July 1, 2016 7:25 AM

Greed is good...assuming you're not the one being gouged

Neil Hutchinson has lived for six years at his North Beach apartment, where some scenes from Clint Eastwood’s 1988 movie “The Dead Pool” were shot, but his landlord increased his rent without warning June 1 from $1,800 a month to $8,000, reported KTRK-TV…. Hutchinson said he was served with an eviction notice after he was unable to pay the increased rent, and he’s appealing the hike through the San Francisco Rent Board. Hutchinson moved into the three-bedroom apartment in 2010 and signed a lease with his roommates — but now the landlord said the lease is no longer valid. The master tenant moved out last July, and the property owner claims the lease no longer applies to Hutchinson…. San Francisco’s housing costs have skyrocketed with the tech industry boom, and the median rent in North Beach is $6,850 a month, according to Trulia.

I’m not an economist, so I’m spectacularly ill-equipped to be discussing market forces vis a vis supply and demand. That said, even a writer and a history major like me can recognize pure, unadulterated greed when it rears its ugly head.

I’ve been in mid-town Manhattan, the home and breeding ground of severely overpriced real estate. We have a friend who lives there in something roughly equivalent in size to a large shoe box…and pays a couple thousand bucks a month for. As much as I love New York, there’s no conceivable way I’d subject myself to that. Having spent some time wandering around North Beach, where space isn’t at nearly the premium it is in Manhattan, it’s difficult for me to understand how someone could charge $8000/month for a three-bedroom apartment. What’s even more astonishing is that there’s someone out there likely willing, ready, and able to pay that.

It’s what the market will bear, eh? A very wise man, who happened to be an economics professor, once told me that something is worth whatever an individual will pay for it…so perhaps a rat-trap North Beach apartment really IS worth $8000/month.

Free market economics aside, simple human decency dictates that raising someone’s rent by a factor of more than four times is…well, just plain indecent. Unless you’re pulling down seven figures annually, it’s difficult to imagine absorbing that kind of hit. At some point, someone (the heavy hand of government, I suspect) needs to step in and put an end to this sort of rampant greed.

There’s no reason why a landlord, like any business owner, shouldn’t be able to make a fair and reasonable profit…but this sort of rent-gouging, if left unchecked, will inevitably spiral out of control until only the super-rich are able to live in San Francisco. At some point, the welfare of those living and working in the city need to take precedence over those only seeking to make a quick buck, consequences be damned. This case would seem to meet that criterion; now the question becomes what San Francisco will do about it.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on July 1, 2016 7:25 AM.

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