SF eviction filings return to pre-pandemic levels, data shows

When the eviction warnings began arriving in late June, Leonardo Lopez said, his family had already fallen $12,000 behind on rent.

His mother, a janitor who is the family’s primary breadwinner, had injured her knee in March 2023, making it difficult for her to work. In addition to rent, their many other bills had begun to stack up, Lopez said.

“I was worried they were going to send us to court,” said Lopez, who lives with three family members in a Mission Bay affordable-housing development. “The pressure just kept building up.”

It had been for years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lopez’s family had fallen into a similar rent hole after his mother, Araceli Tolama, lost her job due to the lockdown. With the help of San Francisco’s rental-assistance program, the family eventually did manage to pay down their rental debt from that period.

But here they were again.

Such challenges are ones many San Francisco renters seem to share. The number of evictions has skyrocketed over the past three years, hitting more than 2,900 for the fiscal year that ended in June, according to data from San Francisco Superior Court. That essentially represents a return to pre-pandemic levels.

That surge came in spite of The City’s implementation in recent years of policies designed to protect renters. Those include San Francisco’s tenant right-to-counsel program, which has offered free legal assistance to thousands of renters facing eviction since it was first launched in 2019. That program seemed to be making a dent in The City’s overall eviction numbers just before the pandemic began.

But now, earlier optimism has given way to worry that the high eviction rates that predominated before the pandemic have become the norm once again.

With eviction bans now gone, and renters still struggling, more and more seem to be falling behind, said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, which counsels tenants and helps them organize to fight evictions .

“Every building we’re in, we have tenants in massive debt — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars,” Sherburn-Zimmer said of her conversations with San Francisco renters.

Some kind of eviction rebound was expected. During the first three years of the pandemic, state and local governments put in place a bevy of policies aimed at temporarily protecting tenants during the crisis. Those included bans on evicting renters who failed to pay their rent as a result of the economic turbulence unleashed by the lockdown orders.

Such policies had a dramatic effect. Throughout California, eviction filings fell to record lows in 2020.

But California ended its pandemic-related eviction ban in 2022, and The City relaxed its own a year later. Over that time, eviction-filing numbers in San Francisco and across the state have surged back.

“There was this huge lag on evictions, and it’s really catching up,” Sherburn-Zimmer said.

While San Francisco Superior Court does not track the causes of eviction filings, the increases appear to be driven by renters’ inability to pay, close observers of the rental market say.

The San Francisco Rent Board also tracks eviction data, though the agency’s tally of eviction notices excludes those triggered by failures to pay rent.

Those figures show a decline in recent years in nearly every other eviction category — including those related to broken lease agreements, owner move-ins and nuisance complaints — suggesting that payment failures help explain a large share of the overall surge in eviction court filings.

“Our best guess is that we’re seeing evictions for nonpayment of rent stabilize to levels that are considered ‘average’ when compared to pre-COVID years,” said Charley Goss, a manager with the San Francisco Apartment Association, which advocates for landlords. “COVID-era evictions for nonpayment of rent have been making their way through the backlogged ourt system over the past few years after the various moratoriums subsided, and are being processed now.”

Continued economic distress could also be playing a role. While overall unemployment has been dropping in San Francisco , the gains have not been shared evenly by all residents, Sherburn-Zimmer said. She pointed to lingering instability in several sectors that employ many low-wage workers, including the hotel, retail and restaurant industries.

“We see a lot of places closed, and with it their staff has been put in a jam,” she said.

While advocates say they are holding on to hope that the surge in evictions will recede once the backlog of cases clears up and the pandemic’s long economic hangover eventually subsides, they have their doubts.

“Whether this will be better in a year or two, I don’t know,” said Ora Prochovnick, a director with the Eviction Defense Collaborative, the nonprofit leading San Francisco’s tenant right-to-counsel program.

Either way, she said, “it’s the pain we’re in right now that we have to address and aren’t sufficiently addressing.”

Funding for the tenant legal-aid program is not keeping up with the current level of evictions. Right now, the lawyers employed under the program can manage 2,500 cases each year, Prochovnick said.

That figure falls hundreds short of the annual caseloads seen in the past two years. If such a mismatch continues, “it’s going to cause some tenants who deserve full-scope representation to go unserved,” Prochovnick said.

As for Lopez and his family, following a settlement meeting earlier this month, the four have been given three months to pay back the rent they owe.

With some more help from The City’s rental-assistance program, he expressed confidence they will be able to do so.

Nevertheless, the financial stress has already upended the 22-year-old’s life plans. Earlier this year, he dropped out of the civil-engineering program at San Francisco State University.

“My mind couldn’t focus anymore,” he said.