SENIORS AND DISABLED TAKE ON THE BANKS: Round One: Bank of America

The "Ellis Act" is a state law which says that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to "go out of business." For an Ellis eviction, the landlord must remove all of the units in the building from the rental market, i.e., the landlord must evict all the tenants and can not single out one tenant (with low rent) and/or remove just one unit from the rental market. When a landlord invokes the Ellis Act, the apartments can not be re-rented, except at the same rent the evicted tenant was paying, for five years following the evictions, While there are restrictions on ever re-renting the units, there are no such restrictions on converting them to ownership units (e.g., tenancies in common or condos**).

--This is a short excerpt from the San Francisco Tenants Union web site. For the full explanation, go to http://www.sftu.org/ellis.html

**And one way to stop this is to persuade banks not to finance the purchase of TICs and condos. This July 3rd demo and the ones to follow have that aim.