Much ruin in a city by the bay

Left-wing...the heart of San Francisco. And the source of its housing woes;

...Jerrold Jacoby and Daniel and Maria Levin have a lot in common with Beverly Upton and Jacqui Naylor: All five have called San Francisco home for decades and feel part of the fabric of the city.

....Jacoby and the Levins are landlords using the Ellis Act to evict longtime tenants to, they say, move family members into their extra housing units. Upton and Naylor are facing Ellis Act evictions and say they will not be able to stay in San Francisco if they are displaced from their home of 20-plus years.

These five people are among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, feeling the effects of a series of laws implemented - with more proposed - by San Francisco policymakers over the past 18 months in an attempt to stem the tide of tenant displacement.

It is those laws that are the heart of the problem. They've made it nearly impossible for the normal trucking and bartering, the mutually beneficial give and take between buyers and sellers that almost every other city in the USA uses to keep housing supply and housing demand in equilibrium.

Oh, what a tangled web they've woven in Baghdad By the Bay;

 The liberal-leaning Board of Supervisors has passed at least seven laws since last spring geared toward stabilizing the rental market and protecting tenants vulnerable to no-fault evictions, such as those conducted under the state Ellis Act, which lets landlords kick out tenants if they want to exit the rental business.

No-fault evictions being rental contracts everywhere else.

Several of these laws - including one that dramatically increased the amount of relocation assistance landlords must pay tenants when they evict under the Ellis Act - are being challenged in court. Jacoby and the Levins are among the plaintiffs in those cases.

Challenged as ex-post facto laws--prohibited by the U.S. Constitution--as well as takings under the Fifth Amendment.

Another handful of proposals is in the pipeline, including a November ballot measure that seeks to render real estate speculation less attractive by assessing a hefty tax on the sale of a multiunit building within five years of its purchase and a legislative proposal that would regulate the shadowy market of tenant buyouts, in which landlords offer renters sums of cash to vacate a unit.

Smart, really smart; attempt to cure a housing shortage by making it even less desirable, than it is currently, to be a landlord.