San Francisco sees uptick in SRO evictions

Evictions of formerly homeless tenants from San Francisco residence hotels have more than doubled in the past year.

Operators of single-room occupancy hotels evicted 114 residents in the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with 40 people kicked out of the city-funded buildings the year before, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

A Chronicle analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing found the percentage of households displaced from these hotels increased from 0.7 percent to 1.8 percent.

The number of official evictions in city-funded SROs is lower than before the pandemic, when rates hovered between 2.2 percent and 2.6 percent.

Before 2020, nearly half the residents formally evicted from supportive-housing SROs were kicked out for owing money, HSH records show. But new laws and financial assistance programs have almost entirely prevented evictions over non-payment of rent.

A small number of SROs accounted for a large share of last year’s evictions.

The Chronicle found that more than half of all evictions were in nine residential hotels, which housed 16 percent of all supportive housing SRO residents. Of the 75 residential hotels that provided information to HSH, 45 percent reported no evictions last year.

Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the agency foresaw the increase in evictions with reduction of pandemic-related restrictions on evicting tenants.

A Chronicle investigation published last month found that the official statistics represent a portion of the displacement within San Francisco’s $160 million permanent supportive housing system. It found tenants are sometimes forced out of their SROs through informal channels or through means that HSH doesn’t track.

The nonprofits that manage SROs typically kick out residents for the same issues that qualified them for the supportive housing programs: poverty, mental illness, trauma or an inability to care for themselves.

“Unfortunately, at times there are individuals who have to be removed from the buildings for the safety and well-being of all the residents,” Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed, said in a statement.

— Dana Bartholomew

Read more

Commercial

San Francisco

Listings of SRO buildings in SF’s Chinatown ramp up

Residential

San Francisco

After outcry, SF Health Department to cap rents in hundreds of housing units