Preston wants to ban ‘dangerous’ landlords in S.F.
Can San Francisco block landlords with track records of endangering their tenants from buying or owning property in the city? A San Francisco supervisor is exploring the idea.
Furious about the recent sale of a residential building in his district to a San Francisco landlord with a problematic past, District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston announced Tuesday that he plans to propose legislation banning “dangerous” landlords from owning or operating rental properties in the city.
“Property owners with a track record of criminally endangering tenants shouldn’t be able to buy or operate tenant-occupied buildings in San Francisco, period,” Preston said. “We have an obligation to ensure that long-term tenants are not put in jeopardy by allowing dangerous landlords to buy properties in our city.”
Details about what this legislation would look like are still being hashed out — Preston told the Chronicle that he’s requested that the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office look into the feasibility of such a ban and to what extent it is allowable under current law.
Preston said that he envisions the proposed ban to have “very clear standards” and target “the most extreme cases” and “most egregious criminal conduct.”
“We’re very much focused on the most extreme and indisputably ill-equipped people who just cannot be trusted with rental property,” Preston said. “I think the clearest example of that are people that have been convicted of a crime involving a threat to their tenants.”
The proposal was sparked by the recent sale of 800 Divisadero St., an 18-unit residential building near Alamo Square Park that houses the family-owned, half-century-old Eddie’s Cafe on its ground floor, to a landlord who was sentenced to time in prison for soliciting others to burn down a residential hotel he owned in Oakland more than a decade ago.
Preston had urged the May
or’s Office of Housing and Community Development to acquire the building through the city’s Small Sites Acquisition program when it hit the market earlier this year, and a local nonprofit organization lined up to manage it. In 2021, Preston led efforts to allocate $64 million to the program.
And even though the city’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, a law that was passed in 2019, gives nonprofits the right to make a first offer on multifamily properties that are being marketed for sale, city officials indicated that the program did not have enough funding to scoop up the building at 800 Divisadero, which was initially listed for $2.9 million. Late last month, 800 Divisadero sold for $2.7 million to a company that is registered to Richard Earl Singer, who pleaded guilty in 2011 and was sentenced to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $60,000 fine after admitting to soliciting arson at the Hotel Menlo in Oakland. Singer owns at least one other residential property in San Francisco.
Preston described the recent sale as a “missed opportunity” for the city.
In regard to the proposed ban, Preston said that his office and the city attorney will be looking into “the point in time at which the city can legally prevent an acquisition” or “regulate operators once they acquire a building.”
He added that a moment to intervene could be during the COPA process, which grants nonprofits five days to notify a seller that they are interested in making an offer, followed by a 25-day period to submit an actual offer. If they get rejected by the seller, they then obtain a right of first refusal to purchase the property by matching the terms and conditions of a subsequent thirdparty sale, and are granted five days to do so.