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If you ask me the person that owns the property, not some government nanny should be the one who decides how much to rent the property for.

Government rent control laws are nothing but a form of government theft stealing from the property owner and giving to the tenant.

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Renters get boot with big rate hike

Carolyn Said

Updated 11:13 p.m., Sunday, September 2, 201

Dana-Lee Smirin has rented a house in San Francisco's Dolores Park neighborhood since 2008 and considered it "a haven of stability" as she battles Hodgkin's lymphoma and the aftermath of a car accident.

So she was distressed when her landlady informed her that she wants to sell the house and almost doubled Smirin's rent, from $3,100 to $6,000. Smirin viewed it as a tactic to get her out because it's easier to sell a vacant property.

"The only way to evict me is to raise my rent to an abominable amount I can't afford," said Smirin, 42, who is on disability leave from her job as a sustainability consultant. "Then if I can't pay it, she can serve me a three-day notice to evict."

Single-family homes, such as Smirin's rental, are exempt from San Francisco's strict rent-control laws, which cap rent increases for multiunit buildings. Landlords cannot evict tenants from any kind of unit without just cause, but they can utilize several loopholes - such as big rent increases in single-family homes and violations of the rental agreement in apartment buildings - to create a legal reason to evict tenants or encourage them to move.

Those loopholes are coming into play now, as both rents and sale prices escalate in the city. Tenant activists say the incidence of renters being forced out is likewise on the rise. San Francisco Rent Board statistics show that eviction numbers have stayed consistent over the past two years, but advocates say renters often move out before the point of eviction.

"Every time I see that the real estate market is getting better, I say, 'Oh no,' " said Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. "Rents have gone through the roof, so there's a lot of pressure to get long-term tenants out" so landlords can charge higher rents or sell their properties.

Asking rents in San Francisco were up 12.9 percent in the second quarter, to an average $2,734, according to RealFacts.

Sales are also on the upswing, which may be motivating some owners to sell rental homes. The median price paid for a single-family San Francisco home in July was $714,000, up 5.8 percent from a year earlier, according to DataQuick. In Smirin's ZIP code, the median was just north of $1 million, up 9 percent from a year earlier, according to Zillow.com Single-family homes hit

The situation is exacerbated for tenants in single-family homes.

"Landlords (in single-family homes) have figured out that they can just raise the rent to a level that's not affordable" as a way to force out tenants, Gullicksen said.

Adam Clark, a jewelry designer and metalsmith who had spent almost 10 years renting a one-bedroom single-family Sunnyside house with a roommate, saw his rent rise from $2,050 to $2,750 this year.

"The landlady had never really raised the rent beyond the standard, but suddenly at the beginning of the year decided to raise it by $700," he said. "She knew I wasn't going to go for it. She raised it to get me out."

In multiunit dwellings, landlords can evict tenants for violating the terms of a rental agreement; such breaches are consistently listed as the main cause of eviction on the Rent Board site.

"Typically, a landlord evicts for a minor violation of the rental agreement, which otherwise would be ignored," Gullicksen said. Sometimes landlords even change the rules, he said. "We call it a pretext eviction."

But even more commonly, once the landlord raises the rent or says the rental agreement has been violated, "most tenants move before the eviction notice," Gullicksen said.

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, a trade group for landlords in the city, said she thinks such cases remain relatively rare.

"I don't think there's a massive amount; maybe a few isolated incidents," she said. "These things happen all the time, and it's tragic, but that's the cycle of real estate. It seems to boom and bust."

Eviction compensation

The city's eviction numbers have not risen appreciably. From January through July, the Rent Board recorded 824 evictions, averaging 118 a month. For the same period last year, there were 740 evictions, averaging 106 a month.

Landlords must pay relocation compensation to renters who are legally evicted for circumstances outside their control, such as when a rental is returned to owner occupancy. It starts at $5,000 and includes extra payments for those who, like Smirin, are disabled or catastrophically ill. Tenants who move voluntarily - in response to a rent increase, for instance - are not automatically entitled to compensation.

Smirin wants financial assistance with relocation, including the first year or two of higher monthly payments she is likely to face in a new dwelling. She also hopes that a new owner allows her to stay at a reasonable rent. Letters from her UCSF oncologists stress the importance of a stable, stress-free living environment as she undergoes chemotherapy and prepares for a possible bone-marrow transplant.

Smirin sees her situation as directly related to the improving real estate market, which is particularly hot in neighborhoods such as hers that are served by private shuttle buses to Google and other Silicon Valley companies.

"In the past few months, houses around here have been bid up by (huge amounts), because there are all these newly wealthy young tech guys," Smirin said. Landlady needs to sell

But her landlady, the Rev. Keenan Kelsey, pastor of Noe Valley Ministry, said her decision to sell has nothing to do with homes increasing in value.

"My other income has gone down so far that I need what I have invested in the house in order to pay my own home rent," she said.

Public records show the house was purchased in 2002 for $837,000; Zillow.com pegs its current value at $1.35 million.

Although the two women, who each have hired lawyers, dispute several facts, they agree that Kelsey served a 60-day notice to increase the rent to $6,000 starting in October. Kelsey said she would not necessarily enforce the increase if Smirin moves out in a certain time or is amenable to letting her fix up and show the house.

"The law says that a landlord cannot evict a tenant, but ... a landlord can raise the rent," Kelsey said. "I am not evicting Dana. I need to sell the house, which costs me money and has ever since she's lived there. In order to facilitate a conversation, I invoked my legal right to raise the rent. We are trying to negotiate a fair settlement for both of us."

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com