The Chronicle’s Thursday front-page story on San Francisco’s tenancy-in-common industry was its second high-profile article in recent weeks that virtually ignored why TIC’s are so controversial: their role in the eviction of longterm tenants. The Chronicle’s coverage is akin to writing about Iraq without mentioning those killed or maimed by the conflict, and raises questions why the paper is so reluctant to describe facts about TIC’s that have been widely publicized in other media. The Chronicle’s financial reliance on real estate advertising is no mystery, but now the front-page of its news section is being used to misleadingly further the industry agenda.
In Thursday’s Chronicle story, “Strangers sharing mortgages,” it is not until the 35th paragraph of a 40 graph story that readers are informed that “TIC’s displace renters and erode the city’s stock of affordable housing.” Up to then, the article largely resembled a sales brochure for the real estate investors and agents who profit most from the TIC industry (even sales brochures cite some of the risks).
The past few years have seen a series of high-profile cases in which longterm elderly tenants in San Francisco were displaced from their homes and neighborhoods due to eviction for TIC’s. The Chronicle, both Thursday and in a related front-page TIC story a few weeks ago, has sought to render these victims invisible.
If the real estate industry’s goal is to increase the pool of TIC buyers, how better than to have the Chronicle “cover” the issue without portraying the human cost of TIC evictions. Instead, the paper shows three happy guys in front of the four- unit building they acquired.
It is enough to remind one of the tourist brochures for Sun City put out by the South African government during the apartheid era. The photos of smiling people of diverse races were designed to make potential visitors forget that Sun City was dependent on a legalized system of racial oppression.
The Chronicle headline, “Tenancies in common a popular practice in S.F.,” gives no indication that there is any controversy surrounding TIC’s. The paper is certainly free to editorialize all it wants for the virtues of TIC’s, but the basic rules of journalism would seem to require that at least one victim of a TIC eviction be quoted.
The Chronicle does give Tenants Union leader Ted Gullicksen a couple of quotes at the end of the article, but the article then quickly concludes by quoting a realtor saying that TIC’s are “like the tide coming in; you cannot stop it. It’s gravity.”
Really? San Francisco has enacted multiple laws that would have restricted TIC’s, but in each case Republican judges threw the measures out. But at least now tenant advocates understand why—if gravity cannot be restricted, neither can TIC’s.
Fortunately, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charlene Mitchell recently ruled (in a decision omitted from the Chronicle articles) that state law does regulate TIC’s. But the failure of TIC converters to obtain legally required Public Reports has been entirely omitted in the Chronicle’s two front-page stories on the issue.
Since the legality of virtually every TIC conversion of buildings over four units is now in jeopardy, this issue would seem to be essential in an article raising the consumer issues surrounding TIC’s. But the Chronicle stories seek to boost the TIC market, not scare potential buyers away.
With the housing boom starting to wane, expect the Chronicle news section to engage in even greater distortions to keep its real estate advertising revenue flowing.
