Will City Sell Out Tenants to Balance the Budget?Paul Hogarthbyline‚ Feb. 02‚ 2009Whenever there’s a crisis, opportunists try using it to get what they want. As the City faces a deficit for the next fiscal year that is half the General Fund, a group of real estate speculators want to raise the cap on condominium conversions – and allow all those waiting in the “condo lottery” to pay a one-time fee to convert their property. The stated premise, they say, is that the City badly needs more revenue. San Francisco only allows 200 condo conversions per year to stem the erosion of rental housing, which for decades has protected tenants from mass speculative evictions. Mayor Frank Jordan proposed upping this limit in 1993, but was shot down after housing activists protested. Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier tried it in 2005, but likewise got rebuffed. Now, Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected to support lifting the annual cap to 1,500 (and raise the conversion fee) as a means of balancing the budget – which his press office confirmed this weekend. At a time when renters are struggling in this recession to stay in San Francisco, paving the way for mass evictions is a bad idea. And as the City faces a glut of newly built condominiums (which are struggling to sell in this depressed market), why would we want more condo conversions? Our fiscal crisis requires finding sound solutions to the problem – not creating a path to runaway gentrification. |