Families pack up as S.F. rents keep rising

Protests against landlords are commonplace these days. Try to evict a tenant — especially through the Ellis Act — and you’ll probably have people shouting through bullhorns outside your building in about five minutes flat.

There was no such reaction when Kelly Dwyer — a city worker, an elected member of the local Democratic Party leadership and the mother of a 5-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy — was forced to move out of her Sunset District rental home. The house is empty, the moving truck has left for Vacaville and nobody really noticed.

Dwyer wasn’t actually evicted. But when her landlord — who lives in China — sent a letter in February notifying her the monthly rent on the two-bedroom home was rising from $2,100 to $3,000, it meant Dwyer had no choice but to move.

The contract compliance officer for the city of San Francisco and her husband, a Vacaville firefighter, make a good living. But when they looked for a two-bedroom home with a rent low enough so they could still pay for child care and sock some money away for savings, they realized they were not only priced out of San Francisco, but San Mateo, Berkeley and Oakland, too.

“What’s a family supposed to do?” the 37-year-old asked upon telling us her story. “I don’t want to leave too quietly. I want to let the world know how pissed off I am.”

Love it or hate it, rent control is on the tip of everybody’s tongues these days. But the fact is that 72 percent of the 237,000 rental units in the city are covered by it. Due to the 1995 passage of the state’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, all single-family homes and condominiums, as well as units built after 1979, are not subject to rent control.

Bracing for worst

That means families like Dwyer’s, who rent single-family homes to accommodate their children, can receive any rent increase at any time, and there’s nothing they or all those loud protesters can do about it. Word from our own friends, the tenants union, City Hall politicians and others is that families around San Francisco who rent single-family homes know the other shoe — in the form of a major rent increase — can drop at any moment.

In March, a $6,755 per month rent increase on a single-family home in Bernal Heights made big news.

And in today’s nutty real estate market, where the median asking rent in San Francisco is $4,225, there’s hardly ever anywhere else in the city to go.

“Getting an unaffordable rent increase is pretty much the same as getting an eviction notice, except you don’t have a court process,” said Sara Shortt, director of the Housing Rights Committee, a nonprofit that advocates for tenants. Her group is hearing from many families who’ve been priced out of their rental homes and cannot afford anything else that’s for rent inside the city limits — or even a BART ride away.

“We hear all the time about Vacaville or Vallejo,” she said. “It used to be Oakland or Berkeley, but now it’s just farther and farther out.”

That’s the case for Dwyer. The Los Angeles native moved to the city in 1995 to study political science at San Francisco State University. Elected to the local Democratic County Central Committee in 2012, she dreamed of someday running for the school board or for supervisor.

The progressive has made some waves on the DCCC, most notably for backing a resolution in 2013 encouraging Mayor Ed Lee to appoint a mother to a vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors. He appointed a woman, but not a mother.

Until having to vacate her seat on the DCCC for her move to Vacaville, Dwyer was one of the very few moms in elected office in San Francisco. Of the 18 full-time elected positions, there remain no mothers.

“I’m an elected official who can’t even live in the city,” she said with a sigh. “The voters elected me to do a job, and I can’t even do it because I can’t afford it.”

For now, Dwyer will keep her city job and suffer the brutal commute on Interstate 80. A sliver of good news: For a monthly mortgage of $2,400, the family was able to buy a house in Vacaville with four bedrooms and a front yard and backyard. And, to the chagrin of the urbanite, cows on the corner.

Giving Dwyer an even bigger twinge of regret is that she’d just weathered the city’s frustrating public school lottery for her daughter, Saoirse, and had scored their top choice: the Mandarin immersion program at Jose Ortega Elementary. But they gave up their kindergarten spot along with the DCCC seat and the house.

It’s one more family gone from a city that already has a smaller percentage of children — 13.4 percent according to the 2010 census — than any other city in the country. Rent increases on single-family homes could further shrink that percentage, housing advocates say.

“I just think that San Francisco is geared more toward people who don’t have kids or who are just wealthy investors,” Dwyer said.

Notable resolution

Dwyer did offer up one last notable resolution at the DCCC before giving up her seat. It requests that the Board of Supervisors study the feasibility and legality of updating state and local law to expand rent control to include single-family homes and units built after 1979.

It passed unanimously — a rarity at the DCCC. But even the most progressive supervisors admit there’s little they can do to change state law, considering how their joint attempt with the mayor to make a small revision to the state’s Ellis Act has gone nowhere.

“We’re really limited by state law in what we can do,” said Supervisor Jane Kim, who is pushing other tenant protections, such as a rule that rents could not be raised following evictions for minor nuisances like hanging laundry outside the window.

Supervisor Katy Tang, Dwyer’s representative before the move, said many of her constituents are receiving huge rent increases from their landlords. Tang, a moderate on the board, said she feels for the families but also understands the needs of landlords, many of whom have kept rents level for many years and have their own families to support.

She supports giving a preference for new affordable housing units to longtime San Francisco families who earn below a certain income level and receive huge rent increases.

J. Scott Weaver, spokesman for the San Francisco Tenants Union, said local officials could try to expand rent control to units built after 1979 but before the Costa-Hawkins 1995 cut-off. We’re pretty sure there’s one new resident of Vacaville who would appreciate the effort.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer who covers City Hall politics. E-mail: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf