Enacted in 1986, the Ellis Act was originally intended to protect landlords who decided to leave the rental market. It allows landlords to evict tenants to close up shop and leave the rental housing business. In recent years, though, the Ellis Act has become increasingly associated with housing (in)affordability struggles plaguing San Francisco — often, landlords who use the Ellis Act to evict tenants then sell their properties to real estate developers, allowing the landlords to leave the business and the developers to raise the rent.

For all the attention that Ellis Act evictions have received lately, however — this being a recent example — another type of eviction, owner move-in evictions, have accounted for the vast majority of no-fault eviction notices since the San Francisco Rent Board first began recording eviction notices in 1987. These evictions, which occur when the landlord of a property or a relative of the landlord decides to move in, are the most common type of evictions for rent-controlled units in San Francsico. They are also widely thought to be the most commonly exploited and least regulated — various analyses reveal that little enforcement of the requirement that the landlord or relative actually move in make it easy for the landlords to return the property to the market for much higher rent. Numbers released by the San Francisco Tenants Union and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project show that in 48 percent of OMI evictions, the landlords had not filed the required paperwork with the rent board.

Owner move-in and Ellis Act evictions make up the bulk of San Francisco's no-fault eviction notices. This chart shows the correlation between no-fault evictions and home property values in SF, broken down between the two types of evictions. Periods of significant evictions precede significant increases in property values.

Data sources: City of San Francisco, Zillow