San Francisco Supervisors Norman Yee, Jane Kim and Board President David Chiu gathered with a cluster of tenant advocates at City Hall April 15 to unveil a proposal billed as a more equitable alternative to a highly controversial condominium conversion legislation that’s fueled a months-long battle over affordable housing. Read more »

Perhaps it was just an unfunny April Fool's Day joke or some wishful political spin, but the San Francisco Chronicle's April 1 article about how tenancy-in-common owners and their political supporters are pushing legislation that would allow them to bypass the condo conversion lottery seriously misrepresented the city's biggest current political standoff.Read more »

[UPDATED BELOW] Negotiations between tenant advocates and real estate interests (including the political advocacy group Plan C) over the controversial condo lottery bypass legislation haven't gone well or found common ground. But sources tell the Guardian that Sup. Read more »

No politically savvy San Franciscan has ever really bought the rhetoric espoused by the so-called “moderate” political action group Plan C that it's all about finding middle ground between what its website calls “a 'downtown' machine, and a far-left, dogmatic, so-called 'progressive' machine.” As if that unbalanced labeling wasn't enough of a indicator, the fact that its funding comes from all the biggest cogs in the downtown machine should be.Read more »

Got a fascinating letter from a local lawyer named Richard Hurlburt, who has some thoughts on the TIC-condo conversion legislation sponsored by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell. He writes:Read more »

We all know how Mayor Ed Lee got his start as a tenant advocate, and we all know that every tenant group in the city is fighting bitterly to stop Sup. Scott Wiener's legislation that would allow more condo conversions. Read more »

What is the shelf life of  a really bad public policy concerning housing in  San Francisco?

When it comes to condo conversions of existing rent controlled apartments, the answer is that there is no limit on how many times this bad idea is taken off the shelf. Like a bad summer zombie movie, this undead keeps  walking, no matter what San Franciscans say.

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