Ellis payment law upheld in San Francisco

A California state appeals court has upheld a San Francisco ordinance providing that tenants being evicted under the state Ellis Act must be paid relocation assistance of $4,500 per person or up to $13,500 per household, regardless of the tenants' own income levels. The SocketSite blog has several local reports on the decision. California's Ellis Act allows most residential building owners to evict tenants, including rent-controlled tenants, without cause, so long as the owners intend to take the building entirely out of the rental market. It's a process that has become more attractive to owners with the increased popularity of tenancies in common (TICs), which can be used to sell a property to multiple owner-occupants while avoiding California's burdensome legal requirements for conversion to condo or co-op status. The case name is given in one of SocketSite's sources as Pieri v. CCSF (meaning "City and County of San Francisco"). The text of the opinion doesn't seem to be posted on the state or FindLaw slip opinion pages, so either they're late posting it (may as well check back in a few days) or the decision is an unpublished opinion, in which case it'll be most easily findable through LEXIS.