Desperate Tenants in SF Face Scams, Substandard Rentals

San Francisco’s AI boom is making the rental market more competitive than ever. Prospective tenants face intense pressure to stand out, leaving them susceptible to substandard living conditions or outright scams. 

Links:

• Part 1: As AI Booms, Daniel Lurie Declares ‘Rent Emergency’ in San Francisco 
• After the $18,000 Scam, How Can Bay Area Renters Protect Themselves? | KQED

This transcript is computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Beyond Deng is packing up the Mission District apartment he’d been living in for the last few years. He has yet to find his next landing spot, but he’s got a big deadline looming over him. On Friday, he’ll have to be out of this apartment.

Beyond Deng: I wake up every single morning in my bed that’s now on the floor because we did it to sell our bed frame. And I think I’m just, damn, where am I going to be next week?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Earlier this summer, Deng’s landlord announced that they were selling the apartment building, throwing Deng and everyone else in the building into San Francisco’s crazy rental market.

Beyond Deng: So the last month and a half, we’ve been through this whole tedious, arduous journey on learning more about how we can project ourselves as tenants to now try to face this brutal landscape of the rental market.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The AI boom has injected even more money into an already competitive rental market. So renters like Deng are now facing a desperate situation. Some are willing to pay extra, others are accepting substandard living conditions, and some are even falling for scams.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: People are accepting things that they otherwise wouldn’t, in these circumstances. It’s making renters more vulnerable. This is a landlord’s market right now.

Speaker 1: What makes San Francisco special is being threatened right now.

Daniel Lurie: When San Franciscans sit down at the kitchen table at night, many are asking another question. Can I still afford to live here?

Speaker 2: The listings are pretty sparse to begin with.

Speaker 3: I really hope we’re not being priced out of our move to the city.

Speaker 4: It was so competitive that we’re moving to the East Bay.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, in part two of the Bay’s series on San Francisco’s AI-fueled rental crisis, KQED’s Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí tells us about how far some renters are willing to go to stay in San Francisco. I wonder if you can just tell me about like the range of crazy things that you’re hearing renters settle for in this rental market right now.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: People are accepting things that they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s not a new thing that you find someone in San Francisco or the Bay Area who has four, five, six roommates. But things start getting a little strange when you start hearing folks having to visit places with no kitchen, no bathroom, no sunlight. On Reddit, one user shared that he went to visit a spot. He walked around the room and then he’s like, where am I supposed to go use the restroom? And the landlord was like, oh, well, there’s a gym down the street. You should get a membership.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Oh my god. San Francisco has always been a very expensive place to live, a difficult place to rent in, and we talked in our last episode of The Bay about how this is just a unique moment in the city because of just the sheer wealth that is being injected into the city with the AI boom, but how is this competition and this pressure in the rental market right now changing renters’ behavior?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: We know that in San Francisco, there’s always been a market for living spaces that offer the minimum. But now we’re seeing people who are, you know, have full-time jobs, who are professionals, who let’s say would be in most other places in the country in very comfortable circumstances, having to then also compete for the same exact spaces. As a renter, you don’t have any guarantee that a landlord’s even going to look at message right on Zillow or Craigslist, whatever. One way to stand out is to offer more. You know, if the listing was, hey, this is for 4,000, you’re gonna have some people emailing the landlord being, hey, I’m willing to pay 5,000. If I set my homie up in a closet, they might say, oh, this good, man, I’ll settle here.

Ora Prochovnick: People feel desperate and sometimes just think any four walls and ceiling and a floor is worth it and they’ll put up with a lot of problems.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: As part of my reporting, I spoke to Ora Prochovnick. She is the Director of Litigation at the San Francisco Eviction Defense Collaborative. This is a renter’s rights group. She’s seen how in this tight market, people are making desperate choices to find a home.

Ora Prochovnick: The escalating anxiety around, if you find a place that’s at all desirable and within your ballpark about what you can afford, you know that in one afternoon, at least 20 other tenants are gonna be putting in their applications to compete with yours.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, people are desperate. People are desperate to stay here and find a way to make it work here in San Francisco. And so, I mean it sounds like people are kind of not just going through crazy lengths in order to stay there, but are also more vulnerable, as you say. And another part of your reporting too is that folks have been more susceptible to scams.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: When competition is this intense, this is both anecdotal and this is something that I’ve seen again and again, especially on Craigslist, are scams.

Alvin Tran: I was super excited to see the listing because it was a two bed, one and a half bath. And that was exactly what my roommate and I were looking for.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: I spoke to Alvin Tran who lives in San Francisco and he got a 10% rent increase. You know, with his bestie, he starts looking for a new spot and they’re looking everywhere and they find a spot on Craigslist.

Alvin Tran: Photos and the description, the place looks huge. There’s a lot of sunlight and it was in an ideal location. It was within our top three neighborhoods that we were looking for and it within our budget.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: He emails the contact on Craigslist. The person on Craiglist who put up the listing says, fantastic, why don’t you come to the open house?

Alvin Tran: So when I arrived at the open house, I saw that there were around six or seven other parties there and people have already mentioned that they have already applied online on Zillow.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: He sees the competition and he’s like, okay, obviously, you know, he’s proactive as soon as they get home, let me email the person I’ve been talking to on Craigslist, makes his interest very clear. He says, hey, I’m ready to put money down.

Alvin Tran: I was feeling a little bit pressured on how do I make myself stand out? How do I be able to kind of secure this apartment?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: He and his roomie were asked to put down $18,000 together. It was $6,000 for the first month of rent, another $6000 for last month of the rent, and an additional $6k for a deposit.

Alvin Tran: I was super excited to finally get confirmation that we were approved and that lease included a signed signature. So I assumed that everything went well and this is the end.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Of a journey. And it turns out that the person he sent the money to on Craigslist was not the landlord. What this scammer had done was, you know, he had seen other listings on Zillow and other places and created a fake one on Craigslist and sent Alvin to the open house that the real landlord was doing. So he intercepted what would otherwise been a regular normal interaction between Alvin and the real landlord.

Alvin Tran: I tried texting the number that I had. I tried calling and emailing. I even tried knocking on the door, but never got any response.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: The person he sent the money to just disappeared, blocked Alvin, you know, stop taking his calls, stop responding his emails, but obviously he was able to like keep the money, right? Because it was done through a bank wire, bank transfer.

Alvin Tran: I was just shocked and floored that it turned out to be a scam. And then that sadness turned into frustration and then devastation because I then now realized that I have wired a big chunk of money to the wrong person and to a scammer.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So Alvin lost $18,000 through this scam. And I think maybe some people might hear this, Carlos, and have very little empathy for Alvin, because, I mean, Craigslist scams are not new, but also $18000 is a lot of money. I mean what stands out to you about his situation?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Yeah, yeah. Alvin told me, he’s like, what was his blind spot? And what he shared was like, if he had just, maybe at the open house, talked with the landlord and was like hey, wanna confirm? Is this your email or is this your phone number? This wouldn’t have happened. But his mind was elsewhere. His mind, as he told me was to get this place soon.

Alvin Tran: I know that in my case, when I was there in person, I had already been texting and emailing who I thought was the property owner. So I didn’t think to confirm or ask for his contact information in person. But I think had I just done that and gone the extra mile to verify this whole scam would have fallen apart.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: The incentive for scammers to get involved in the Bay Area rental market is huge. They’re hearing that people in San Francisco are willing to put down 18,000, 20,000 25,000 right? You know, with deposit, everything. Scammers are gonna be so like, they love that. They’re like, what, I can just do this and I get this huge payload. So that’s scary. And then the second thing is that, point out that if folks who are better off are getting this amount of pressure, are getting screwed over by this rental market, That is not good news for everyone else.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’ll have more with KQED’s Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí right after this break. By the way, if you appreciate the local deep dives that we bring you on the bay, consider supporting the work we do by becoming a KQED Sustaining Member. We can’t do this work without you. Just go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. We’ll be right back.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I wanna transition Carlos into what this means for people who are in the rental market right now and how to go about navigating this what feels like an impossible situation. So are your only options basically to pay 4,000 for a one bedroom, accept a bad living situation or get scammed?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: That’s something really important to have in mind right now, that no matter how desperate you have, the state of California guarantees you basic rights as tenants. Any place that you’re paying for, you, ECG, my landlord in this situation, are legally required to provide these things to me as your tenants.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What are those things?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Right, so these are some things that sound incredibly basic, but for example, a sink, a working heating system, a toilet. And as of this year, California also updated the set of rules to include a fridge and a stove. So if I’m paying rent for an apartment for a room, you need to guarantee that that I have access to a fridge and a stove. Something super super important that I think it seems like a you know for some people I mentioned to you know they even laugh when I say this but sunlight, natural sunlight you need access to natural sunlight. And the fact that this is in California’s legal code represents decades and decades of tenant activism. You know, that could be for a later story, but there’s a huge significance to mental health to just basic wellbeing, knowing that you wake up and if you want, you can raise the curtains or you can just open the window and have access to fresh air and sunlight.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So landlords owe you basic things as a tenant, but what about how to avoid scams like Alvin’s situation?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: There’s a few small things that you can do to just kind of immediately spot a scam. And in Alvin’s case, the $18,000 that he was asked for, that should have been the first red flag. And Ora had a lot to say about that.

Ora Prochovnick: California limits the amount of money that landlords are allowed to charge at the start of a tenancy.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Landlords, especially, you know, at the big level where they own multiple properties, they can’t charge you more than one month of rent and then a deposit. And in Alvin’s case, it was $6,000 for first month of rental, $6000 for last month of rent, and then $6K for an additional deposit.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So if they ask you for any more than that?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Red flag because it’s well one it’s illegal so it’s either you have a landlord that doesn’t read the law which is okay that’s already a problem or two a scammer that doesn’ know anything about California rental law and something that everyone I spoke to told me is avoid a wire transfer which is unfortunately what Alvin you know ended up doing he sent the $18,000 via wire transfer.

Ora Prochovnick: It’s never a good idea to do, unfortunately, what was done in this case. Don’t wire money, don’t use crypto, don’t us those digital apps that we’ve all come to love like Venmo and Zelle because you’re not protected when you use those tools.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Once you send that money out, there’s no way for you to get it back, versus if I sign you a check, or even if I pay you through my credit card, I still have a chance to be able to cancel that and get that money back.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, one thing I’m struggling with here, Carlos, is the fact that I think you could be as aware of your rights as a tenant as possible. You could be read up on California state law, but it sounds like there are enough renters in the market right now who are willing to settle for less. I mean what advice would you give to people right now on how to navigate San Francisco’s rental market?

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: We’ve been in a landlord’s market before. There’s a lot of circumstances, right, out of our control where the AI boom goes next. But we have to also remember that individual actions add up to a collective result. You know, like we normalize landlords charging $4,000, $5,000. We’re putting ourselves in a position where we as tenants collectively will have less power. You gotta make these rights worth it somehow, right? Like you gotta fight for them if they’re not, you know, rights are only there if you fight for them, if you stand up for them, if you use them, if you work them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Carlos, thank you so much for sharing your reporting. I appreciate it.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Thank you ECG.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, a community reporter for KQED. By the way, this episode is the first in a series of stories we’re doing here on the Bay about how AI is affecting the Bay Area’s rental crisis. We’ll leave a link to the first episode in our show notes. This episode was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. Gabriela Glueck is our producer. She scored this episode and added all the tape. Music courtesy of Audio Network. If you wanna get in touch with us here at The Bay, feel free to send us an email. We’re at thebayatkqed.org. Support for The Bay is provided in part by the Osher Production Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. And I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks so much for listening. Peace.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.