the work, no blessing from Planning required.

[NYC_SKP]

1. Eat the rich.

Just eat them. It's coming to that, this unsustainable direction that society follows.

[villager]

2. It's sure as hell coming to something that won't be very pretty...

And given the obliviousness of society's owners to it all, as well as that of their "elected" puppets, it's hard to see any of it being averted, either...

[petronius]

4. Does that mean that the landlords were illegally renting that downstairs unit all along?

Seems like they should get penalized for that (although the current tenant also benefited--up to now--from that action)...