AFAIK that's not actually true. There are some crazy edge cases but for the most part if a tenant stops paying rent you can absolutely evict them in SF. Most of the horror stories from landlords are attempts to evict for reasons besides non-payment - which SF does make somewhat difficult.
You'd be surprised. SF Rent Board will always seek the solution that keeps the tenant in their home.
So a tenant might stop paying rent, a few months later you get an eviction hearing, but then the tenant pays the rent this month and promises to pay the back rent. Your eviction has just been denied.
Tenant falls back on rent again, but made a good faith effort to pay some of the back rent. Eviction denied.
Finally, tenant stops paying entirely and doesn't respond to you. You stand a pretty good chance of getting an eviction then.
Meanwhile, over the past 12 months the tenant made 2 full rent payments and a couple thousand on the $18,000 in back rent owed. They get evicted and you get to clean up the mess.
So yes, it's not impossible to evict a tenant, but it's really damn hard (unless it's for something like violence or failure to pay and no response when rent is demanded).
Honestly, that sounds great. The risk of being a rentier should be higher than the risk of an index tracker. A lot of our problems can be traced to the fact that bricks and mortar are seen as a better RoI than stocks and shares, and one way to fix that is to change the risk profile of being a landlord by increasing tenants' rights.
You're saying that it's totally fine for a renter to pay like one month out of every six months and keep doing that forever, just enough to defer evictions each time?
> The risk of being a rentier should be higher than the risk of an index tracker.
Risk and return should roughly correlate, or people will not do it. There is already very little return in renting out a house, so the risk needs to be fairly low, if society cares to have rental properties available.
> change the risk profile of being a landlord by increasing tenants' rights
What would you expect to happen as a result?
If the risk is too high to compared to the return, these rental units are simply removed from the market. Are you convinced that less available units make renters better off?
> If the risk is too high to compared to the return, these rental units are simply removed from the market. Are you convinced that less available units make renters better off?
Yes. We'll need an LVT too. Adjust the market so selling is the rational choice, not hoarding.
Markets are just tools, and right now the market for property isn't serving the needs of society. So we stick our collective thumb on the scales until it does.
