over here are or have been evicted and i'm seeing the people who are and were my friends being kicked out of the city, essentially, because as many people have testifid, there really isn't any alternative. there's no place to go except to move to fresno or alaska or something. i just wanted to advocate for all of them and myself. i have been a musician in this town for 20 years and feel like i have contributed to the cultural -- the culture that made the city the place that all these speculators are capitalizing on. so thank you very much. i think we deserve our place here too. thank you. >> thank you, sir. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon, i am mary johnson. >> if you can speak into the

mic please, thank you very much. >> i am mary lou sampson, fighting for my home against foreclosure. they gave me an undisclosed adjustable mortgage, the payment and rate went up so much at the same time, our speculator bought my home who is evicting me when i could not afford the payment when it went up from $1,854 to $3,394. i kept being denied my loan notification which made me feel hopeless. i made 20 percent on a $700,000 house. being evicted by these real estate investors, speculators, the richer get richer and the poor gets poorer and people

should be protected from being displaced in san francisco. okay, due to unexpected expensive repair costs and legal costs i am now forced to live in an unfinished house. i was given the impression i would be living in a fixed loan of $1,654 through the life of the loan but later found the loan would be increasing until it came up to $3,954. i paid the $3,954 but i cannot keep paying it. in august 2010 they sent two guys in my house to destroy or change my lock and took the valuables in my house without notice although i had not been foreclosed. they were driving me out of the house forcefully. the lender evergreen has sold my loan, my

loan has been transferred and sold more than once since then for a profit. to this point i didn't know the real loan owner. >> thank you, ma'am, if you can close and finalize your thoughts. >> i am just saying that housing speculators who buy these houses for cash and driving the common people out for cash money should be charged more, foreclothesing houses and selling these houses more expensive. thank you very much. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors, my name is julian lagos, i am with the coalition state park merced. there are evictions going on on the east side as many of you know. we have been fighting development in park merced since 2005 and we will continue to fight it. i just want to let you know we had over 200 section 8 evictions last year that your analyst didn't cover. 200 section 8 evictions. the development agreement that the city attorney hammered out with our land lord will call for 1500 evictions in the next few years. we believe it's a piece of paper that's not worth its weight in gold. there was no input from tenants and we'd like to see your legislation cover those evictions that we consider come under the development agreement. we also believe that the board needs to look at constructive evictions. we have a graup of tenants at 310 arballo that face what we consider constructive eviction because of a cell phone tower that's being put in there. we have tenants over near 800 brotherhood way that are

constantly day in, day out dealing with the pounding going on with a condo development that's being built on brotherhood way. the plaster is coming off their walls. so we believe that there are solutions. i would respectfully disagree with the solution that you are putting out in terms of registering buyouts and doubling the relocation payments. we're calling for this board to look seriously at using the powers of imminent domain and seizing these properties. >> my name is catherine, i've been a working professional on the west side of the city for the last 25 years, i'm a 20

year resident at park merced and i am not under any kind of threat of immediate eviction, however i think i am in line for what we might call a constructive eviction. i've been here before to talk about the cell towers, it isn't just the one at 310 arballo and 9 smart meters below my kitchen sink. there's development going on as julian was talking about. those buildings, they literally cut out the hill side and now they are building 180 buildings that will start in the low millions. so with the imminent, who knows what will happen with the park merced project. but with all the considerations going on i think there are constructive evictions into the hundreds if not thousands over at park merced in the coming years so i'm just here to throw my

comments in to the mix and thank you very much. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> hello, i am teresa flandic, i live on lombard street and our building as well as the building at the end of lombard street, we are all being evicted february and april is when we need to leave. so imagine how many moving vans for a total of 21 people would be going down lombard street. but i am seeing and doing some research, it is urban green, peter iscandar who also goes under the name of master builders, sometimes san francisco affordable housing llc, also newly i have found out he's also has a company called bubble real estate. he bought a building on the corner

of greenwich and stockton and evicted elderly, disabled, 5 years later it is on the market so he bought it from the seller, so the seller sells it for 1.2 million, it is now on the market for 3.6 million. and there's another building, an additional $2 million profit within a few years. if someone could please research the speculators as well as the number of units that are being taken off the market in any given neighborhood. we are devastated, there were 3 additional buildings on stockton aaround the corner from lombard and stockton where people were evicted, families, one was a threat, not knowing that they had rights. so the other issue is how can we, how can we also help others learn that they have rights, how to protect themselves. i would really hope that we could do

something like that. thank you. >> thank you very much. and i want to open, just make sure that anyone who has not spoken who would like to speak, even if you did not fill out a speaker card, if you can please line up as well, we want to hear from you. thank you. next speaker. >> hi, my name is dominic, i lost my rent controlled apartment of 18 years last year. it was the longest i ever lived in one place, i lived here for 31 years, i have been hiv positive for 31 years and i have been bipolar for 32 years. i was going to tell the

details about what happened but they tried to evict me for not being cooperative in dealing with the bedbugs which was not fair at all because i had done a good job of trying to deal with the bedbugs, even getting home protective services and adult protective services to help out. i ended up being railroaded. the owner of the building ended up making a choice he would rather hurt me than help me. the lawyer i got was at the very least hardly competent and i'm scared to think about what he was at the very worst. i ended up having a panic attack when i realized my land lord was out to evict me and i ended up having a nervous breakdown when my lawyer told me we wouldn't win in court and i ended up working out a really lousy move out

agreement and i got shafted by my land lord and my lawyer. i ended up homeless for 6 months. three of those months it take dnd to process my application for disabled housing. i'm glad you are having this hearing. i think it's true a lot of tenants like me do not know their rights and i think the land lords and property owners are protected more than tenants are in this city. i'm hoping that, i heard you talking about some -- what you wanted, that they actually do go into effect and protect people like me in the future. >> thank you, sir. thank you very much. next speaker. >> hello, i am really glad that this is happening. i am glad that i am seeing the ellis act in the newspaper headlines. i was an ellis act evictee back in 2005 and people didn't even know what the ellis act was. well, a lot more people know about it now. one idea that i heard of some years ago on the state level, which nobody seems

to be talking about now, was it wouldn't solve everything but it would be a step, would be requiring that the property owner has to have had the property for 5 years or more and i make that 20 years. that would discourage some of it. yeah, i lost my place where i lived for 36 years, raised 3 children, they were mean, they did all the stuff that you hear about, you know, the harassment. they even tried a lawsuit at one point, it was like baffling and they lied on the legal documents so i got help from the tenderloin housing clinic. those people are really good, thank you, steve collier. yeah, i don't know what to do about it. i have thoughts about, they could have some kind of mental health survey that property owners would have to take and if it disclosed that they were incapable of

feeling either compassion or ethical standards they would be prohibited from owning property. yeah. but meanwhile i do appreciate the efforts, what you are trying to do. it's a step. it's a step. but it is a crisis, as people have been saying, and i have to say after listening to all the other people and their stories, this is a case where misery does not like company. i wish nobody had to go through what i went through. the only reason i'm still in san francisco is because at the last minute when i was totally freaking out i was introduced to somebody whose roommate was moving out. so basically at the age of 67 i moved into a room in an apartment with a complete stranger. >> thank you very much. >> where i still live, i'm 75

now. thank you. >> thank you, ma'am. next speaker. >> hi, my name is andy blue. thank you, supervisor campos, for holding this hearing, thank you, supervisors yee and mar for listening to all of us today. clearly it's a crisis, the line never seems to end of people who are dealing with this crisis. i'm with eviction-free san francisco and we formed earlier this year to hopefully address this crisis and we are trying to call out land lords specifically like urban green, we're actually having a meeting this very evening of tenants from urban green to figure out how we can hold land lords and speculators that are putting their profits over the interests of human beings so i would invite anyone who is an urban green tenant or anyone who is facing an eviction from a speculator or facing an ellis act eviction, et cetera, to check out our

organization, eviction-free san francisco. i don't know how much time i have, i came back i wanted to speak on behalf of a chandra gil who is on your list. he and a dozen other folks who lived at 17th and mission were evicted from their housing this year. i'd like to read you what he wrote. two years ago a dozen of us had a vision to create a space that not only provided affordable housing but gave back to the community. every monday we shared food with hundreds of people at 16th and mission, we provided a 2,000 square foot event space to community groups and in april this year our building was bought for $16 million and very soon they were given notice to evict, that they were going to be evicted. for five months we lived through unbridled abuse, lockouts, guards who demanded

identification for us to enter our homes. one of us afflicted with aids is now homeless. our evictors, native san franciscoans, well connected san franciscoans abused us without fear of repercussions. thank you very much. >> thank you very much, mr. blue. >> supervisors, i am diane carpio, resident of the city and county of san francisco for 20 years, my daughter is a native. yeah, there's -- this is definitely a huge, huge, issue, the bigger -- the other piece of the puzzle is the affordable housing aspect of it. and you know with all the funds that we're going through hud and the office of redevelopment and i mean -- it's just appalling that it's gotten to this point.

then we had the bid's which the city gives businesses increasing assessments and that impacts all the residents around it. there's realtors, formula retail realtors under the guise of various llc's and they are all connected here and there and really the attorneys, bornstein and bornstein, mentioned earlier, i was in a courtroom, there's no court reporters or attorneys, the eviction collaborative is wonderful however just having somebody there to divide you through the entire process is absent. but those guys are rock stars. but it's an unfair advantage for people going in and daniel bornstein, i was

almost threw up i was so disgusted by his behavior, he stood there and he went, she bounced a check. how do you like that? she gives us a check and it bounced. it was just a pathetic display of power and kind of the culture of what these attorneys are being trained to do. and that's a problem. so looking into that aspect. >> thank you. thank you very much. next speaker. >> ted galackson, san francisco tenants union, i could talk for an hour about this but i don't have the time. this is indeed a crisis, tenants are panicked about unferry 76s and all the evictions. we need to do what we can as quickly as we can. i think what david, supervisor campos, has been talking about is very good. we need to get control of these buyouts,

there's about 3 of them to every ellis act eviction. these are indeed evictions, tenants are not voluntarily taking them, they are being bullied into taking them. the numbers are extremely dramatic. we need to bump up the money for ellis, i would suggest we may want to look at even more than doubling it and come up with a formula to the actual length differential, a tenant being evicted under the ellis act should get their rent subsidized for the next year so they can get back on their feet. tenants working with the san francisco displacement coalition have proposed a number of things, one being the increase in displacement. right now tenancies in common are completely unregulated, completely unlimited, there's

thousands of people that get created, these are the drivers for the ellis evictions, the drivers for the buyouts, the drivers for harassment and we need to get control of all of them. i want to thank supervisor campos on working on anti-harassment which is a big part of this package because tenants are being bullied out of their homes so the rent can be increased. it's a war on tenants and we are losing right now and we need all the help we can get from the supervisors and the mayor. thank you. >> thank you, mr. gullickson, thank you to the tenants union for what you do. >> good afternoon, supervisors, i'm share -- sarah short from the san francisco tenants union. it's very validating and what both the report showed and what we all know to be true is that

indeed it is a crisis. it is an epidemic and we have no time to wait before we take measures to curb this greed that's wrecking havoc on our community. in relation to what ted said prior, i really appreciate reading that there's a coalition forming to deal with the ellis act on the state level. that absolutely needs to happen and i wanted to acknowledge that. but i also want to also reinforce that we need to continue on the path of doing everything we can locally as well to create solutions that can at least help mitigate the impact when people do get evicted or make it much harder to ellis or to disincentivize the evictions that are taking place through use of the ellis act and again a coalition of tenant groups have presented some of those ideas and some are being taken up and we read about them in the paper this

morning. these ideas include the extended relocation payments, making it harder to convert because of requirements for code upgrades and plans the mayor mentioned today. supervisor avalos has a plan concerning where there is construction and plans to upgrade a home. what i want to say about all that is just that we need all hands on deck and we need to continue with the mayor and the board of supervisors, all of us in the community and all the tenant groups to make sure that we move forward with all of these great proposals and that we keep the momentum steadily onward and don't stop until we get there, until we reduce

significantly the number of ellis act evictions and all other type of evictions that are happening right now. thank you. >> thank you, miss short. i also want to call on marlo knight, i'm sorry. next speaker. >> good afternoon, members of the board, steve callier, tenderloin housing clinic as well as all the other housing groups are supporting this broad package of local legislation to limit the incentive to do he will ils act and speculative evictions. i want to talk a little bit to supervisor yee's question which is sort of what is driving this. one thing i always tell people is that i'm glad now the lexicon has become accepted by even the mayor, these are speculators. these aren't land lords who are doing this, these are speculators and the speculation comes from a lot of money that's coming in to fund

the speculators now that we have an era of relatively easy money. the fed window is at zero, you have a lot of wall street money, money throughout the country in that is coming in funding this speculation and it's cheap money so it can do a lot of damage. we find time and time again that the land lords who own these buildings are not the ones invoking the ellis act. when they sell or die or retire, whatever reason, the speculators come in like vultures and do their work. so unfortunately because of the nature of real estate holdings, they are llc's, they tend not to be transparent, they tend to be hidden, they are llc's owned by other llc's so it's hard to know who is driving the particular speculation. but that's what it is, it's speculation coming from a lot

of money coming into the city and you need to also target not just the funding of it but also the lending. there's been a development in real estate lending now that allows for fractional shared mortgages, which is where a bank will lend percentage ownership interest in a tic, not on the whole building. >> thank you very much. thank you for your work. next speaker. >> hello, my name is patricia kirkman and i came to san francisco in 1970 when i first set foot here i fell in love. when people asked me where i'm from, i tell them detroit by birth, san francisco by choice. i've been living in my flat in the mission since 1987 -- 86, 86. i am being ellis acted, i am a senior on disability. i

have a very low fixed income, trying to find alternative housing i have been told i don't make enough for low income housing. i am looking at shopping carts and i am terrified. i haven't had a good night's sleep in i can't tell you how long. i wake up in the middle of the night and i hear everyone's story and my heart goes out to them because i know what they are feeling. that's why i wasn't going to speak, i figured this would happen. anyhow, you have to do something. it might not be enough for me right now but you can't do this to any more people. and i don't mean you personally. >> thank you very much. >> good afternoon, i am mitchell with the affordable housing alliance and i want to try to furtherance supervisor

yee's question about why this is happening. i want to tell you a story, about 30 years ago there was a land lord in a rent controlled jurisdiction who wanted to empty his building out of all his tenants. so he went to the california supreme court, i'm shorting the story a little bit, and he said i need to empty my building from the tenants but they pay their rent on time, no one is creating a nuisance, there is no illegal activity, i don't have an approved condominium conversion, i don't have a just cause but i've come up on one on my own which is i think i have a constitutional right to go out of business and that involves kicking out all my tenants. the supreme court thought about it for a little while and said, yes, you have a right to go out of business and the way to accomplish that, the normal way someone would do that is go out of business, sell the apartment building to someone else, they will continue to oopt it.

now people like california state senator say the ellis act is being abused but another way is to say the ellis act is acting as intended. the business is going out of business, foertsing -- forcing out the tenants and changing its use. i applaud the ellis act, we need to do these things but we should repeal the ellis act, we must amend it and change it as part of any package coming from this committee. thank you. >> thank you, sir. next

speaker, please. >> good afternoon, i am marla knight, a retired city college teacher and a fourth generation san franciscoan. i live down the street from teresa on lombard. we were bought by urban green investments in mid-november. a week later we got the letter of intent that they were going out of the land lord business which they had been in one week. on february 24 of this year we received our notice of ellis act eviction so we are due to vacate on the 4th, 2014. i support your proposal, especially the moratorium. i hope it will apply to us too. i'm also a volunteer tutor at telegraph hill community center and i really would like to continue contributing it my

community. as all of my co-tenants, we have a couple asian immigrants who are 89 and 92, respectively, and they are section 8 resip cipients and they are being evicted too. urban green chose not to do a value added and do market rate but just evict us all. anyway, i really really hope that this matter, these proposals go forward quickly. thank you very much. >> thank you, next speaker. >> hi, i've evan juisilary, it's me with the pictures. you may need someone to get here and record. you know i