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by Tommi Avicolli Mecca

S.F. needs land trusts

MATT GONZALEZ MAY have decided he doesn't want to be the supervisor from District Five anymore, but at least two pieces of legislation he's been championing deserve to be passed into law before he leaves office in November.

The bills – one to establish a community land trust, the other to allow spouses, domestic partners, and immigrant families to live together despite the occupancy restrictions in a lease – are too important to be sacrificed to Gonzalez's career change. The Matt Gonzalez for Mayor grassroots campaign that came together last fall, as well as other progressive groups, needs to mobilize support for these pro-tenant, pro-queer, pro-immigrant measures.

Community land trusts are the future. Rent control is being slowly whittled away by landlord interests. San Francisco doesn't even have true rent control. It has rent stabilization. Without vacancy control (which means rent control that continues when a unit becomes vacant, a vital component of true rent control that's prohibited by a state law called the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act), apartments go to market rate when the tenant moves out. An apartment is only affordable while the tenant lives there.

Community land trusts, which have been successful in many other areas of the country, are affordable forever. A land trust is a nonprofit corporation that buys buildings when they become available. This corporation then offers the existing tenants the opportunity to rent or buy at one-third of their income. Tenants can therefore continue to rent, or become homeowners, and spend no more than one-third of their income on rent or mortgage payments. Talk about affordable homeownership!

In a city where real estate is (unfortunately) gold, community land trusts make good sense and are sound public policy. Since the land in a trust isn't on the open market anymore, it cannot be speculated on. Real estate speculation is one of the major forces that keep rents rising, not to mention gentrifying neighborhoods and displacing poor and working-class folks.

When Gonzalez first came into office in 2001, he formed a task force to formulate a plan for a community land trust. It's time to put that plan into legislation and secure the future of affordable housing in our city. As for the second piece of legislation, believe it or not, if you're straight and get married, or if you're queer and have a domestic partner, you have no intrinsic right to live with your loved one. We used to have that right under our city's human rights laws. But a landlord lawsuit (Artel v. Sharpe) a few years ago wiped it away. What good is marriage – gay or straight – if you can't live together? Gonzalez introduced legislation to rectify this situation. The last I heard, it was back in the hands of the city attorney for a face-lift.

This legislation has been much maligned by the landlord lobby. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom trashed it in one of his election campaign mailers. Opponents claim it will allow upward of 15 people to live in a one-bedroom apartment. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

In reality, the legislation will merely implement our city's already existing housing-code standards – that is, two persons to a bedroom. That means if you live in a one-bedroom and your lease says only one person can live there, you can move in a spouse, domestic partner, or family member without being evicted for violation of your lease.

When all is said and done, this is the real litmus test for how much Newsom supports gay rights. It's one thing to allow marriage licenses to queer couples in a city that overwhelmingly supports gay marriage. It's another thing altogether to defy some of his landlord buddies to give domestic partners the right to live together.

Enough said: it's time for Gonzalez to move forward on these matters pronto.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime radical queer antiwar and social justice activist and writer.