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January 27, 2010

Join Next Week’s Condo Conversion Rally at City Hall

My friends at Plan C are organizing a rally on the steps of City Hall next week, in support of expediting condo conversion. Here’s the lowdown, straight from Plan C:

“Please join Plan C at 8:15AM on Wednesday, Feb. 3, on the City Hall steps for a rally to support condo conversion reform! As many of you know, the condo lottery drawing happens at 9AM on February 3, and we’ll be done in time for you to attend the lottery itself.

You may have read within the last few months in the Chronicle and in the Examiner that the mayor’s office is considering again the possibility of a condo-lottery bypass initiative for qualifying TIC owners.

As you are already aware, expediting the conversion of owner occupied TICs to condominiums would help bring ownership and mortgage relief to middle income San Franciscans and has the potential to bring significant revenue to the city during this time of budget and financial distress. The revenue collected could have a meaningful impact to the city’s bottom line and has the potential to save crucial city jobs and services from further cuts.

The expediting of TICs to condominiums would be facilitated by the payment of a specified fee to the City that is higher and in addition to the usual mapping and permit fees collected from winners of the current condo conversion lottery. The fee would likely only be available to owner occupied TICs that are lottery eligible.

The proposed fee for the bypass of the lottery hasn’t been set, and we would like to again call on you for your input. The fee has to be low enough for TIC owners to be willing to pay it (and to be fair) – but also high enough to be meaningful to the City’s budget deficit. Initial discussions concerning the development of this initiative have considered fees in the $20,000-40,000 range per unit or 5-10% of a unit’s value.

As usual, we encourage you to email the supervisors (particularly your supervisor) on the need for condo reform by going to our Plan C Web site and clicking on “‘Contact City Hall.'”

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