The San Francisco Rent Board has calculated that eviction notices filed citywide rose 44% compared with the prior year. The average one-bedroom rent in the city has reached $4,400, up more than 25% from a year earlier and nearly three times the national average. A two-bedroom runs about $6,000, and a centrally located four-bedroom easily exceeds $10,000. The prices have meant that even people with six-figure salaries can have a hard time finding housing, and for the city’s most vulnerable groups it has become increasingly hard just to survive.

At the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco’s downtown clinic, phone lines ring from 9am until closing at 5pm every Monday, and in-person counseling appointments for renters facing eviction or landlord misconduct fill days in advance. The non-profit’s staff of seven sifts through more than 150 voicemails after every weekend, and the rental assistance hotline averages 200 calls a week. “Our clinic is completely at capacity,” said Maria Zamudio, the non-profit’s executive director. Her organization has seen a 23% increase in landlord disputes related to repairs over the past year.

Roughly two-thirds of San Franciscans rent, and the city has stronger tenant protections than most U.S. cities, including rent control on more than 160,000 of its more than 250,000 housing units. Even so, landlords looking to cash in on the boom are exploiting loopholes that leave tenants exposed to surprise rent hikes, condo conversions and mass evictions.

The dynamic is especially pronounced in neighborhoods such as SoMa and Mission Bay, the industrial and waterfront areas that are home to the offices of AI firms including Anthropic and OpenAI. Anand Singh of the hospitality and tourism union Unite Here said he has heard stories of tenants facing 40% rent increases in recent months. “When margins are as slim as they are, an extra $100 per month is easily enough to stress test a person’s ability to live in the city,” Singh said. State law caps annual increases on some units, but newer buildings are exempt from limitations entirely.

Mayor Daniel Lurie declared a “rent emergency” in September, pointing to soaring costs driven by the AI boom. He proposed funding for eviction legal aid, larger payments to displaced renters, and caps on rent increases for newly vacant rent-controlled units. Critics say the measures address symptoms, not causes. “This is San Francisco on repeat,” said Quintin Mecke, executive director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations. “We treat housing like a commodity rather than a home that people have a right to, and we don’t learn any lessons.”

Rent control, which applies to many buildings in the city built before 1979, is meant to shield tenants from big shocks. In boom times, however, it can give landlords an incentive to oust long-term tenants who pay below-market rent so they can re-let the unit at market rate, and a growing number of landlords are relying on legal pathways to do so, advocates say. Under the Ellis Act, a property owner can evict every tenant in a building if they go out of the rental business, and thereafter sell the vacant property. With properties selling for as much as $1m over asking price to buyers working in AI, those evictions are appearing more often. Some are predicated on turning long-term rental units into luxury condos to sell at a large profit: on Powell Street in the North Beach neighborhood, a little more than a mile from the Anthropic headquarters, the new owners of a seven-unit building occupied by the same tenants for decades are trying to combine the units into four larger, upscale condos.

San Francisco also allows eviction for “just causes,” including nonpayment and lease violations. Increasingly, landlords are designing circumstances that trap renters into missteps, such as by changing the way rent is collected from in-person to online platforms, organizers say. When a rent-controlled building in the Tenderloin changed hands after the original owners defaulted on their loan, many residents were not told that they needed to re-route their monthly payments; tenants who paid the old landlord were then issued nonpayment eviction notices en masse. Some landlords are growing bolder in provoking what organizers call “self-eviction” — refusing to address infestations, repair broken appliances or collect trash, or carrying out loud, inconvenient “renovictions” designed to wear down a resident’s resolve. City Supervisor Danny Sauter, whose district covers much of downtown, said renters now feel uneasy when their landlords move to make improvements. “All of a sudden their landlord is paying attention and wanting to fix something that has been broken for years,” Sauter said. “Folks are getting nervous.”

Predatory landlords are counting on certain tenants, especially those who are older or who speak limited English, to quietly move on, said Goldberg, a housing advocate. Because tenant protections are largely self-enforced, “most predatory landlords are going to first aim at who they think doesn’t know their rights and who they think would be scared to assert them,” Goldberg explained. In Chinatown — which spans some 30 blocks adjacent to the financial district and is the oldest Chinatown in the nation — an investor purchased a rent-controlled building of mostly older Cantonese-speaking residents and almost immediately started issuing eviction notices, claiming renters who had lived there for decades were hoarders “simply because their belongings demonstrated four decades of living,” Goldberg said. The residents of 1120 Jackson St. have since formed a union and are fighting back. Organizers said stepped-up federal immigration enforcement has made many immigrants unwilling to risk going to court. “These sorts of dynamics make it much more difficult for immigrant families to avail themselves of their rights,” said Roller, another housing advocate. Some landlords are even using deportation fears as leverage: Goldberg said a neighbor abandoned their rent-controlled unit voluntarily after their landlord threatened to report their marriage as fraudulent for the purposes of acquiring a green card. “They left in fear,” she said.

Displaced renters who want to stay in San Francisco have few options. Since he first moved to San Francisco 20 years ago, Frederick Jones, 47, has lived with roommates. After he lost his last apartment to a condo conversion, he moved into the smallest room of a three-bedroom house in the Sunset neighborhood. Every month, he spends half of his earnings from his job at the flagship factory of chocolate maker Ghirardelli on rent. “I would love to have a place of my own, but in San Francisco, with its high rents, you can’t,” he said.

As AI wealth further inflates rental prices, people who are evicted from or priced out of their homes are moving into units that are smaller or in poor — even substandard — condition. “People are being shown places without a bathroom, with no working lights, with no kitchen,” Roller said. Many “double up,” cramming into a shared space meant for one. Advocates describe multiple families sharing a single family home, with four or five people to a bedroom, and as many as 10 immigrant workers bunking together in a studio.

Overcrowding takes a toll on residents’ mental health, said Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “Can you imagine trying to do homework in a studio apartment with eight people, or trying to get some sleep when people are coming and going to their night shifts?” she asked. “It creates stress for everybody.” Kushel and her colleagues are increasingly seeing patients put their physical health on the line to remain housed. Some delay important preventive care because they can’t afford to take time off work. People start to drink more because of the stress, Kushel said, or they turn to stimulants such as meth so that they can stay alert at their multiple jobs and stave off hunger. Patients with life-threatening conditions stop taking their medications because they can’t afford the $10 co-pay. Some even starve themselves. “I had one elder patient who had not eaten in three days, who kept missing appointments because he didn’t have money to pay for the bus and couldn’t risk falling behind in rent,” Kushel said. “It’s heartbreaking and it’s real.”

Meanwhile, the services that once helped people through displacement are thinning. Interfaith agencies offering support services and charity have closed as landlords have refused to renew leases or raised rents to unattainable levels. Many struggle to recruit staff while demand for their services is “through the roof,” said Michael Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council. Proposed cuts at the local and federal levels could add more fuel to the fire. Still open is the council’s winter shelter, which gives meals and beds to up to 100 people experiencing homelessness during the coldest months. Last year, the shelter was nearly always full, Pappas said, with many residents only having recently become unhoused. “I’m afraid of what we’re going to see this year,” he said, noting that the AI companies behind the wealth surge have yet to go public.

For the many who move out of the city, jobs tied to San Francisco now mean commuting from increasingly vast distances. “Super-commuting” — traveling more than 50 miles to get to work — has surged in recent decades, said Sarah Karlinsky, director of research and policy at the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation. The AI boom will likely intensify the trend. “For communities at the center, at the eye of the storm, it’s a lot of pressure,” Karlinsky said. Unite Here’s Singh has seen the shift firsthand: when he first started working for the union 24 years ago, more than half of the members he represented lived in San Francisco or very close to it. Now, most live outside it, with members commuting from Tracy, more than 60 miles away, and Modesto, 90 miles distant, now common rather than outliers — except that whereas people previously moved far away to purchase a home, they are now doing it just to find affordable rent. “It’s astounding,” Singh said. “That is hours and hours spent in cars and trains.”

Entire industries are feeling the strain. Hospitality, still recovering from the pandemic, is short on workers, restaurants are struggling to hire line cooks and dishwashers, and grocery stores are finding themselves chronically understaffed.

Kim Tavaglione, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, said only 7% of union members — comprising nurses, teachers, orchestra workers, fire fighters and others — were able to afford living in the city before the most recent rent spike. “Folks are living on the edge,” she said. “Even workers who on paper seem to be doing OK are struggling. There is nowhere left for people to go except outside the city.” In recent months, Tavaglione said she has heard of janitors who live in homeless shelters and healthcare workers commuting from as far away as Lake County who, between back-to-back shifts, live in their cars and take showers at the local YMCA. “It’s frightening,” she said.

The AI-fueled surge is also making the city less diverse, a trend under way for decades. While San Francisco’s Black population peaked in 1970 at 13%, today it hovers at around 5%. “The loss of the Black population in the city is a major dynamic that I’ve seen over the time since I’ve been here,” Roller said. That is what happens when a city doesn’t support residents at various points on the income scale, said Michael Lens, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA. “We need a diverse workforce to support all the things we do,” he said. “We can’t just have an economy of lawyers and tech bros. We need people who work at restaurants and who teach at schools to be able to afford to live somewhere nearby.”

Housing advocates are divided about the best way to increase the supply of affordable rental units. Matthew Lewis of the pro-housing non-profit California Yimby said the solution is to build “as much housing” as possible so that competition softens and market rates drop. Others want the city to commit to building more affordable housing that shelters renters from market whims and unscrupulous landlords. But both sides agree the system is broken. “For tenants who aren’t looking at stock options, this is a lottery that most people lose,” Lewis said. Shanti Singh, a housing advocate who has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment in Nob Hill for 10 years and has never missed a payment, said she “always” worries about being evicted, and that she could not afford a similar place at today’s market prices if it happened. “Unless you’re really rich, everybody is on edge,” she said.