The landlord of 1049 Market Street, the building filled with low-rent live-work units that some tenants have lived in over 15 years, appears to be getting desperate, and is going on the offensive in the latest chapter of what's becoming a two-year-long battle with the city. At Monday's meeting of the Board of Supervisors' Land Use and Economic Development Committee, some of the remaining tenants of 1049 Market were testifying before the committee to plead their case. They had also held a rally on the steps of City Hall prior to the meeting. But a lawyer for landlord John Gall a former baseball player who bought the building, along with two others on the same block, in 2012 arrived to serve the tenants with eviction notices, as Hoodline reports.
Also, as the Examiner adds, the tenants were each served with lawsuits seeking back rent and control of the units they're living in.
The tenants say that they have been trying to pay rent, but their efforts have been refused.
And furthermore, the landlord is subpeaona-ing Jane Kim in a separate lawsuit which has to do with the future of the building itself. Kim says all of this is "simply irrational," including the part of the legal language that suggests she's "target[ing] a particular property owner to prevent the abatement of hazardous conditions because that property owner needs to evict tenants in order to restore safety."
There is no real safety issue here, and you can read more of the backstory here, which has included multiple sets of eviction notices issued and rescinded in this 80+ unit building in which many tenants pay under $1000 for units with shared bathrooms, SRO-style. The new ownership has been banking on their ability to flip this and two other buildings on the block back to lucrative office use which is what they were originally built for. However the resulting situation, after the previous landlord rented all the units essentially as residences some with no windows and therefore with code-violations means that emptying these buildings to bring them to code amounts to mass eviction of low-income tenants. In truth, about half the units in 1049 Market are legal dwellings with windows, however building inspectors back in 2007 had declared the central, windowless units to be code violations. The current owner says bringing them up to code is economically infeasible, and the city says he can't just evict these people without penalty, thus the catch-22.
Approximately 60 tenants already vacated the building voluntarily, accepting payouts. But in addition to the remaining tenants you have another whole building-full at 1067 Market who are likely facing the same situation, though it seems they haven't been issued eviction notices yet. '
Kim is currently trying to extend a moratorium on the conversion of these tenant-occupied units to office space. She says, "Tenants are being evicted from their homes throughout the district through a loophole in the Planning Code," and, she adds, "This is not just an issue in Mid-Market."
