This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.
After a few slow years marked by a COVID-19 pandemic-era eviction moratorium and struggling housing market, San Francisco Superior Court is exploding with eviction cases, sometimes hearing 20 in a single day.
One morning in September, a few men appeared in the courtroom, mostly white, dressed in suits. They were fluent in legalese and many represented faceless entities with names that consisted only of addresses with “LLC” tacked on the end.
Then you had the tenants, mostly people of color, dressed casually. A sheriff’s deputy stood in the corner, imposing in his full uniform with a weapon in its holster. When a baby began to wail, he told the woman standing by the stroller that babies weren’t allowed in the courtroom.
“Are both sides ready?” the judge asked. “No,” responded a woman who was asking for a stay in her eviction.
“Why?” the judge wanted to know.
“I’m not an attorney, but I am going to do the best I can,” she replied.
Language interpreters flitted among the tenants. One spoke Mandarin, another Spanish, and two knew American Sign Language. When tenants approached the podium to speak, many seemed lost. Some cried.
“It’s basically a lot of tenants begging. It’s a lot of anxiety. It’s a lot of waiting around in a hot, packed courtroom,” said Dustin Helmer, a senior staff attorney at the Eviction Defense Collaborative. “It just feels like it’s a system that is set up for people to fail.”
San Francisco’s economy has long been plagued by boom-and-bust cycles, going back to the Gold Rush. These cycles drastically affect the local housing market, and no one is more primed to squeeze money out of residents at this moment than the real estate industry, anti-displacement advocates say. Amid the artificial-intelligence boom, some landlords are using loopholes to evict tenants and raise prices.
As in past boom eras, a strong tenant rights movement is emerging. While many point to a lack of housing broadly as the driver of this crisis, tenant rights groups and some academics say the story is more nuanced. They cite inequalities in the labor market, San Francisco’s reliance on the technology industry, and the commodification of housing as major contributors to the affordability crisis. Some say instead of ramping up production on market-rate units, the city should build more affordable housing and increase protections for tenants.
‘Historic eviction pandemic’
Some landlords are trying to push out existing tenants and attract new ones who can pay more.
The precarity of the current moment is palpable. On Sept. 10, Mayor Daniel Lurie declared a rent emergency and noted that more than 1,000 eviction notices had been filed since the new year.
“We are absolutely in the middle of a historic eviction pandemic,” said Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative.
They added that this surge stems from a combination of rapidly rising rents and people struggling to pay rents in a difficult economy.
Though San Francisco has strong renter protections, landlords may set any price for vacant units, and some occupied units are not subject to the city’s Rent Ordinance, which caps price increases based on an annual determination by the local Rent Board. For occupied units not covered by the local ordinance, California caps annual increases at no more than 10%.
Today’s record-shattering rent increases are bigger and coming much faster than increases during the 2010s tech boom, Prochovnick said. “The pain that that causes people is just really different.”
Over 70% of evictions are for non-payment of rent, they said. But landlords are also increasingly using dubious methods to evict those paying on time.
“We’re seeing very bogus nuisance evictions,” Prochovnick said. The data appears to back up these claims. The San Francisco Rent Board found in its latest annual eviction report that nuisance eviction notices increased 41% in the 12 months ending last February.
Higher rents, fewer jobs
San Francisco Chief Economist Ted Egan said that while we have seen booms driven by tech before, the amount of money flowing into the city for AI is much higher. During the dot-com boom, the Bay Area saw about $130 billion in venture capital, adjusted for inflation. From 2011 to 2013, it was about $65 billion. Between 2023 and 2025, it was about $405.5 billion.
That money is also more concentrated in San Francisco, with about 60% of all AI venture capital in the U.S. coming here. As a result, the ripple effects on housing are more pronounced than in the past.
“That’s causing a very, very targeted, unprecedented increase in rents in San Francisco neighborhoods that aren’t diluted by spreading to other areas,” Prochovnick said.
The job market is also drastically different this time around. Instead of furiously hiring workers, AI companies are leaner. At the same time, many legacy tech companies are replacing employees with AI agents, leading to weak job growth in the industry.
While the city had a net gain of 42,000 jobs during the dot-com boom and 87,000 jobs in the 2010s boom, in the current cycle it has lost nearly 47,000 jobs. Meanwhile, rents are skyrocketing.
“That’s exactly opposite what Econ 101 would tell you is going to happen,” said Karen Chapple, director of the Urban Displacement Project. “It’s a very treacherous moment in time.”
So why are rents growing when jobs are not? Egan pointed to a 2% apartment vacancy. “You don’t need very many people at a 2% vacancy rate to drive up rent spikes,” he said.
But some academics say a lack of housing isn’t the sole reason rents are going bananas.
The AI boom has created strong local demand for highly skilled, well-paying jobs that not many people can do, said Schuyler Louie, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine, who has published several papers on housing in partnership with economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. When demand for those jobs increases and they’re concentrated in a single area, you’re going to get a lot of inequality, he said.
When people who represent a small segment of the population see their wages go up a lot, this can drive up housing costs.
Chapple has examined how the presence of tech companies affects housing costs, finding in one study that prices tended to be significantly higher around tech headquarters. In another study comparing San Francisco and Minneapolis, two cities with high price increases, she found that tech jobs explained spikes in certain areas in San Francisco that never occurred in Minneapolis.
“There’s a special cost on communities when we bet on the tech sector as our economic driver,” she said. “And that means there’s a responsibility for us to make sure that the tech companies are paying for the negative externalities of their growth, which is extreme growth in housing prices and instability for communities around there.”
‘An island of the superrich?’
Anti-displacement groups also blame the crisis on the incentives for real estate investors to profit excessively from a basic human necessity.
On Aug. 15, hundreds of tenants and tenant rights organizers gathered in the Fillmore District for a Citywide Tenants Assembly. Organizers described rampant speculation with landlords focusing on making a quick buck.
“Speculation has been the fire that we all have been fighting for the last 10 years plus, and the AI boom that we’re in is adding gas to that already giant fire,” one organizer told the crowd.
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the private sector scooped up residential property for pennies on the dollar. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a group that researches corporate landlord networks, found that one-quarter of San Francisco’s housing units are owned by corporate entities.
Real estate is well-positioned to extract wealth from residents of all stripes, said Molly Goldberg, executive director of the Anti-Displacement Coalition. “Whether or not you believe that, for example, OpenAI stock is truly worth anything, real estate is well set up to convert the theoretical value of that stock into very real higher rents and higher housing costs for all of us.”
One tech worker who moved to San Francisco almost two years ago shared his experience with the Public Press. He asked not to be identified by name because he feared landlord retaliation. A few months ago, his neighbors started receiving drastic and possibly illegal rent increases along with letters from their landlord stating that their rents were going up because of the AI boom.
“Some people were saying they had rent increases of anywhere between one to $2,000 a month and that’s when I was like, ‘Whoa, this kind of felt surreal.’ I almost felt like it was a joke,” he said. When his notice came, his rent increased by $400, putting his monthly rate at $4,500.
While he could weather that increase, several of his neighbors will not be able to stay if their increases go into effect, he said. They are getting help from the Eviction Defense Collaborative to determine if the increases are legal. Working with others, he said, has given him the strength to push back on the increases.
Many displaced tenants must move out of San Francisco, or sometimes onto the streets, Prochovnick said, and both carry consequences for the city.
“You start to lose the great diversity of San Francisco, and once that’s gone, it may never come back,” Chapple said. “That’s the issue I think that you want to really wrestle with from a policy and even a moral perspective, is do we want to be an island of the superrich?”
Possible solutions
Across the ideological spectrum, everyone agrees that surging rents, climbing evictions and affordability are a problem. But how to fix it? That’s where things break down.
Lurie has focused on upzoning – rezoning specific areas or parcels to allow more population density – and reducing regulations to increase market-rate housing supply. He also announced he’s sponsoring legislation that would give an additional $3 million this year for the city’s tenant right to counsel program, which helps people facing eviction get legal representation.
Egan, the city’s chief economist, said the production of market-rate housing will help address housing affordability in the long-term, given that 90% of low-income people in the Bay Area live in market-rate housing.
However, some academics don’t believe that would fully address the problem.
Even if you find evidence of filtering — a concept that as housing ages, the income of the people living in it decreases — that doesn’t necessarily mean housing is more affordable, said Max Buchholz, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
He co-authored a study which found that if the number of market-rate housing units in San Francisco increased by 1.5% each year, it could still take up to 124 years for a one-bedroom apartment to become affordable to a non-college graduate earning the median wage.
In another study, Chapple, director of the Urban Displacement Project, found that the production of market-rate housing led to a slight uptick in displacement for low- to moderate-level socioeconomic groups.
Some scholars and housing rights activists argue for building more affordable housing and increased renter protections.
Government officials are taking action on that front.
District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar introduced legislation to close nuisance eviction loopholes, and in October the Board of Supervisors approved legislation by District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder stipulating that tenants must owe more than one month’s worth of fair-market-value rent before they could be evicted for nonpayment. District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter is working on legislation that would prevent landlords from imposing massive rent increases for tenants in rent-controlled buildings where such increases have accumulated over time.
“We have barely gotten started,” Melgar said to a crowd of dozens at an Oct. 5 tenants rally, where she decried people trying to make money off the backs of working-class residents. “We’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to protect communities. We’ve got to protect our people for today and for tomorrow.”
