Beleaguered San Francisco Landlords Fight Back

Beleaguered San Francisco Landlords Fight Back

Flanked by a grave assemblage that included all fourteen members of the San Francisco Republican Party and the entire editorial boards of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, Carl Van Heusen III of the San Francisco Realtor's Association spoke to a crowd of roughly two dozen landlords at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce today. In lieu of the recent 20-point defeat of Proposition R, which would have allowed landlords to unconditionally evict 10,000 tenants of any age, health, or economic status each year to convert their apartments to condominiums and pocket millions, Van Heusen announced the creation of a new Mega-developer-backed NPO called the Struggling Landlords Associated Group (SLAG).

"Ever since our founders stole the water and all other necessary resources from around us in every direction to create a dense urban area in an artificial setting, it has been understood that the San Francisco plutocracy was entitled to as much money as it could extract from San Franciscans of every race, religion, and age."

"Yet since the passage of rent control in 1982, the 65% of people who rent in this city have turned their backs not only on the 7% of us who own property; they have turned their backs on over 100 years of San Francisco history."

Press packets handed out by the Realtors Association included bar graphs showing the dire effects of rent control. Under an unregulated, pure free market system, landlords could expect upwards of $2,500/month for a two-bedroom apartment. Under rent control, landlords were getting just $2,000, a loss of 20% of full market share.

"Repeatedly we have run million dollar campaigns, strafing local couch potatoes for up to three months with distorted tv attack ads, while our opponents have run $25,000 grassroots campaigns. Yet consistently, come election day, San Francisco tenants have selfishly denied us potentially obscene profits."

"These defeats at the ballot box, apart from being a heinous violation of the highest theoretics of capitalism, have had a profound effect on my family life. As of election night 2002, I was unable to buy a beautiful $500,000 vacation home my wife wanted in Cape Cod. We had to settle for a $300,000 fixer-upper in St. Petersburg. In our million dollar Pacific Heights residence we felt the shock too, after we had to let go of not one, but two - yes two - of our staff of seven maids, cooks, and butlers."

After waving at the crowd to quiet down, Van Huesen III laid out SLAG's four-point plan to reclaim full market share from unruly renters: 1) SLAG will create a ballot measure that removes rent control; 2) SLAG will obtain endorsements from the tiny, yet powerful clique of vested interests, newspaper owners, and politicians who mutually benefit from the measure (all will strenuously deny that the measure removes rent control); 3) SLAG will devise an Orwellian acronym for the measure, something like HOPE, or CARE; and 4) beginning an unprecedented ten months before the election, SLAG will run two million dollars worth of attack ads on television to convince less-discerning voters to take the acronyms at face value.

Van Heusen ended on a hopeful note: "While President Bush has fearlessly led the rest of the country to a promised land of untrammeled exploitation of our environment and working people by oil companies, timber companies, mining companies, transnational corporations and the ultra-rich, turbo capitalism has been silenced in San Francisco by reactionaries who seek to undermine the fundamental values upon which this great nation was founded, and continues to be run. With your help, we will inoculate this local outbreak of socialism. Stand with me now, to take back this city!!"

After finishing the speech Van Heusen III was whisked offstage to a standard four-seat Cadillac limousine. An anonymous source told the Onion that Van Heusen was originally intended to ride a stretch limousine, but had demanded the modest four-seater in the new spirit of frugality.