converted it? Why not? You could have won the lottery several times over in that time.

Troll said: "We never tried to convert. The property taxes on the individual units would increase. We were friends before the purchase, which I understand is not the case for most TIC owners today"

You are full of you-know-what. You obviously don't even know a thing about TIC. Property tax does NOT change after you go condo. ONLY if you sell, then the new owner will pay prop tax according to the sale price.

Not only your brain is not functioning and you are high on something (maybe lots of things), but your entire body is full of you-know-what.

of the format of this website.

First, your subsidy argument continues to be bogus even if this is a discussion under a different article. Making up your own definitions of words doesn't equate to reality.

Second, if rent control is so burdensome to our landlord, why hasn't he raised our rent in over two years as is his right under rent control?

Third, just as your housing situation is none of my business and I don't question it, our situation is none of your business unless you are my landlord, which I seriously doubt.

So keep you shit-covered nose out of my business, troll.

Sorry again, BeckyBayside, but it's hard to avoid responding to personal attacks and insults.

Right now, the debate is whether TIC owners should be allowed to participate in a one-time, condo-bypass buyout for $20K per unit. This would only apply to entrants in the last two lotteries. To participate in a lottery, a building needs to be majority owner-occupied for three years. This means that no one could "buy out" and then flip.

Once a landlord has evicted tenants, sold the building, and walked away, the damage is done. The lottery was meant to discourage flipping, but also had a built-in protection for two-unit buildings, allowing them to automatically condo-convert after one year of owner occupation. This was to safeguard the rights of homeowners who bought a TIC with the intention to stay there. Now, however, there are many homeowners living in multi-unit TICs who are unable to condo-convert. Due to HOA agreements, this can lead to situations where people cannot refinance, cannot take jobs in other cities, and cannot even rent their units. (Or, if they can rent their units, they must do so at high rates due to the high interest fees they have to pay to banks to finance their TIC in the first place.)

Those interested in this issue from a tenants-rights perspective would be advocating for a new lottery that would require landlords wanting to evict tenants and sell units to participate in a lottery with higher fees and a smaller number of winners. This would help slow the rate of evictions in the first place — something the current lottery system has done nothing to prevent.

There are many reasons that housing prices are so expensive in San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general), having little to do with TICs. In recent years, new tech growth and also bus systems allowing people to commute from the city to Silicon Valley have driven up rents enormously; as other commentators have pointed out, short-term vacation rental sites have also driven up prices. Long-term anti-growth, anti-development, and zoning policies have also contributed to the current housing shortage. These all have little to do with TICs, and forcing TIC owners to participate in expensive lotteries does nothing to address or remedy any of these problems.

The current lottery system penalizes the wrong people. It makes people living in flats — often small — payer higher interest rates and enter lotteries for years, while the people they purchased from are allowed to evict and sell with few restrictions and no wait times, then walk away.

Right now, the debate is whether TIC owners should be allowed to participate in a one-time, condo-bypass buyout for $20K per unit. This would only apply to entrants in the last two lotteries. To participate in a lottery, a building needs to be majority owner-occupied for three years. This means that no one could "buy out" and then flip.

Once a landlord has evicted tenants, sold the building, and walked away, the damage is done. The lottery was meant to discourage flipping, but also had a built-in protection for two-unit buildings, allowing them to automatically condo-convert after one year of owner occupation. This was to safeguard the rights of homeowners who bought a TIC with the intention to stay there. Now, however, there are many homeowners living in multi-unit TICs who are unable to condo-convert. Due to HOA agreements, this can lead to situations where people cannot refinance, cannot take jobs in other cities, and cannot even rent their units. (Or, if they can rent their units, they must do so at high rates due to the high interest fees they have to pay to banks to finance their TIC in the first place.)

Those interested in this issue from a tenants-rights perspective would be advocating for a new lottery that would require landlords wanting to evict tenants and sell units to participate in a lottery with higher fees and a smaller number of winners. This would help slow the rate of evictions in the first place — something the current lottery system has done nothing to prevent.

There are many reasons that housing prices are so expensive in San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general), having little to do with TICs. In recent years, new tech growth and also bus systems allowing people to commute from the city to Silicon Valley have driven up rents enormously; as other commentators have pointed out, short-term vacation rental sites have also driven up prices. Long-term anti-growth, anti-development, and zoning policies have also contributed to the current housing shortage. These all have little to do with TICs, and forcing TIC owners to participate in expensive lotteries does nothing to address or remedy any of these problems.

The current lottery system penalizes the wrong people. It makes people living in flats — often small — payer higher interest rates and enter lotteries for years, while the people they purchased from are allowed to evict and sell with few restrictions and no wait times, then walk away.

Much better if we were all miserable, impoverished losers huh?

Your objections sounds like nothing more than envy that someone somewhere is getting something that you are not getting.

You can’t apply logic until you understand the way real estate markets work, including speculation. Speculation is always a major factor in any real estate market since quick and easy money can be made without building anything or even investing much of a down payment. If I invest 20% down on a building that increases 50% over five years, I make a 150% profit on my downpayment without doing anything other than being the nominal building owner. The tax benefits are very lucrative too since they essentially allow me to recover my initial downpayment. How cool is that!

But if the building decreases 50%, I turn it over to the bank and let them suffer the loss, limiting my own loss to the low downpayment that I’ve mostly recovered through tax deductions anyway. It’s like a casino that lets you borrow money to play – if you win big, the gains are all yours; but if you lose, the casino happily absorbs the loss. Socialism is alive and well in the US, except it only applies to real estate speculators who get 100% of the gains when property is appreciating, and the taxpayers pick up most of the bad loans when real estate crashes.

The US history – and especially SF history – is as much about real estate speculation and resource extraction as any other factor. Location on a bay, proximity to a densely populated and currently booming Far East, multi-billion dollar transportation improvements, many world-class universities, a tolerant, creative and well-educated population, and many other factors make SF real estate always in high demand, so the speculators are of course attracted to it since they can make quick and easy money with little work.

As for your points:

1) Refinancing costs for TIC owners have zero effect on current tenants in other buildings. The correlation is so tenuous and non-existent it's surprising you even added this point to your list since it shows little awareness of how the real estate market works. If anything, difficult follow-up refinancing may make other TIC buyers more cautious about buying a TIC. And if future TIC demand is diminished, this will help protect more tenants who might otherwise be evicted to create more TIC units. The opposite of the point you apparently were trying to make is correct – difficult TIC financing options HELPS current tenants from being displaced.

2) Every TIC owner purchased a former apartment, almost all of them protected by rent control. The fact current TIC owners didn’t perform the actual eviction hardly matters since it’s the underlying demand for the TIC units that prompted the tenant displacement in the first place. Just because it was other real estate players who cleansed the building of those “slacker tenants” doesn’t give TIC owners or subsequent condo owners “clean hands.”

We regulate and even criminalize downstream purchasers of ivory and tiger skin rugs because it’s the downstream demand that ultimately causes the killing of elephants and tigers to supply the demand. It’s the same for TIC owners – their demand causes the tenant evictions in the first place. Nice try protecting your conscious by thinking you were not a part of the eviction process, but you were, just as everyone who buys a condo that was once a rent-controlled apartment was ultimately the cause of the initial displacement too.

3) The decision to allow conversions of 2-units building within one year is based on the very misguided, even stupid, decision of housing activists and politicians to treat them as separate situations. That decision should be revisited by the city and those units should be put into the condo lottery as well since every existing tenant in a 2-unit building will be evicted soon because it is so easy to make a huge windfall converting the units to condos. But the fact 2-unit buildings are given a green light for tenant evictions and fast-track condo conversions in no way should impact the current process for other units since it has ALWAYS been the case that the condo lottery would apply to bigger buildings. Every buyer knew the rules but now they want the rules changed mid-stream. Changing the rules will only encourage MORE displacement, MORE demand for TIC units, and MORE demand for “one-time” TIC conversions.

4) The 10-year plus waiting period has been known for a very long time, at least 10 years. If people like you keep buying rent-controlled apartments as TICs in the hopes of condo converting, OF COURSE the wait times will increase. If this isn’t obvious to you, again you’re showing you don’t know how real estate markets work. You helped cause the wait time to increase to its current period by buying another TIC unit! Your argument is like saying, “it was the other people who polluted the river and my little bit of pollution isn’t causing very much damage.” But cumulatively all of the polluters are destroying the river, including you, in this case destroying rental housing that is vitally needed for future generations of students and teachers, short-time business assignments, waves of immigrants passing through; displaced LGBT and other marginalized groups from other parts of the country and world who may be in danger where they currently live; and millions of others who hope to live in SF for a period of time bringing the city their talents and taking away some of the city's charms and lessons as well. This multi-generational tidal action is what has made SF the great city that it is. There are 99 other cities in the Bay Area that are perfect for more stable living arrangements, which people with children often choose for a variety of reasons.

5) Again, it’s the TIC buyers who enable all of the other “evil” real estate players you list to thrive. Without your demand to buy a TIC unit in the first place, the evictions would not have occurred, the banks would not get to charge high interest rates, and TIC lawyers would be out-of-business. All of the ills you’ve listed are caused by the person looking back at you in your mirror every morning.

You show your selfishness by not acknowledging that you got a much better price for the TIC than if you bought a similar sized condo in the same area. This is saving you substantial property tax (thousands of dollars each year) for however long you hold the unit, even after the condo conversion when the unit value goes up by $200,000. Awkward financing and a higher interest rate are all part of the original calculation every TIC buyer makes knowing there is a very big pay-off at the end of the wait.

The fact Wiener and Farrell are pushing this legislation by focusing on the relatively minor interest rate and refinancing issues without mentioning the huge offsetting financial benefits TIC buyers receive, or emphasizing the tenant displacements caused by the TIC purchases in the first place, shows what the legislation is all about: Creating future demand for TIC units and causing massive displacement of current tenants residing in 2 to 6-unit buildings. If this legislation passes, and if new rules preventing ANY future condo conversion of rent-controlled apartments aren’t immediately enacted, every tenant in a 3 to 6-unit building will have a glowing target on their back. They will be displaced. It’s only a question of how many more months they have left to live in San Francisco.