S.F. school workers get reprieve from evictions under supe’s plan

Tenants who work in San Francisco’s schools would be safeguarded from eviction during the academic year under controversial legislation to be introduced by Supervisor David Campos on Tuesday.

The idea follows unanimously passed legislation by Supervisor Eric Mar in 2010 that bans landlords from using owner move-in evictions — when the landlord or a family member moves into a unit — on tenants with children except during the summer break.

Campos wants to expand that law to ensure that any employee, from the principal to the janitor, who works at a day care, preschool, elementary school, middle school or high school also not face an eviction during the school year. The legislation would cover public, private and parochial schools.

He also wants to expand the law to include all no-fault evictions except for mandated seismic repair and the Ellis Act, a state law used to clear a building to take it off the rental market.

In addition to owner move-in evictions, Campos’ legislation would ban teacher and family evictions to turn a unit into a condominium, make capital improvements or perform substantial rehabilitation during the school year.

No-fault evictions — where the tenant has not breached the terms of the lease — could still be handed to teachers and families during the summer break as defined by the San Francisco Unified School District’s calendar, and teachers could still be evicted any time for failure to pay rent or other issues of their own creation. Campos said he is unaware of any other city that bans teacher evictions during the academic year.

If Campos’ legislation passes, it will come too late for Allison Leshefsky, who teaches physical education at Paul Revere Elementary School in Bernal Heights.

She was forced out of her unit in the Castro on Dec. 1 — her birthday — so her landlord could make capital improvements. The eviction was for three months, and she should be allowed to move in on March 1 but has received no communication from her landlord and is skeptical she’ll ever be allowed back.

Her landlord is Anna Kihagi, whom City Attorney Dennis Herrera has sued for illegal strong-arm tactics to evict tenants from rent-controlled apartments.

“I don’t expect it to be a ‘Welcome back, Allison’ on March 1,” Leshefsky said, adding she’s been harassed by Kihagi for two years, including having her water and electricity cut off. Kihagi’s attorney, Karen Uchiyama, did not return a call for comment.

Leshefsky makes $62,000 a year and can afford a maximum rent of $2,000 a month, but can’t find anything in the city for that price. She is considering moving to Portland, Ore., at the end of the school year.

“Teaching is a very thankless profession, and to have to not deal with that during the school year would have made a huge difference not only in my personal life but in the education of the kids I serve,” she said. “All students deserve teachers who are secure in their homes.”

In December, the United Educators of San Francisco polled 920 of its members — 15 percent of the total — to determine their housing needs and concerns. Seventy-seven percent reported having difficulty finding housing, and 59 percent said they are worried they won’t be able to keep working for the school district, which already faces a teacher and substitute teacher shortage.

Teachers’ union President Lita Blanc said anything that helps teachers stay in their units — even for an extra few months — is important.

“We support anything that will help our educators stay in San Francisco, and this legislation is a small step in that direction,” she said.

Not everybody supports Campos’ legislation. Noni Richen used to be a cook in a school cafeteria and managed to buy two small properties — one is two units and one is four — in the Western Addition decades ago. Now the president of Small Property Owners of San Francisco, Richen said Campos’ legislation will backfire.

“Every regulation that’s added takes a few more units off the market, unfortunately,” she said. “For somebody who only has one or two units and is counting on it for retirement income — bought years ago like us — it’s just a very discouraging situation.”

Her organization, which counts 1,500 households as dues-paying members, sued the city and won over Campos’ legislation to make landlords who leave the business pay displaced tenants up to $50,000.

The group’s attorney, Andrew Zacks, said Campos’ latest legislation is illegal because the state sets the notice period for evictions, not the city. Zacks said he has raised three children in San Francisco — and everybody should be concerned about teacher displacement, but it shouldn’t fall only to landlords.

“The idea that teachers need protections is easy, but why is that something that is the problem of individual small-property owners rather than the community as a whole?” he asked. “This is stupid, it’s illegal, and it’s a waste of time.”

Mayor Ed Lee and the school district in October announced they will build a 100-unit housing complex for public school teachers and spend up to $44 million to help teachers buy homes.

Campos said he supports those long-range plans, but that more immediate eviction protection is needed too.

“What this proposal does is it tries to stop the bleeding,” he said. “San Francisco cannot be a world-class city unless we allow teachers the opportunity to live here. Once you’ve been evicted, it’s rare that you can come back.”

That’s just what Kristen Panti fears. Panti has lived in the same eight-unit building in the Mission district since 1989 and has taught since 1991 in the after-school program of the nearby Las Americas, a pre-school run by the public school district.

Panti’s landlord has told her repeatedly she intends to sell the building, and Panti is fearful that a new landlord could evict her for an owner move-in or something else.

“I would probably have to be someone’s roommate or live in an SRO,” she said.

Already, many of her co-workers commute from as far away as Concord or Pittsburg. Substitute teachers are in such short supply, classrooms whose teachers are absent are often split in two and put in other teachers’ classrooms for the day.

Panti is already teaching the children of kids she taught when she started 25 years ago and said she’s “a fixture” at Las Americas.

“I love living in this neighborhood, I love my job and I love my apartment,” she said. “Even contemplating being evicted has been very stressful.”