San Francisco Ordinance 21-05 expanded the scope of relocation assistance “mitigation payments” to all tenants displaced by the Ellis Act, regardless of whether they were “low income”.
Ordinance 21-05 provided for an inflation adjusted payment (roughly tracking first months’ rent, last month, and security deposit), which payment was upheld as “reasonable” in the case Pieri v. City & Cty. of San Francisco (2006) 137 Cal. App. 4th 886. However, the “Pieri reasonableness” standard was called into question in the case Coyne v. City & Cty. of San Francisco (2017) 9 Cal. App. 5th 1215, which measured the propriety of mitigation payments by whether they imposed a “prohibitive price” on a landlord’s exercise of his state law right to go out of the residential rental market.
You can read the full text of Ordinance 21-05 here.




