SF agency buys buildings housing LGBT bar El Rio

Posted on October 10, 2019 by

A local agency has bought the two buildings that house LGBT bar El Rio through the city’s small sites acquisition fund.

The properties at 3156-3158 Mission Street also include eight apartments that are rented to low- to moderate-income households. The Mission Economic Development Agency acquired the buildings through an $8.6 million loan provided by the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund.

The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development is expected to provide MEDA with permanent financing for the building in December 2020 after the agency completes critical repairs and upgrades to the buildings. The roughly $800,000 in work includes seismic retrofitting and strengthening of the structures, updating electrical and building systems, and additional exterior renovations and improvements.

“Our small sites program is about keeping our residents stable and our communities strong, and El Rio is an incredible part of this community,” stated Mayor London Breed. “We have seen a lot of our nightlife institutions, especially in the LGBT community, struggle to stay open in recent years, so this feels special to be able to keep El Rio secure in the Mission where it belongs, while also preserving rent-controlled housing.”

Malcolm Thornley and Robert Nett opened El Rio in 1978 as a leather Brazilian gay bar. When the couple retired in 1997, ownership of the bar passed to Dawn Huston, who is queer and was hired roughly 25 years ago as a door person.

Officially called El Rio, Your Dive, the bar was designated by the city as a legacy business in November 2017. In addition to offering various parties for its patrons, a mix of LGBT and straight clientele, El Rio has long hosted fundraisers for LGBT nonprofits and other community groups.

It is one of the few remaining queer-woman owned bars in San Francisco. Huston, 54, was unable to buy the one property that Thornley and Nett had owned and put up for sale in 2006. While she had a cordial relationship with her former landlord, Huston told the Bay Area Reporter she nonetheless had concerns about the bar’s longevity.

It was her staff that had first proposed that she enter into talks with MEDA about possibly buying the two properties. Those conversations had already begun, said Huston, when the former owners decided to sell. She signed a new 10-year-plus lease — Huston wouldn’t disclose the exact terms — with MEDA in September.

She is working with the agency to obtain rental benefits through the legacy business program and possibly establishing a nonprofit arm for the bar’s fundraising efforts to help offset its property tax bill.

“There is a lot of stuff in our lease that talks about what we are and what we do. I feel incredibly good with our relationship with MEDA,” Huston said by phone Tuesday from her Big Table Ranch near Yosemite that she co-owns with her partner, Kim Brisack. “We are protected for a very, very long period of time. Even when we need to renew our lease, there are terms in there to make it very fair.”

The San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund was incubated in the mayor’s office and was begun due to investments from the city, Citi Community Development, Dignity Health, and the San Francisco Foundation. Over the last three years the fund has used $109 million to preserve and construct 433 permanently affordable units in San Francisco.

According to the mayor’s office, the city’s acquisition programs have been used to acquire 34 buildings consisting of 278 units, and another 12 buildings with 110 total units are in the pipeline. In September, the mayor’s housing office announced there was $40.5 million available to buy additional small sites.

“Bars and clubs like El Rio are sacred spaces for queer people,” noted gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. “They’re places where we come together with chosen family, raise funds for important organizations, and create a stronger and more vibrant LGBTQ community. I’ve been to dozens of fundraisers, dance parties, and drag shows at El Rio and am looking forward to many more community events to come thanks to this purchase through the city’s Small Sites Program.”

In a news release Wednesday announcing the acquisition of the El Rio buildings, MEDA Associate Director of Community Real Estate Johnny Oliver stated that protecting the legacy LGBT business is in keeping with the nonprofit’s cultural placekeeping strategy for the Mission/Bernal Heights.

“El Rio promotes diversity, which is a value that San Francisco has long touted, and remains a communal meeting ground,” stated Oliver. “This purchase will also keep in place the longtime tenants in the apartments above El Rio – tenants vulnerable to displacement.”

Rebecca Foster, CEO of the SFHAF, noted that, “The Housing Accelerator Fund was created to make important projects exactly like this a reality.”

El Rio is celebrating its 41st anniversary Saturday, October 12, from 2 to 8 p.m. with a Dolly Parton themed party that will raise money for the singer’s Imagination Library book gifting program.

Article source: https://www.ebar.com/news/news/282848/sf_agency_buys_buildings_housing_lgbt_bar_el_rio

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Confused about San Francisco’s real estate market? You are not alone

Posted on October 9, 2019 by

San Francisco is a place that loves to call itself “unpredictable,” and yet every fall it’s the same thing: the fog blows off, summer arrives, a ton of listings flood the real estate market and people start asking if this is the year the housing bubble finally bursts.

Is this the year? Here we are, dripping sweat after another Patagonia summer, hearing about record-setting inventory spikes and year-over-year price drops, listening keenly as pundit after pundit warns of the coming recession. It’s enough to send us to our knees with despair — if we’re sellers or potential sellers — or rubbing our hands together in glee — if we’re buyers, potential buyers or simply real estate haters.

So we flock to the websites — Zillow, Socketsite, Redfin, Curbed — and find news of homes sitting on the market for months… alongside tales of record-setting prices paid for Pac Heights mansions by 30-something tech titans. Meanwhile, the national media occasionally adds in a bomb about San Francisco’s outrageous cost of living, its homeless crisis, its jazzy new innovators or some combination of all three.

Confused? You have every right to be. Sometimes it seems that local real estate is the poster child for the term “mixed messages.”

In 2019 there is no one “story” of San Francisco real estate. It’s not like it’s been all decade, when the news is always madcap growth, multiple offers and record-setting prices. Nor is it like it was in 2008, when the news was foreclosures, underwater mortgages and suburban ghost town subdivisions.

The 2019 market is more nuanced than that. Way more nuanced.

Right now, after the usual early-autumn flood, the number of active residential listings in San Francisco is the highest it’s been at any time since 2011. Or maybe it’s slightly lower than it was in 2018. Home sales are lagging and have been lagging, compared to 2018, for months. That part is inarguable. Prices nationwide are declining slightly, except in San Francisco, where they’re holding fast, or maybe also declining slightly, depending on which number-cruncher you read most recently in an effort to further cloud your understanding of the local market.

The local median price is holding at $1.6 million, unemployment is at 2.3 percent and mortgage rates, which recently fell as low as 3.5 percent, are still historically low but have risen slightly to 3.64 percent.

Is this good news for buyers, that 17 percent of residents who, per Compass real estate analyst guru Patrick Carlisle, can now afford a home in San Francisco? Maybe, but that assumes a blanket statement about local real estate. Remember, the local market is nuanced. When Compass agent Ana Dierkhising tells me about “microclimates,” she’s not talking about the weather. She means that the market can change from neighborhood to neighborhood or even block to block. And that the market for condominiums is completely different than the market for single-family homes. “Condos are way easier to get into,” she says.

What everyone seems to agree on amidst the turmoil, real or otherwise, is that what happens over the next three months will go a long way toward determining the actual state of the local market. Real estate follows the academic calendar; the year starts in September and ends in June, with a big mid-winter break during the holidays. Local real estate has until then to decide where it’s going.

Right now we’ve got the usual flood of post-summer inventory, which could continue to rise — signaling a softening market — or continue to rise, fueled in part by newly-completed condo buildings in the city’s southeastern corridor (I’m looking at you, Mission Bay). Like all markets, Bay Area real estate is driven by supply and demand. Increased demand and a looming recession could play havoc on our decade-old real estate bubble.

Or maybe all of those recent tech IPOs will bring new buyers to the existing market. These new millionaires could wait, or they could pounce. Interest rates could remain low, driving the market through whatever recession comes. International buyers could be spooked by new U.S. immigration policies or find work-arounds. There are lots of moving parts.

To be honest, this is not a new story. In fact, this is what the market looked like last September, too — except interest rates were a full point higher.

“Last fall everyone thought the sky was falling,” Dale Boutiette of Compass told me recently, “and then spring came and we had this nice bounce back.”

Boutiette says he is “bearish” right now, but feels 2018 was “worse than what this fall will be.”

So forget trying to figure it out. Instead, grab a bowl of popcorn, sit back and watch what happens. Keep this in mind: between 2008 and 2010, San Francisco home values dropped by around 25 percent overall. Two years later they were back above their 2007 peak. Since then the median price for a home in San Francisco has almost doubled. If your aim is to keep living where you’ve been living, if you’ve been sitting on a property for more than 10 years or if you plan to buy a house and hang onto it for awhile, all of this should be white noise to you.

The new Market Musings real estate column will appear every other Wednesday. Larry Rosen is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, podcaster and recovering former Realtor. He is a guest columnist and his viewpoint is not necessarily that of the Examiner.

Article source: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news-columnists/confused-about-san-franciscos-real-estate-market-you-are-not-alone/

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California gets its first statewide rent control, eviction protections

Posted on October 8, 2019 by

As living costs soar across California amid a severe housing crunch, millions of residents will be protected for the first time from large rent increases and losing their homes if they have been reliable tenants.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB1482 on Tuesday at a West Oakland senior center, imposing the first-ever statewide cap on rent increases and requiring landlords to provide a “just cause” when evicting tenants.

Supporters estimate the law will extend protections to an additional 8 million renters in California. Cities including San Francisco and Oakland already have rent-control ordinances that cover about 2 million people.

Newsom said it is a necessary first step to address the cost of living in California, an issue driving so many others in the state, including the high rates of poverty and homelessness. But he added that there is much more work to be done.

“We need to build more damn housing,” the governor said.

  • California gets its first statewide rent control, eviction protections
  • California gets its first statewide rent control, eviction protections

California is the third state this year to adopt significant rent regulations, giving renewed national momentum to the push for rent control. Newsom predicted that more states would follow.

The new law, which was carried by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, will limit annual rent hikes to 5% plus the regional cost-of-living increase, or a maximum of 10% per year. Based on current inflation rates, Bay Area landlords could not raise rents by more than an estimated 7.7%.

Chiu said the cap would protect tenants from predatory rent increases while allowing landlords to make a fair rate of return.

“Just because somebody rents doesn’t make them any less worthy of having a stable home,” Chiu said.

Tenants will also receive eviction protections after living in an apartment for a year, meaning they cannot be ousted without a reason such as failing to pay rent, breaching a rental agreement, creating a nuisance or engaging in criminal activity. Advocates say this is necessary to prevent landlords from evicting longtime residents to raise the price of a unit.

If they are evicted through no fault of their own, such as when a property is taken off the market, tenants will be entitled to relocation assistance equivalent to one month’s rent.

The protections take effect in January and will expire in 2030, but can be renewed. They exclude apartment buildings built in the previous 15 years, duplexes where the owner lives in one of the units, and single-family homes except those owned by corporations.

Newsom signed six other renter protection bills Tuesday, including SB329 by state Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, which prohibits landlords from rejecting prospective tenants simply because they use Section 8 housing vouchers. About 300,000 low-income Californians rely on the federal subsidies to pay their rent.

California’s rent-cap law follows victories for tenant advocates in Oregon, which in February restricted annual rent increases to 7% plus inflation and required a just cause for evictions, and in New York, which strengthened its rent regulations in June and allowed communities statewide to adopt their own rent-control ordinances for the first time.

It’s a remarkable shift to the political landscape. California sharply restricted local governments’ ability to cap rents in the 1990s, and voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot initiative in November that would have allowed cities to expand rent control, after a $74 million campaign by owners and developers of rental properties.

Amy Schur, campaign director for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action, one of the sponsors of the rent-cap bill, said legislators were finally forced to confront how severe the housing crisis has gotten. About half of renter households in California spend more than a third of their income on housing, which experts consider unaffordable.

Her group, which organizes tenants, canvassed in lawmakers’ neighborhoods and occupied the governor’s office to urge support for renter-protection measures. She said politicians were waking up to the power of 17 million California renters.

“It’s up to the people in our state to stand up to corporate interests and defend consumers,” Schur said.

Newsom, who asked the Legislature to send him a package of tenant protections during his State of the State address in February, played a crucial role in getting lawmakers to pass the final measure.

This summer, he called for a stricter rent cap than what was under consideration. That brought the state’s largest landlord group, the California Apartment Association, to the negotiating table, where Newsom helped broker a deal that cleared a path for the bill.

The association had fought the measure for months, arguing that it would discourage construction at a time when building rates have stalled at less than half of what state experts estimate is needed to meet housing demand. Ultimately, the group determined the rent cap would pass and negotiated key amendments, including one that restarts the one-year clock on eviction protections each time a new roommate moves into a unit.

The law could also serve as a political buffer for apartment owners and developers preparing to fight another rent control initiative next year sponsored by Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who funded the unsuccessful 2018 ballot measure. It would renew the debate over whether rent control is a good idea.

Kenneth Rosen, chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a real estate consultant, said California was making a mistake by adopting a cap on rent increases.

Research on local rent-control ordinances has found they reduce the supply of rental housing, Rosen said, by encouraging landlords to convert apartment units to condominiums or other uses and diminishing the incentive for developers to build new housing.

The rent cap will become a floor for many landlords, he added, who will raise prices by the maximum amount allowed each year — which is far higher than annual rent increases recently.

“From a housing policy point of view, nothing could be worse,” Rosen said. “It’s going to make housing less affordable.”

Schur, the tenant organizer, said California’s rent cap is plenty high enough to allow developers and landlords a reasonable profit. Her group plans to continue its push for stricter renter protections at the state and local levels next year to address what she said is the true cause of soaring living costs: increasing corporate ownership of the housing stock.

“Instead of people who want to provide housing in our communities, we have Wall Street investors who want to extract money from housing in our communities,” Schur said. “It’s coming to a head.”

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-to-get-its-first-statewide-rent-14501172.php

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Woman Indicted for Real Estate Rental Scam in Martinez

Posted on October 8, 2019 by

A San Pablo woman was indicted for fraud on Friday for allegedly collecting deposits for rental housing that she did not own and had no legal authority to rent, according to the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office.

Mercedes Gonzales, 25, was arrested by Vallejo police last weekend and appeared in court for arraignment on Friday. She pleaded not guilty to the charges and remains in custody on $540,000 bail, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said that the fraudulent conduct was uncovered in the spring when numerous victims made complaints to the Richmond Police Department.

The victims alleged that Gonzales would post listings for houses to rent on Facebook and elsewhere under a false name.

She would then show prospective renters the units despite having no legal authority to rent the units.

She would prepare fictitious rental agreements and collect deposits for the units, according to prosecutors. In all, prosecutors alleged that she bilked 23 victims this way.

In addition to the indictment, prosecutors said that Gonzales was charged separately with receiving stolen property and grand theft relating to two victims.

Any other potential victims or anyone with information about the case is asked to call Richmond police Sgt. Kristopher Tong at (510) 620-6668.

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Article source: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Woman-Indicted-for-Real-Estate-Rental-Scam-in-Martinez--562226911.html

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The 12 most expensive zip codes for Bay Area renters

Posted on October 7, 2019 by


  • 69c78 920x920 The 12 most expensive zip codes for Bay Area renters

  • The 12 most expensive zip codes for Bay Area renters

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Trying to find a budget rental in the Bay Area? We can tell you where not to look.

RentCafe recently released its annual list of most expensive zip codes for renters and, no surprise, there are a whole lot of Bay Area zip codes dotting the top 50 list (see them in the gallery at the top of this story).

Some are pretty intuitive — Cupertino isn’t exactly known to be cheap — but others are pockets of the Bay Area where the rental market is so small that it’s astronomically expensive.

To get a more balanced look at the rental market, which is notoriously hard to break down into simple numbers, we asked another apartment listing site, Zumper, to share its data of most expensive zip codes in the Bay Area. Similar to RentCafe’s data, Zumper also found many of the region’s most expensive locations were in San Francisco. Namely, the Pacific Heights, Cow Hollow and China Basin areas were three of the priciest neighborhoods.


ALSO: Calculator shows how insanely little you can afford to rent in the Bay Area

“Since there is very limited space in the city to build new housing stock and the high demand —created by things like tech job opportunity and people’s desires to live in a bustling city — does not seem like it will cease anytime soon, rent prices will continue to stay expensive here,” said Anthemos Georgiades, Zumper’s co-founder and CEO.

Georgiades added prices in the East Bay and further afield are continuing to steadily rise as more renters move across the Bay Bridge to escape SF prices.

“Notably, most of the cities on our Bay Area metro report had either flat or growing year over year prices, signaling that there is an incredibly strong demand here that’s keeping the majority of these rents expensive and continually growing.”

But maybe this will make you feel better about the Bay Area rental market: The most expensive zip code in California according to RentCafe isn’t around here; it’s 90024 in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Alix Martichoux is an SFGATE digital editor. Email: alix.martichoux@sfgate.com

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/most-expensive-sf-neighborhoods-san-francisco-rent-14493519.php

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