Tenants at 781 O’Farrell St. who have been on a rent strike for more than a year say they now face eviction by Veritas Investments, the owner of their building and once the city’s largest residential landlord. The four tenants have vowed not to settle unless Veritas fulfills their collective demands for quality-of-life improvements in the building.
Veritas acknowledged but did not respond to a request for comment.
At a nearby building, organizers say another landlord is moving to evict six tenants who have been on rent strike for more than a year after originally offering rent reductions.
Residents at the O’Farrell Street building formed a tenant association in late 2022, following passage of a city ordinance that allows the formation of tenant associations and requires landlords to negotiate with them.
Though Veritas agreed to meet with the tenants and even addressed some long-unresolved maintenance issues, tenant advocates say Veritas did not recognize the association until 2023, when residents started a rent strike. Their demands included maintenance repairs, retroactive rent reductions for past habitability issues, a publicly accessible bulletin board for the tenant association to share information, and translated notices in the tenants’ languages. Tenants have found that the language barrier is the main obstacle to communicating with the landlord and getting issues resolved.
Over the last year, Veritas has been sending eviction notices to striking tenants individually, advocates said. Some tenants have settled the eviction cases and resumed paying rent. Others have moved out. The still-striking tenants have been preparing to go to court since receiving eviction notices late last year, around the one-year anniversary of their strike.
“I see it as a union busting strategy,” said Katelynn Cao, a tenant advocate with the Housing Rights Committee. She also described Veritas’ attempt to evict striking tenants as a way to shift collective bargaining to individual negotiations in court.
Ping is among the 10 tenants who initially joined the rent strike. Ping asked not to use her real name due to fears of retaliation, which other tenants say they experienced with their previous landlord. Once the strike began, Ping recalled seeing improvements in the speed at which quality-of-life issues were addressed.
“The elevator, which had been broken for months, finally got repaired, the lobby lock was replaced, along with the flooring on the first floor,” Ping told the Public Press in Cantonese.
Residents also learned of a new property manager for the building. The manager couldn’t speak Cantonese, unlike the person in that role before Veritas took over.
Tenants have found that the language barrier is the main obstacle to communicating with the landlord and getting issues resolved.
“After all, issues in the building will keep coming up,” Ping said.
Another tenant, Jenny, who also asked not to share her last name out of fear of retaliation, said the elevator is again out of order.
Ping and Jenny are among the last strikers in the building and face eviction threats. Yet they said that they are not planning to settle unless the demands put forward by the association when they started the strike are fulfilled. If a settlement cannot be reached, their eviction case will likely be heard in court, making it the first of its kind to go before a judge, according to Cao.
Sandy, a resident facing eviction from the apartment she has lived in for 15 years, said that without the strike, living conditions in the building would be unbearable. While she experienced far worse than a broken hallway light, that issue, at least, was promptly addressed after the association was formed.
“If we didn’t form the association to represent us, by myself, I couldn’t even get them to fix the hallway light,” Sandy said.
