The rent-controlled apartment where Bernard Dethiers has lived for more than 40 years is his lifeline to staying in San Francisco.
Mr. Dethiers, 74, is retired and pays around $1,100 a month for his two-bedroom in North Beach, significantly below the city’s median asking rent in August, $4,395. His son, a senior in high school, splits his time between the apartment and his mother’s home nearby.
But Mr. Dethiers is at risk of losing it. After new owners bought the building last year, they offered him $40,000 to leave within about three months. He countered for $600,000, a number he reached by adding up the cost of a “potential rent differential” of $2,500 a month over 20 years. The owners rejected it.
“We need to be in San Francisco, and we have nowhere to go because of the price,” Mr. Dethiers said. “We are totally priced out.”
Now the owners are seeking to evict him and five other households under the Ellis Act, a California state law that allows landlords to evict tenants in order to remove all of the property’s rental units from the market. (The owners of the building intend to live in the units with their families, said Gael Bizel-Bizellot, a lawyer representing them.) Mr. Dethiers and the other tenants are fighting the eviction in court.
