San Francisco is about to draw a new map. After two years of work, city planners will reveal tomorrow which streets and neighborhoods will be open to taller buildings. The citywide redesign — or upzoning, in planning parlance — is a big step in SF’s pledge to make room for tens of thousands of new homes, more than half of them affordable.
The upcoming map is also prompting opponents of a denser city to raise a new alarm. Since a new housing plan began to take shape in 2022, they have warned of demolitions, displacement, and evictions across the city.
As The Frisc reported in 2023, new rules accompanying the plan, known as the Housing Element, make demolitions difficult. San Francisco also has some of the nation’s strongest renter protections.
Yet tenant unions and anti-eviction activists say there’s a loophole for developers to exploit with “renovictions” — that is, long-term renovations designed to evict tenants.
“Temporary eviction can turn into long-term displacement — we call this a renoviction,” Amalia Macias-Laventure, a member of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, told the SF Planning Commission in a February 27 hearing. “Now faced with upzonings, this issue is extremely urgent.”
Speakers lined up for more than an hour at that hearing to tell commissioners that a wave of these unjust evictions is set to sweep out the city’s most vulnerable renters, just as soon as landlords and developers get the green light to build higher and faster.
Leah Simon-Weisberg, UC Law professor and onetime member of the Berkeley Rent Board, doesn’t see it that way. Simon-Weisberg stresses she is always concerned about tenant abuse but says in this case the city is probably doing things the right way: “I don’t think this upzoning is going to trigger a lot of renovictions.”
Once the new map is unveiled Thursday, the Planning Commission then the Board of Supervisors must approve it by the end of January 2026 or face penalties from state housing regulators. That seems like a long time away; it isn’t.
San Franciscans following the housing debate will hear a lot more about renovictions in coming months. Let’s break down how they work, how often they occur, and why people like Simon-Weisberg say the fear is overblown.
Protections in place
During the February hearing, the SF Rent Board cited 797 eviction notices served from March 2023 to March 2024, down more than 33 percent from the year before. The figure rose to 1,033 in the most recent year, but this is still relatively low. In Southern California, Kern County has a comparable population to San Francisco County and has thousands of eviction attempts annually.
San Francisco protects against displacement by demolition by requiring, for example, that displaced renters get first dibs on homes in the replacement building. Tenant groups note it’s difficult for most renters to exercise this right, but it’s a rare occurrence. Of last year’s 1,033 eviction notices, just three were due to planned demolition; the year before it was zero.
For more protection, San Francisco prohibits demolition of rent-controlled homes unless developers replace them with new rent-controlled units.
And no matter the situation, renters who receive eviction notices are guaranteed free legal counsel. Some of these protections are mirrored on a state level, creating what one SF planning official has called a “belt and suspenders” approach to keeping renters secure.
Anti-eviction activists say the Rent Board’s numbers are too low because many landlords don’t report eviction notices to the board. Based on court filings, they say nearly 2,000 eviction bids went unreported last year. Even using these uncorroborated figures, SF still has one of the lowest displacement rates in the state.
Landlords game the system, activists say, by using a series of renovations that require the tenant to move out. The landlords call it capital improvement, not demolition. “If the landlord says ‘I have to do foundation work, I have to do plumbing,’ that’s how you get renoviction,” says Ozzie Rohm, co-founder of the San Francisco Land Use Coalition.
“Owners will do what’s called serial permitting to get around rules,” stretching out work for months or years in hopes of driving tenants out, says SF-based tenant attorney Joseph Tobenor. He says his firm gets about 30 such complaints a year: “Serial permitting flies under the radar.”
Much of the resistance to upzoning has come from homeowners who worry about property values and views while making common cause with tenants groups.
Tenants have the right to return to their homes after capital work is done, but after months or even years many will move on. The rent board records such temporary evictions from capital improvements. There were 104 last year, down from 128 a year prior. But again, advocates say the Rent Board misses cases when renters move out “voluntarily” to escape the hassle of constant construction.
Department of Building Inspection (DBI) assistant director Patrick Hannan tells The Frisc there’s no rule against serial permitting. “There is no regulation in the building or housing codes forbidding property owners from getting multiple small permits, so we have no mechanism for direct enforcement,” Hannan says.
Property owners run afoul of DBI during renovations when they work on a mostly vacant building without permits or do work beyond what’s permitted. “Complaints are usually filed by the remaining tenants and are fully investigated,” Hannan says, but someone’s got to ring the alarm. (DBI is also working to regain trust after years of high-profile corruption cases and lack of accountability.)
Hannan stresses that San Francisco laws “offer some of the strongest residential tenant protections in California.”
Still, planners say they’re aware of the problems, and they have a fix in mind.
Memories of urban renewal
Opponents of the new housing rules often cite San Francisco’s grim history of urban renewal, the 1960s and ’70s takedown of the Fillmore and parts of South of Market, mostly at the expense of Black, Filipino, and working class San Franciscans.
But unless planners add a major surprise tomorrow, the new map should upzone more carefully this time. The most glaring difference is that the current Housing Element forbids major upzoning in what are called “priority equity neighborhoods” where low-income and historically vulnerable communities live. There will be no major upzoning in the Tenderloin, the Mission, Chinatown, and Bayview-Hunters Point.
Instead, the map must focus on the Sunset, Richmond, Marina, Haight, and other wealthier neighborhoods where very little construction has occurred in decades. Much of the resistance to upzoning has come from homeowners in these neighborhoods who worry about property values and views, citing “neighborhood character” while making common cause with tenants groups.
Within those districts, the new map will also likely be more targeted, although it’s not clear what planners, now under Mayor Daniel Lurie, have in store. Under Breed, the Planning Department released what was supposed to be a final version. It concentrated density along a few major transit and business corridors. But last spring, Breed ordered a re-do to reduce maximum heights but spread density across more blocks. That version never emerged.
UC Law’s Simon-Weisberg says research shows mass upzoning of entire neighborhoods is a great way to drive displacement, but smaller, surgical increases in limits usually don’t.
We have heard loud and clear that tenant protections are a major concern.
city planner lisa chen
Renters who suspect their landlord is using capital work as harassment can appeal to the Planning Commission to review the permits. But Rohm and others lack confidence in the commission to take the side of tenants.
When the new map comes out, activists also want rules beyond what SF currently offers. “We want the city to focus on protecting tenants,” Ora Prochovnick, director of the Eviction Defense Collaborative, tells The Frisc. “That requires enforcement and accountability instead of just trusting systems to work.”
Prochovnick says developers should pay for relocation specialists to help displaced tenants find new homes. She also wants landlords to charge the same rent for new units as they charged for old ones, even if the original tenants do not return.
”That way there’s no incentive to prevent the original tenants from returning,” Prochovnick says, or even incentive to drive them out through endless construction in the first place.
At the February hearing, Lisa Chen, the planner in charge of the new zoning map said, “We have heard loud and clear that tenant protections are a major concern.” Chen unveiled a few proposals, such as the right of a tenant to stay in their home up to six months before demolition. She said the department is working on more.
More renter rules are meant to appease activists. But city planners must also satisfy state regulators who are watching for signs that San Francisco isn’t doing enough to make up for decades of underproduction of housing.
The threat of eviction – or renoviction – will never reach zero. The next few months will clarify how close to zero SF wants to get, even if it means cutting back on the new housing that renters at all levels need.
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