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Across the city, there are landlords trying to capitalize on the boom. Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images Across the city, there are landlords trying to capitalize on the boom. Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images An AI boom is sending San Francisco rents through the roof: ‘nowhere left for people to go’ According to city’s rent board, eviction notices are up 44% and tenants are on edge over landlords swooping in over their homes To say that Maria Zamudio and her team have been busy lately would be a gross understatement. Every Monday at 9am, the phone lines at the downtown clinic of San Francisco’s Housing Rights Committee start ringing, and they keep ringing until closing at 5 pm. In-person counseling appointments for renters facing eviction or landlord misconduct fill days in advance. After every weekend, the staff of seven sits in their office and sifts through more than 150 voicemails. The rental assistance hotline averages 200 calls a week. “Our clinic is completely at capacity,” said Zamudio, the non-profit’s executive director. San Franciscans have long been squeezed by high rents. The pressure spikes during the city’s legendary boom periods and is worsened by its struggle to build enough affordable housing. Now, the AI industry – with its high salaries and the astronomical paydays it promises shareholders when firms go public – is pushing rents higher still. Today, the average one-bedroom in the city by the Bay costs $4,400, a figure that is up more than 25% from last year and that is nearly three times the national average. Want a two-bedroom? Expect to pay $6,000. A centrally located four-bedroom for a family? Easily over $10,000, if not more. San Francisco apartment rents are soaring as the AI boom brings a new wave of wealth to the city. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images The exuberant prices have meant that even people with six-figure salaries can have a hard time finding housing. And for the city’s most vulnerable groups, it has meant it’s simply increasingly hard just to survive. Roughly two-thirds of residents in San Francisco rent, and the city has stronger tenant protections than most US cities, including rent control on more than 160,000 of its more than 250,000 units. But landlords looking to cash in on the boom are exploiting loopholes that leave tenants exposed to surprise rent hikes, condo conversions and mass evictions. Calculations by the San Francisco rent board show eviction notices are up 44% citywide compared to last year. In September, the city’s mayor Daniel Lurie declared a “rent emergency”. Pointing to soaring costs driven by the AI boom, he proposed funding for eviction legal aid, larger payments to displaced renters and caps on rent increases for newly vacant rent-controlled units. Critics say the measures address symptoms, not causes. “This is San Francisco on repeat,” said Quintin Mecke, executive director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, “We treat housing like a commodity rather than a home that people have a right to, and we don’t learn any lessons.” Across the city, there are landlords trying to capitalize on the boom. The dynamic is especially pronounced in neighborhoods such as SoMa and Mission Bay, the industrial and waterfront neighborhoods which are home to the offices of AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Anand Singh, of the hospitality and tourism union Unite Here, said he’s heard stories of tenants facing 40% rent hikes in recent months. “When margins are as slim as they are, an extra $100 per month is easily enough to stress test a person’s ability to live in the city,” Singh said. State law caps annual increases on some units, but newer buildings are exempt from limitations entirely. Rent control, which applies to many buildings in the city built before 1979, is also meant to shield tenants from big shocks, but in boom times, it can perversely incentivize landlords to oust long-term tenants who pay below-market rent so they can relet the unit at market rate. A growing number of landlords are relying on legal pathways to do so, advocates say. Under the Ellis Act, a property owner can evict every tenant in a building if they go out of the rental business, and thereafter sell the vacant property. And with properties selling for as much as $1m over asking price to buyers working in AI, these evictions are popping up more and more. Some are predicated on turning long-term rental units into luxury condos to sell at a massive profit. On Powell Street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood – just a mile and change from the Anthropic headquarters – the new owners of a seven-unit building occupied by the same tenants for decades are trying to combine the units into four larger, upscale condos. The Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco, California. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images San Francisco also allows eviction for “just causes”, including nonpayment and lease violations. Increasingly, landlords are designing circumstances that trap renters into missteps, such as by changing the way rent is collected from in-person to online platforms, organizers say. When a rent-controlled building in the Tenderloin changed hands after the original owners defaulted on their loan, for example, many residents were not told that they needed to re-route their monthly payments. When those tenants paid the old landlord instead, they were issued nonpayment eviction notices en masse. Speculating on a big AI-fuelled payday, some landlords are growing increasingly brazen in their efforts to provoke this type of “self-eviction” by refusing to address infestations, repair broken appliances or collect trash, housing advocates said. Others do what are colloquially known as “renovictions”: remodels that are loud, inconvenient, unnecessary and designed to annoy a resident so much that they leave. Zamudio said her organization has seen a 23% increase in landlord disputes related to repairs over the past year. Danny Sauter, a city supervisor whose district covers much of downtown, said that renters now feel uneasy when their landlords move to make improvements. “All of a sudden their landlord is paying attention and wanting to fix something that has been broken for years,” he said. “Folks are getting nervous.” Predatory landlords are counting on certain tenants, especially those who are older or who speak limited English, to quietly move on. Since tenant protections are largely self-enforced, “most predatory landlords are going to first aim at who they think doesn’t know their rights and who they think would be scared to assert them”, Goldberg explained. In Chinatown – which spans some 30 blocks adjacent to the financial district and is the oldest Chinatown in the nation – an investor purchased a rent-controlled building of mostly older Cantonese-speaking residents and almost immediately started issuing eviction notices, claiming renters who had lived there for decades were hoarders “simply because their belongings demonstrated four decades of living”, Goldberg said. Stockton Street in Chinatown, San Francisco. Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images The residents of 1120 Jackson St. have since formed a union and are fighting back, but under the shadows of the federal anti-immigration crackdown, many immigrants are unlikely to risk going to court. “These sorts of dynamics make it much more difficult for immigrant families to avail themselves of their rights,” said Roller. Some landlords are even using deportation fears as leverage. Goldberg’s neighbor abandoned their rent-controlled unit voluntarily after their landlord threatened to report their marriage as fraudulent for the purposes of acquiring a green card, she said. “They left in fear.” Displaced renters who want to stay in San Francisco have few options. Since he first moved to San Francisco 20 years ago, Frederick Jones, 47, has lived with roommates. After he lost his last apartment to a condo conversion, he moved into the smallest room of a three-bedroom house in the Sunset neighborhood. Every month, he spends half of his earnings from his job at the flagship factory of famed chocolate maker Ghirardelli on rent. “I would love to have a place of my own, but in San Francisco, with its high rents, you can’t,” he said. As AI wealth further inflates rental prices, people who are evicted from or priced out of their homes are moving into units that are smaller or in poor – even substandard – condition. “People are being shown places without a bathroom, with no working lights, with no kitchen,” said Roller. A person bikes past an AI sales agent advertisement in San Francisco, California. Photograph: Heather Diehl/Getty Images Many “double up”, cramming into a shared space meant for one. Advocates describe multiple families sharing a single family home, with four or five people to a bedroom, and as many as 10 immigrant workers bunking together in a studio. Overcrowding takes a toll on residents’ mental health, explained Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “Can you imagine trying to do homework in a studio apartment with eight people, or trying to get some sleep when people are coming and going to their night shifts?” she asked. “It creates stress for everybody.” Kushel and her colleagues are increasingly seeing patients put their physical health on the line to remain housed. Some delay important preventive care because they can’t afford to take time off work. People start to drink more because of the stress, she said, or they turn to stimulants such as meth so that they can stay alert at their multiple jobs and stave off hunger. Patients with life-threatening conditions stop taking their medications because they can’t afford the $10 co-pay. Some even starve themselves. “I had one elder patient who had not eaten in three days, who kept missing appointments because he didn’t have money to pay for the bus and couldn’t risk falling behind in rent,” Kushel said. “It’s heartbreaking and it’s real.” Meanwhile, the services that once helped people through displacement are thinning. Interfaith agencies offering support services and charity have closed as landlords have refused to renew leases or have raised rents to unattainable levels. Many struggle to recruit staff while demand for their services is “through the roof”, said Michael Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council. Proposed cuts at the local and federal levels could add more fuel to the fire. Still open is the council’s winter shelter, which gives meals and beds to up to 100 people experiencing homelessness during the coldest months. Last year, the shelter was nearly always full, Pappas said – with many residents only having recently become unhoused. “I’m afraid of what we’re going to see this year,” he said, noting that the AI companies behind the wealth surge have yet to go public. Traffic backs up on the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images For the many who move out of the city, those whose jobs are tied to the city commute into San Francisco from increasingly vast distances. “Super-commuting” – traveling more than 50 miles to get to work – has surged in recent decades, explained Sarah Karlinsky, director of research & policy at the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation. The AI boom will likely intensify the trend. “For communities at the center, at the eye of the storm, it’s a lot of pressure,” Karlinsky said. Unite Here’s Singh has seen the shift firsthand. When he first started working for the union 24 years ago, more than half of the members he represented lived in San Francisco or very close to it. Now, most live outside it. A decade ago, members commuting from Tracy (60+ miles), Modesto (90 miles), and other towns in the agricultural Central Valley were outliers. Now they are common – [truncated for AI cost control]