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Tenant Being Evicted by Google Lawyer Hands Out 'Eviction Protection' @ Folsom Street Fair

by Eviction Free San Francisco
Claudia Tirado, a third grade teacher and tenant being evicted by Google's head of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin, queered her fight to remain in her home at the Folsom Street Fair this past Sunday. With other activists from Eviction Free San Francisco, Tirado handed out condoms for "eviction protection" at the annual kink and sex-positive SoMa fair. Hundreds of condoms were disseminated with a picture of Halprin on them, warning fair visitors that an evictor was in their midst. Chanters sang, "Sex Positive, Eviction Negative," while others held posters and drummed.
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Claudia Tirado, a third grade teacher and tenant being evicted by Google's head of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin, queered her fight to remain in her home at the Folsom Street Fair this past Sunday. With other activists from Eviction Free San Francisco, Tirado handed out condoms for "eviction protection" at the annual kink and sex-positive SoMa fair. Hundreds of condoms were disseminated with a picture of Halprin on them, warning fair visitors that an evictor was in their midst. Chanters sang, "Sex Positive, Eviction Negative," while others held posters and drummed.

Halprin bought the 7-unit 812 Guerrero in 2012, and then illegally Owner-Move-In evicted one tenant, Susan, only days after her sister passed away. She filed a lawsuit against him, and won. In retaliation, he then proceeded to issue Ellis Act eviction notices to the other tenants in four other units in the building, including the unit that Claudia and her three-year-old son Valentino reside.

Halprin is active in the Power House and the leather community, and was part of the Power House during the 2014 Pride Parade. Eviction Free SF has been demanding that Google pressure Halprin to rescind the eviction, utilizing tactics from bus blockades to demonstrations in Mountain View. During the Folsom Street Fair, the group implored members of the leather community to also pressure Halprin into withdrawing the eviction, immediately. Members of Eviction Free SF received nothing but warm support from fair attendees, many of whom were quick to agree that housing is a queer issue, and that it is unconscionable for Halprin to evict the residents of 812 Guerrero so that he can have a private mansion, just three blocks from the local Google Bus stop at 18th and Dolores.

After Tirado disrupted Google's I/O Developer conference in May, one of Google's VP's promised to intervene and help Tirado and other tenants at 812 Guerrero. Since then, the VP has reneged her promise. Anti-eviction protestors will continue to pressure Google and Jack to withdraw the eviction, with increased help and support from the leather community.
§Eviction Protection condoms
by Eviction Free San Francisco
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§Jack Halprin
by Eviction Free San Francisco
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§Protestors
by Eviction Free San Francisco
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§Protestors
by Eviction Free San Francisco
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§Claudia
by Eviction Free San Francisco
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by Angry renter, getting angrier
Eviction Free San Francisco leads the way in irrelevant and self=indulgent gimmicks like this as an alternative to attacking the source of the mass eviction and displacement crisis, which is the prevalent business climate in San Francisco. Far from being a bare knuckle opposition to bankers, landlords and speculators, the main people behind Eviction Free SF like to fantasize that they are some kind of players with juice among the powers that be. After more than a years worth of empty ritual effort, they remain completely invisibible among a high ninety percent of SF renters. None of my thirty or so friends and neighbors, many of whom are under the gun from scumbag landlords, have even heard of Eviction Free San Francisco. In the same way that the so called San Francisco Tenants Union has never been what its name proclaims it to be, and is in effect fingernail clippings on the fringe of the local Democratic Party apparatus, Eviction Free San Francisco is a style model of an inadequate response to the current, potentailly terminal, market driven housing and social space catastrophy in the city.
Is Google's head of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin, a big Folsom Street Fair person? If not, then what is the point? The outreach around this should be to renters, not to Folsom Street fair habitues as such, some of whom may be renters, and many of whom are not. Does this damage the Google geeks ability to cash in on the mass ripping off of working people and the demographic ruin of the city? You might actually do better to leaflet the crowd at a Giants game, although even then the connection is a somewhat tenuous one, if perhaps slightly less tenuous.

Do these guys have any idea of what they are doing and of why they are doing it?
by Common sense ain't so common anymore
The man bought a house, and he is entitled to live in it if he wants. That doesn't make him a bad person, nor is he individually or socially responsible for the housing shortage in San Francisco. Those tenants signed leases, knowing that those leases were not permanent, that the home could be sold to an individual, who could live in it if s/he wanted, forcing them (the tenants) out. At least, the tenants should and would have known that had they done their due diligence. None of the tenants has a "right" to live there (or anywhere else in San Francisco, for that matter) regardless of his/her profession or existing commute distance. Only Mr. Halprin, as the property owner, has a right to do anything with the property. That's a major problem among San Franciscans: a sense of entitlement to things to which they have no real claim, like underpriced housing (on the poorer end) or desirable city views (on the richer end). I wonder how Ms Tirado would feel if the roles were reversed, and the tenants of a house she purchased were trying to stop her occupying all of it. Mr. Halprin's actions did not cause the housing crisis, nor will Ms. Tirado's solve it. The solution will require strong leadership in local government, particularly in the city planning department, to overcome the NIMBYists and encourage developers to build more and denser housing in the city. (Subsidizing the design costs of high-rise below-market-rate housing units might not be a bad idea either. Let's face it; in a 49 sq. mi. city, it's impractical to build only 5-story concrete government housing units.)
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