“Don’t make me homeless again.”

That’s a heartbreaking plea from a client who said it to me when we were talking about the best way to fight her eviction. This fear, which could happen, keeps me fighting for my clients. Some clients have few options if they are evicted.

Many of my clients are confused about what an eviction really is. They have received unofficial notices, “casual” chats, and many other such attempts by landlords to get them to move.  These type of maneuvers aren’t evictions.

I don’t want you or any tenant to be fooled by attempts to get you to move out of your home without proper notification.

It seems like a lot of fires are happening in the Mission District. Some of these tenants will face the equivalent of an eviction. If this happens to you, what are your rights?

I’ve handled a number of cases involving fire, and I’ve seen the devastating effect it has when your apartment goes up in flames. So I’ve been watching the fire issue in the Mission District.

Evictions are a hot topic among tenants. And rightly so. The fear is that once you get evicted, you won’t be able to find another affordable home in the Bay Area.

I wrote in my last blog about the City of Oakland’s effort to answer the question about how to provide housing. Oakland’s city leaders considered the question (but ultimately did not pass) a proposal to ban no-cause evictions for 90-days.

As most tenants know, it’s been a tough year to be a tenant in San Francisco. The news covering landlord/tenant evictions has been extensive. We have heard stories after stories in the media of tenants suffering hardship.

Now the annual statistics from the San Francisco Rent Board are out. The numbers support these hardship stories. The numbers show that it’s still bad.

That’s no surprise.

As I mentioned in my last blog, my clients are receiving more and more eviction notices that do not even marginally follow the Rent Ordinance rules.

“All the renters I know are living in fear,” said Derrick Tynan-Connolly in the March 9^th, 2016 New York Times.

He noted, “If your landlord dies, if your landlord sells the building, if you get evicted under the Ellis Act and you have to move, you’re gone. There’s no way you can afford to stay in San Francisco.”

The NYT’s article last week, called “Tensions on the Rise in Tech’s Capital City,” made the front page of the newspaper nationally. It stated what we in San Francisco already know: the City has changed.

We are reading more and more stories of evictions in the local news. What frequently isn’t reported in the news are the cold, hard numbers about eviction in San Francisco.

Behind these number are the evictions that are happening to you, your sister, your friend, or your neighbor. These evictions are not sensationalized enough to generate news coverage, but are still painful and life-disrupting.