SF Councillor wants more light on nonprofit housing evictions

Image courtesy sfhomeless.wikia.com

Supervisor Mark Farrell wants a better handle on how many people are evicted each year from city-subsidized housing, such as single room occupancy residential hotels, master-leased rooms, supportive housing, and other publicly-funded affordable housing units. He is introducing legislation Tuesday that would require all city-funded housing providers to submit annual reports detailing how many eviction notices were issued that year, how many evictions resulted, why people were evicted, and how many tenants were impacted. 

The reporting is needed, he said, because it’s currently unclear how often this happens and why. A recent report by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a city-funded nonprofit that provides eviction defense services, stated that 26 percent of the 2,003 eviction proceedings that office litigated in 2013 involved properties the city funds; but some of those may not have ended in an actual eviction. 

“Earlier this year as we dug into our city’s homeless issue, it became readily apparent that there’s been a significant number of evictions from publicly-funded housing units,” he said. “The goal here is very simple — if we are providing public dollars to house less fortunate individuals, we want to make sure that everybody is aligned with the common goal of keeping them housed and preventing unnecessary evictions.”

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