She earns $30,000 a year, on average, between acting and her side hustles — teaching music and babysitting. Wilmurt told local broadcasting station KQED that she’s made it work living in San Francisco over her nearly three-decade career, though it’s getting harder all the time.
She and her partner, Mark Jackson, a theater director, have occupied the same rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in the hip Haight neighborhood since 1996. The monthly rent: $500.
“Rent control is the golden handcuff,” Wilmurt told KQED. “If I lost that, I’d have to leave for sure.”
“For the first time I am feeling insecure about my financial future as I am feeling the effects of aging,” Wilmurt said. “The word ‘hustle,’ which I guess is what I’ve been doing all these years, is now feeling like hustling, and needs to be a more financially driven hustle than art-driven.”
If an earthquake destroys the $500 rent controlled unit, this artist couple would lose rent control. After that, can they move into Jane Kim’s home and let Kim to build a new rent controlled house herself?
This is a gray area. In fact I think the law is purposefully ambiguous so that whoever has the power to interpret it can do whatever they see fit. A lot of these regulations are like that. Clear-cut laws can be scrutinized and lead to opposition before it’s established but once the law is passed it’s much harder to overturn.
If the landlord rebuilds the house it would be a new house and it wouldn’t be subject to rent control, at least before Costa Hawkins is repealed. But even if the tenant doesn’t get to rent the new units at the old rate, the tenant will for sure get lucrative compensation for giving up the apartment. Having a below-market rent-controlled apartment is like having equity in the property, except that you never need to pay tax on the benefits received.
Most multifam listings in SF I am aware of sold below list price. I don’t know whether it’s because rent has been softening in SF or landlords getting tired of rent control.
Ambiguous laws are made so that lawyers can make big bucks.
Politicians were mostly poor quality law students, many of them can even pass bar exam. However, when they make new laws, they know how to make it ambiguous, complex and hard to understand and hard to remember, conflicting with other laws, making some exceptions, making it thousands of pages long each. And the total pages of many law subject is millions of pages. This creates millions of job opportunities for their law school buddies.
Think about it. If the lawmakers make clear cut laws that’s easy to understand by a common person, a real man or a real woman, who’s going to spend thousands of dollars to hire lawmaker’s classmates?
Think about it again. Since most people don’t understand the millions of pages of regulation, how do people make sure that they are doing things legally? It’s impossible.
And this is the secret of how the government governs us. Make the law highly complex and ambiguous, make millions of people to break laws without knowing it. Then when the government decides to arrest anyone, it can always find something to arrest and question anyone.