flipper. we -- and probably most t.i.c. owners don't stand to make a fortune when a unit converts. the conversion starts at 30,000 and then there are the tens of thousands of dollars that you have to spend to bring thible up to code. then if you do so there's another 6% realtor fees and other closing costs so i think few t.i.c. owners will become wealthy off this process. i'd also -- obviously like to ask the committee to pass this legislation. the vast majority of units in question are already owner occupied. they're off the rental market. no rebilitial units are being lost. i would like to see somebody recognize this and stand up or minority rights. with lifetime leases provided with rent control as well as funds going to the affordable housing funds and property taxes going to the city when units

eventually turn over, no one loses. id ask the committee make decisions based on the facts and support homeowners support those protected and put money in the coffers which will help everyone. thank you, supervisors wiener and farrell for your proposal of balanced legislation. thanks for letting me speak too. >> chair wiener: thank you very much and thank you for being honest. next speaker. >> high there. i'm a san francisco resident for 13 years. i'm a t.i.c. owner and previous renter for many years. all of my co-owners in my six unit t.i.c. were once renters also. we are not opposed to rent control. i just wanted to make that clear. the lottery system is so outdated and overburdened and with the current backlog it may be over 10 years before being eligible for conversions. we're not trying to make a quick buck because our units have lost a significant amount of value

since we purchased. we're previous renters who are looking to purchase a home to have stable housing in san francisco. we contribute to san francisco and we invest in san francisco. we are all moderate income households. we include a retired gm who is a renter for many years and wanted the security of owning his own home and t.i.c. was the only affordable option for him. another co-owner is having difficulties with current mortgage payments and faces challenges as options are so limited for t.i.c. this bypass covers just a drop in the ocean of housing stock in san francisco. it really doesn't affect tenants or their protections so i ask you to please support this. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you very much. next speaker. >> good afternoon. my name is beth palmer, and i'm a native san franciscan, born at

what used to be children's hospital on california street. i was a renter in the city from 1988 to 2007 when, along with the three other units in my building we all purchased, all of the other three unit owners are renters in the city as well. so to echo the comments of the last few people this isn't taking away rental units. we are renters and now owners. if anything the present system is keeping rental units off the market because owners like myself will remain in our community to meet the occupancy requirements. so whether there's a young calm couple who would like to move out of the city, maybe like more room, maybe buy another single family home as one of the speakers mentioned they're restricted from doing that so they're staying in the units rather than putting them back on the rental market. i wanted to thank supervisors farrell and wiener. i'm in supervisor farrell's district. i've lived in a number of

different neighborhoods. i've lived in the tender knob, north beach and cow hollow. i wanted to register my support and also register the support of my fellow owners. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> my name is josephine, my family of seven lives in district five. i speak for joe-joe, still in the audience, mr. jow-jow, and ruby lee still in the audience and other monolingual chinese speaker who will have to leave by now or too shy to speak. we also speak for 152 families from asian-american voters.org. we support rent control law. many of us are or having

renters. many of us are still renters some years, some years to go into home ordinancesship. by -- home ownership, in order to buy a home. we speak for cindy, her family has been on the waiting list for eight years and she's on the verge of foreclosure and be homeless. we speak for joe-jow who sits in the audience because he's disabled. he has to pay two-thirds of his disability into his home and withdraw money from 401-k to remortgage due to they can't refinance. we owe a lifetime lease. we support the stability of rental housing. we want peaceful coexistence. why can't we be supported reciprocally -- financial independence. it will not be fair that

homeowners have to sleep on the street while others watch and not help. let's help each other out and make san francisco home for everyone. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you very much. next speaker. >> supervisors kim, wiener, and chiu, thank you for your time, my name is ashley, i'm a first time homeowners and first time renter. i've lived in a t.i.c. in my unit for eight years and lived in the city for 12. i'm not a millionaire, i'm not a speculator, and imnot against rent control. i think it's a real shame that in san francisco that our land use policies have put renters against former renters and look to you to help solve that problem which is why i thank supervisors wiener and farrell for taking courage to address this particular issue. housing stability should be available for all. and there's some crazy irony at work here that i'd have a better chance of attaining that housing stability as renting my own

unit, rather than having taken the step to actually own it as a t.i.c. owner. i believe the legislation that supervisors wiener and farrell have put forward very carefully addresses the -- some concerns of all stakeholders. we're addressing by raising a significant amount of money to go into affordable housing. we know that specifically because of the provisions any buildings that have been ellis acted are not eligible for the conversion, nor are they under the current lottery process. so therefore any linkage between future ellis act and buildings going to t.i.c. in the condo bypass lottery should fall on deaf ears. lastly, i think you shouldn't have to give up your unit as an other than in order to gain -- owner in order to gain financial stability in san francisco. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. let me call more names. amy wagner, cole ryan, gabriela,

cole, tony robe less, sharea short, dean preston, wu, william hahannon, mir nah, amy wagner, v inia, greg, bobby, jennifer ly lyon. go ahead. thank you. you can see from the crowd that just came up that some people maybe have cut in line, but thank you. go ahead. >> my name is jennifer. i actually hate public speaking but this issue is so important to me that i'm going to make an exceptions. i'm a first time homeowner, a long time renter in san francisco. this legislation is important. it provides protection not only for renters that are in their unit, but for families that have been in t.i.c.s and have been

struggling for a long time. the same protections afforded to me as a renter to make sure my rent didn't skyrocket out of control are not in place for t.i.c. owners. the mortgage issue has that impact on us. and our futures are not bright. i thank you so much for putting this it legislation forward. it makes the world of difference for hard-working families in san francisco, and i just thank you. please support it. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is michelle, representing the affordable housing alliance approximate i want to say two things in the short time there is here. i think that your confidence that no tenants will be hurt in this process is misplaced. the low that prohibits conversion after ellis conversions is limited but also what counts as an ellis eviction.

only properly noticed and filed ellis evictions get caught in the system. that's the tip of the iceberg. most in street parlance are people are told it's going to be an ellis and move out. we don't know much more than the tip of the iceberg in terms of which buildings have been ellised in the past. going forward to protect tenants who still remain you're trying to give them lifetime leases. there's another serious set of concerns around lifetime leases and the costa hawkins, which we've discussed at length in other context. here it's a little different than parkmerced because we have to deal with a different provision of costa hawkins which is the single family home exemption which i believe raises serious problems for lifetime leases going forward. that deserves more discussion and more work. the second thing is what kind of perspective i think you should be taking on this. i'm a tenant advocate i helped pass the original ban, i

singlele handedly defeated prop r, and prop n and worked with a lot of people to defeat prop r in 2002 but you need to look at the big picture, moving beyond the interest of the tenants and t.i.c. owners and you will see two things. one, t.i.c. ownership is inferior form of ownership and they need assistance and it's probably not good for the city to have people hanging around with this cumbersome bad ownership. number two the city needs affordable rental housing, we need to maintain the existing stock. >> chair wiener: thank you. thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is terry frye. i've been a tenant in san francisco for over 40 years. the medium rent in san francisco

is three and a half times -- more than three and a half times my income. if it wasn't for rent control and i'm so very lucky to have a section eight housing voucher, i wouldn't be living here. i could never afford to -- the section eight housing voucher, i'm paying more than the voucher is worth because the rents have gone up. i will never own property in san francisco but please don't tell me that i don't care about san francisco or that i don't have roots here. the condo conversion lottery was put in place for a reason. there's constant attack on rent control on many fronts. this is another battle. a few examples of how rent control housing is being lost, what about allowing academy of art to take over rent controlled buildings for student housing and the thousands of units that have been converted to short-term rentals which continue to occur despite current legislation to curb it. and i keep hearing tenants will get lifetime leases. today is the first time i heard that those lifetime leases would

be rent controlled. but supervisor farrell did not explain why they would have extra protection, more protection than they have today. what protection does it given them against an other than move-in eviction and what about those who have been evicted when they were converted to t.i.c. in the first place. i've protested many times in front of those places where people were evicted just to form a t.i.c. there. no one is against families living in san francisco has been intimated but not at expense of elderly disabled and long-term tenants and not at the expense of rent control. people should organize and fight the banks and we should build more housing in san francisco which is truly affordable, not 8 million dollar condos. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i'm sarah short with the housing rights committee of san francisco. we oppose this legislation

strongly. good public policy, i think addresses a demonstrated need. we've heard a lot of an h anecds today and heard people tell stories as t.i.c. owners of needing larger space or wanting to refinance but how many t.i.c. owners are underwater, in default, facing foreclosures. we don't know the answers and need to do better due diligence and see if that really is a problem. i imagine if you went to the assessor's office you wouldn't find that many. it's not a crisis of the proportions that would be worth the trade-off, which is an incentive for more evictions in a city where our rents are already skyrocketing and we have a huge hoamsdz homeless problem. the other question i would ask is how many of these t.i.c.s after they convert to condos are then sold. we hear a lot of people up here saying i'm not a flipper, i'm

not a real estate speculators. i believe them but those flippers, those real estate speculators, they are out there, believe me. and there's hundreds of thousands of dollars to be made from selling a condo after it was formerly a t.i.c. it raises the property value tremendously. no one can tell me that that isn't part of the incentive behind wanting to see this change in the law. so that said, if we really were to find -- there was some issue with t.i.c. owners in dire straits, well then i don't think this is the proper solution. again, the trade-off is too extreme in terms of the results. we're just creating a whole other problem where renters then become displaced. and so why wouldn't we treat it the way we're also looking at solutions to other homeowners in foreclosure and facing financial difficulties, why pull this --

>> chair wiener: thank you. >> thank you. >> chair wiener: next speaker please. >> hello, supervisors. my name is jean, thank you for your time today. i wanted to piggyback on the what the last speaker was saying. i feel that this legislation faces a problem which is people in san francisco are struggling to have housing security. if we wanted to protect t.i.c. owners that would mean that the mayor's office of housing should create legislation to stop foreclosure. i urge you to familiarize yourself with emerging initiative to. thr trying to pass initiative to keep people in their houses. i think this legislation just

pits renters against first time and moderate income homeowners and will stoke the embers of civil rage that are starting to ferment in this city. i don't think you want that. so i urge you to really address the true problem here, and not just put aened band aid on a quick solution on the housing crisis that san francisco faces today. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you very much. next speaker. >> good afternoon. dean preston, executive director of tenants together, california statewide organization for renters right and also a resident of district five. i want to challenge this notion that i think some people have and some supervisors have, that you can claim to support rent control, and support this measure. i think there is a more honest way to have that discussion if one feels that the loss of rent control housing is somehow

outweighed by the benefits of this kind of legislation. but make no mistake about it, there are certain facts here. fact, rent control is lost on nearly 2,000 units if this goes through. that's not disputable. state law says once it's a condo, you lose rent control. second fact, not a single unit of affordable or other housing, ownership housing is created through this. so why are we eliminating rent control on so many units. i think there's a real concern that t.i.c. other than other ow. they don't exist in a bubble. the units that they are in were once renter-occupied units. we can debate how exactly they got vacant for this occupancy. they were units that will at some point be renter occupied units again, maybe in a year,

where people will sell and move, maybe longer but they will become renter occupied units if not currently. and they will not be rent control. the elephant in the room is the costa hawkins rental housing act state law that says you cannot have rent control on these units once they are condos and that's the problem. and fundamentally, when i see mr. sullivan with charts, i think that chart proves the point. if he's showing evictions are down because it's more difficult to convert to condos... >> chair wiener: thank you. thank you. >> ted, san francisco tenants union. i want to remind us all this is an extremely difficult market for renters right now where the new dotscom boom arging well over 1230 a month, evictions have been tripling and it's a tough time for renters. the two most important laws protecting renters are the condo

conversion law and the rent control law. and it will repeal units from rent control and it will convert -- it's exactly over 2,000 units immediately to condos. that's a significant number off of rent control into condos. it's sending a strong message to the real estate speculators that san francisco no longer cares about regulating condo conversion and it's going to be like the wild west and we're going to have an epidemic of evictions in the upcoming months and upcoming years. that said, i think it's true that the condo conversion process is broken. there's t.i.c.s that are unregulated, unlimited, there's thousands of them during the peak years. we need to get them regulated and limited, we need to make sure we're not allowing unlimited conversions. i think the supervisors need to step back and look at the whole condo conversion process and how to make it work so that it both

protects tenants and goes back to the original intent of allowing some limited of number of units to be converted to condos. right now, it's just unlimited, unregulated, and the system indeed is broken. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> hello. thank you for letting me speak my name is amy. i'm a t.i.c. owner. there rch no evictions when we bought our unit. my husband and i saved a bunch of money, did all the work we could on the renovations on the house ourselves, worked 16 hour days, worked really hard to make it work, and we're not millionaires, and the market has really changed. i know everyone else has brought that up. but someone that just recently spoke said that, no one is foreclosing yet. well we have seven -- a seven year arm, and then that's when we are looking at foreclosure. we're not looking at foreclosure

today. the interest rates are low today. in the future, with inflation, with other issues, we are not going to have the historic low interest rates that we have today. this is the only opportunity to -- that we would have to lock in those low interest rates that everybody else has had for the last few years. and so that's why it's different. we want to stay in the city. we hope to have a family, and we hope to send our kids to public school here. and i hope you think about not just the renters, but also the owners, and i don't -- i don't think there should be a war either. and i wish that the renters would understand, from our perspective too. i used to be a renter and i worked really hard to be an otheowner. >> fernando -- with san francisco clearing house and have been a renter since 1992.

as an affordable housing advocate i find it insulting that a proposal would be put that would fight against the diversity of this city and try to link it to affordable housing production. we are united with tenants with rent control and with those of us fighting for permanent affordability. if this proposal were serious about affordable housing it would look at the 550 units that are lost every year in condo conversions and compare that to the 200, 300 at the best of affordable housing that we build per year. you would see the nexus as the difference between that and you would say what would one for one replacement of rent controlled housing look like. and then you would look at what the mayor's office of housing puts out and say for a one unit building being converted to a condominium you'd pay a fee of 175,000 or more to replace that unit as permanently affordable housing. a three bedroom, you'd pay a fee

of 374,000. that might be fair. that might get to a nexus of one per one replacement. if you were serious about helping t.i.c. owners who are facing financial and mortgage issues, you would address that directly through those homeowners and the banks and the problems they are facing. if you were serious about first time home ownership and not speculation this proposal would have prohibited resales of condos within five or 10 years and put a limit to stop any kind of speculation. and if you were serious that this was a one time opening of the lottery, then this proposal would not lead us down a path of increased speculation on t.i.c.s by linking it to a permanent moratorium on any more condo conversions. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> thank you. my name is lav inia turner, a small business owner in san francisco, and by the grace

of god i won the condo lottery last year. i'm just here to speak out. i'm opposed completely to this legislation to charge and extra 4,000, 20,000 per unit, to turn condo. if i had not won the lottery and had to do this, i wouldn't be able to do it, i wouldn't be able to afford it. could i afford a condominium, i would have bought that in the first place but a t.i.c. is all i could afford. i wanted to be here. i was sick of that commute. i'm opposed to that and i want to say that if you want to -- common sense is what we need. go get the people who have been in this condo process longest, and let them convert. i'm sure you can do more than 200 units a year. they need to convert first and then everybody needs to come along that's entered. it really makes no sense to me that it's going at this slow rate. and the amount of money that it has cost us to convert so far, i

mean why do you need a survey. the building was built in 1904 and hasn't moved. so to pay all this money out to surveyors and allzgñ?ñ? the peoe that we have paid out, it's pretty much wiped my savings out completely. sense approach towzñ?ñ?ñ turning people -- tenants in common into condos, andreñ?ñ?ñ? i'm againsts money. >> chair wiener: thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. peter cohen with the council of housing. we are opposed to this legislation in general because we believe that housing needs to be addressed through housing production. that is what our focus is. and as you've heard for hours today the difficulty with converting housing stock from whatever to whatever, or from whomever to whomever is a devisiveness of pitting san franciscans against each other regardless of class or

housing tenure. that's the difficulty, the negativity of this policy approach. but how we got pulled into this particular piece of legislation is when it was crafted as affordable housing strategy through a fee that's being raised. i want to spend a minute on that. it's a very nominal fee, in the context of what it costs to provide affordable housing in san francisco. it's infeasible for t.i.c. owners to be charged for what it really costs to replace a unit so even attempting to go in that creation seems to create a false reality that this is actually doing something significant. i think it was pointed out earlier the nexus study itself on this proposal shows anywhere from a 45 to 75,000 dollar value increase when you convert from a t.i.c. to a condo, therefore a nexus for a fee could be upwards of 35,000, which is sounding like a lot of money if you're a t.i.c. owner but it barely scratches the surface of a foo

cost of affordable housing. the the unfortunate reality of real estate in san francisco. we don't want this discussed as a affordable housing program the real issue is financing option for t.i.c. owners who through no fault of their own are in the situation because of the banks and that's a conversation we should be having, other than upending a system that's been in place for many years trying to find that balance point. thank you. >> chair wiener: thank you. before we get to the next speaker i want to call the remaining cards i have. if anyone has not turned in a card or wants to speak you can get in line. john bracken, andy creeger, miro -- wu, elaina ozark, quan lee, ana lee, becky, mitch peters, brian heckman, casper, alex, gloria, joe zel, kathy

michelle, and marie coons. i think those are all the cards we have. so next speaker. >> good afternoon. my name is cole, i'm a t.i.c. owner in district 5 for the past six years. before that i was a renter for eight years. i'd like to -- i'm highly in favor of this proposed legislation. i am a single issue voter. the idea that this is -- speculation is ridiculous to me given 85% of t.i.c.s are owner occupied. we are the people living in these -- last year, one of my co-owners had a life event requiring them to sell. these are our neighbors and our friends. we went to look at the financing options available for a sale. it was just not feasible. we actually -- my neighbors, it was a three unit