Petrelis Files

Ex-Aide to D8 Sup. & Lesbian Twitter Exec Ellis Act-Evicted Tenants

A tipster shared some fascinating real estate information with me this afternoon. This PDF at the Bay Guardian site shows all Ellis Act evictions since January 1999 through March 2013, and on page 6 it lists info about three common landlords were responsible for displacing the tenants. The following info was provided to me by longtime queer housing advocate Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who read and interpreted the details:

Item # L991796 is an Ellis Act eviction filing by Gillian Gillett, Jeff Goldberg, and Karen Wickre, owners of 1516-1518 Guerrero, a two-unit building, filed September 7, 1999 with the Rent Board. That's all the info I got from the Rent Board, that's all they have. It's public info, by the way, if you see a notice starting with L it's a landlord filing, with a T, it's a tenant petition. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was a landlord filing an eviction, wasn't sure if it was Ellis or OMI, owner move in eviction, but it's an Ellis eviction.

(Public domain photo.)

Gillian Gillett, pictured right, served for a number of years as chief of staff to the current District 8 member of the Board of Supervisors and now holds the position of Director of Transportation Policy to Mayor Ed Lee. She is married to Jeff Goldberg and they have two children. They own the 1516 Guerrero Street unit of the building.

(Public domain photo.)

The other unit at 1518 Guerrero Street is owned by Karen Wickre, pictured, and she is a longtime lesbian tech titan, who currently works as the editorial director at Twitter.

So, here we have a former aide to the Castro's gay Supervisor and her husband, in collaboration with an LGBT tech titan at a firm that ain't paying its fair share of taxes, identified as landlords who displaced renters in 1999 through the Ellis Act. Oh, and they have the Mayor's ear anytime they want to whisper into it and plenty of other ways to influence who lives in this City and the public policies disaffecting and disempowering thousands of low and moderate income residents, cultural institutions and small businesses.

The San Francisco Tenants Union explains this anti-renter and anti-tenant law:

The "Ellis Act" (download copy of law) is a state law which says that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to "go out of business." For an Ellis eviction, the landlord must remove all of the units in the building from the rental market, i.e., the landlord must evict all the tenants and can not single out one tenant (with low rent) and/or remove just one unit from the rental market.

If you're fed up and pissed off with the likes of elites Gillet and Wickre and their ilk, and are a registered voter in the Castro district, please give me one of your ranked choice votes in November. Use my candidacy as a vehicle to send a message that you are against the politics of City Hall staffers and tech titans, and how they are disfiguring our residential and cultural landscape.

Check out my FB page and like it, and remember that I'm carving out an issues-oriented campaign with a huge focus on housing and tenant-protections. A key objective of my race is to raise the idea of expanding rent control to all tenants in buildings constructed after 1979. Let's end the limits on rent control only for pre-1980-erected housing.

Many thanks to my tipster and Tommi for their assistance.