With a few months before their lease was up, Sabah and Goksal Oney reached out to their landlords with an announcement.

“We have some wonderful news to share,” Sabah wrote in an Aug. 1 text message to Jamie and Andrew Patton, the Southern California-based owners of the three-bedroom, three-bathroom Marina home the Oneys had moved into 10 months prior. “We are expecting our second baby — due November. We will have a baby girl this time :)” 

Sabah, a 42-year-old CEO of a biotech startup, and Goksal, 36, loved the house at 135 Avila St. and wanted to extend their lease, which was set to expire just as the baby was due.

“Congratulations!!” Jamie replied. “We have no plans to return to San Francisco, so with the housing market appearing pretty tight and rates coming down, we have been debating selling it. Let us know if you might have interest in buying or what timeframe you’re thinking of staying as renters.”

“We have no firm plans or deadlines,” Jamie added, “so no pressure at all.”

Apparently, she spoke too soon. 

Hours later, as Sabah and Goksal were preparing to head out for their weekly date night, Jamie texted back: “Hey guys, after talking to Andrew we are planning to sell unless the economics change significantly.”

A few weeks later, the Oneys got a notice from the Pattons. The owners said they were raising the rent from $14,000 to $24,000 — a 71% increase — if the couple wanted to stay another year, or to $18,000 a month if they rented through January. 

“We were shocked,” Sabah said.

“We were so happy to be living in such a nice place — the ideal place for our kids, for our family,” Goksal added. 

They had already paid for a spot at a nearby preschool for their 3-year-old son and were still settling into the Avila Street home, which took months to furnish while Sabah focused on work and Goksal juggled her own job while studying for her master’s degree as a family and marriage therapist. 

“As a mom, during one of the most vulnerable times of my pregnancy, this just elevated my stress and anxiety,” she said. 

Instead of putting finishing touches on their baby girl’s nursery, the couple had to figure out where they would all live. 

San Francisco’s AI-fueled housing boom has driven median home prices to a record $2.15 million — up 18% from a year ago. Tenant advocates say the potential for a windfall is driving a growing number of landlords to a tactic that avoids the cost of formal eviction: rent hikes so extreme that, for tenants, leaving feels like the only option.

It’s unclear exactly how widespread the tactic is, because it usually involves single-family homes and properties that are exempt from rent control laws. But Rahman Popal, who’s representing the Oneys in a lawsuit attempting to recover damages from the Pattons, said his firm is fielding at least 20% more calls than last year about displacement by extreme rent hikes. 

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“We’re seeing an explosion in these cases,” he said.

And it’s not just people on the financial brink getting pushed out. It’s “teachers, artists, and CEOs,” Popal said.

The throughline, he continued, is “the greed motive” of landlords trying to skirt relocation costs and boost profits by 15% to 20% by listing for sale properties that are unoccupied by tenants.

Popal said that in the absence of price controls (opens in new tab) on single-family homes and corporate-owned condos, the best recourse is to invoke San Francisco’s just-cause and anti-harassment laws, which protect tenants from dramatic rent hikes if the aim is to price them out. 

In a lawsuit filed a couple of weeks before Christmas, the Oneys say the Pattons never planned to collect the higher rent, and the increase was designed to make it financially impossible for them to stay — forcing the family to leave so the Pattons could sell the house without a tenant and without triggering the just-cause eviction protections and relocation payments required by city law.

The Pattons didn’t respond to a detailed request for comment; their attorney declined to weigh in, citing pending litigation. The Pattons deny wrongdoing in a court filing responding to the Oneys’ claim. 

Though eviction-by-untenable-rent-hike isn’t unusual, Popal said, it’s rarely as overt as in the case of the Oneys. While the couple were still paying the last two months of rent, the Pattons stuck a for-sale sign in the yard and began renovating the place.

By the time August came to a close, the Oneys decided to move so they could focus on settling into a place before the baby arrived. 

A house was listed for sale a few blocks away that fell within their budget. It meant downsizing, losing a bedroom and an office by going from 2,400 square feet to 1,800, but it kept them in the neighborhood where they had built a community and where their toddler would start preschool in the months ahead.

It required them to sell at a steep loss most of the furniture they’d acquired for the Avila Street home, because it wouldn’t fit in the smaller place they rushed to buy. 

The couple paid rent to the Pattons through the end of their lease, Nov. 30, even though the landlords were sending in crews to work on the property during their tenancy. By September, the house was in full renovation mode. By Halloween, it was listed for sale.

“We were trying very hard not to be confrontational, because that’s not who we are,” Sabah said. “But they were being so brazen.”

The Avila Street home, which the Pattons bought in 2019 for a little more than $3.5 million, sold for $4.35 million. Records show the deed was signed over on Nov. 14, with 16 days left in the Oneys’ lease.

The listing described it (opens in new tab) as “beautifully remodeled, ideally located by the shops and restaurants on Chestnut Street and the natural beauty of Crissy Field, the Presidio, and the Marina Green.” The listing also boasts a “bright sunroom,” saying it would be perfect for a nursery.