tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7569226984641278838.post8921004853917278438..comments2024-02-22T00:01:29.581-08:00Comments on Luggage Tag...: Cape Town and LangaWendy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00129398892508107446noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7569226984641278838.post-18371945520369598852008-03-19T17:49:00.000-07:002008-03-19T17:49:00.000-07:00Dayne -- With all due respect, it's a little too f...Dayne -- <BR/><BR/>With all due respect, it's a little too facile to compare wholesale ethnic cleansing of a city-sized district to a state law that allows individual property owners to evict a tenant in order to stop being a landlord.<BR/><BR/>I'm certainly no fan of Ellis Act evictions -- I would never Ellis a property, nor would I ever buy a unit in an Ellised building. But even as a bleeding-heart liberal San Franciscan, I think it's a bit of a stretch to draw a parallel here.<BR/><BR/>The District Six "evictions" involved 60K people who were forcibly, physically removed -- an entire district! The houses were bulldozed, as I understand it, to make way for middle-class, white homes.<BR/><BR/>Ellis Act evictions involve removing tenants from their apartments to let the owner of an apartment building 'go out of business'. Yes, it's usually it's to sell the property and allow the new owners to easily condo-convert, but not always. Sometimes landlords just get too old or too frustrated to do the landlord thing, and the market for occupied units in SF is basically zero, due to our outdated rent-control laws.<BR/><BR/>Depending on who you ask, there were between 300-400 Ellis evictions in SF last year -- a far cry from 60,000 in South Africa -- and many of the evicted renters were no less white and middle-class than the eventual buyers of the units -- most of whom were first-time buyers who turned to Tenancy-in-Common (a strange sort of co-op we have in SF) because they couldn't even afford a condo in this overpriced city.<BR/><BR/>The Ellis Act specifically protects disabled renters, seniors, and anyone with a terminal illness, including HIV/AIDS from eviction. Needless to say, any racially motivated eviction is just as unlawful here as it would be anywhere else. <BR/><BR/>This is a very, very sore subject here in SF, as I am guessing you can tell from my response.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com