Since finding an eviction notice taped on the front door of her apartment in March, 92-year-old Sue Yeng Yan hasn’t slept much. Often, she paces the floor after midnight, consumed by fears of homelessness. A few weeks ago, on a pre-dawn stress walk, she tripped and severely bruised her wrist. 

“I am so afraid,” Yan said in Chinese, her voice trembling. “I’m constantly anxious. I could end up sleeping on the street.”

Yan has lived in her well-kept apartment at 1120 Jackson St., located along the Powell-Hyde cable car line in Lower Nob Hill, for 43 years. The building is rent-controlled, so she pays $281.42 per month. She moved there shortly after immigrating to the U.S. from Zhanjiang, China, in 1982. It’s a tidy but packed unit, with a living room, bedroom, and kitchen, all filled with a lifetime of Yan’s belongings.

According to her landlords, who purchased the 16-unit building last year, this accumulation of possessions is the reason Yan must go. The eviction notice she received March 10 claimed that “excessive piles of personal items and/or debris and/or trash” in her unit “present a safety and fire hazard.”

Yan is one of seven tenants in the building who received identically worded eviction notices at the same time. Like Yan, many have lived there for decades and pay below-market rates enabled by rent-control protections. At least three other tenants facing eviction are senior citizens. Since delivering the notices, the building’s management company, Beam Properties, has refused to accept monthly rent payments, a tactic that often precedes formal eviction hearings in court.

The new owner, Nabob Hill LLC, has been pursuing a halting eviction process that could leave tenants on the street. Nabob Hill’s attorneys claim the threats were meant only to bring units into compliance — and say the effort has largely succeeded. But Nabob Hill is still refusing to accept rent, leaving tenants under the specter of eviction proceedings that could restart at any time.

The eviction notices at 1120 Jackson occur against a backdrop of skyrocketing rental prices in San Francisco. The average asking price for a one-bedroom apartment this month was $3,478, a year-over-year increase of 17%, according to online rental platform Apartment List. 

This pricing surge has been accompanied by a spike in evictions. According to San Francisco Sheriff’s Office data obtained by The Standard, evictions hit a 10-year high in 2025. The city is on track for even more this year.

Still, mass evictions — in which numerous residents of a building receive notices within days of one another — are rare in San Francisco. In the case of 1120 Jackson, at least four of the seven tenants received notices claiming that an accumulation of household possessions created a “nuisance” justifying eviction. 

However, on a visit to two of these apartments, The Standard found little evidence supporting the claims. The rather ordinary-looking units were occupied by long-term tenants with a lifetime of mementos. Tchotchkes lined window sills, woven baskets hung from kitchen walls, books were neatly piled on the ground, and cleaning supplies were pushed into corners. Shelves were packed, and space was limited, yes, but it was hard to see where any nuisance lay.

Gen Fujioka, a tenants attorney for more than 30 years, said renters have borne the brunt of the Bay Area’s real estate cycles, driven by booms and busts in the tech industry.

“As more affluent workers enter the market, landlords see opportunities to charge higher rents,” Fujioka said. “Rents have surged, and so have evictions.”

Fujioka, who works at the Chinatown Community Development Center, said he saw similar patterns during the dot-com era of the 1990s and the tech boom of the 2010s. The AI boom, he said, appears to be an acceleration of the trend.

Unlike other legally acceptable reasons for evicting tenants in San Francisco — nonpayment of rent or lease violations such as unauthorized pets — nuisance evictions can be difficult to defend against. Whether an annoyance rises to the level of a nuisance is a subjective determination. What is an acceptable amount of stuff to keep in a one-bedroom apartment where you’ve lived for 40 years?

Fujioka said his office has seen a sharp increase in what he describes as questionable eviction attempts, including notices based on minor or exaggerated allegations. He estimates that such cases have risen by more than 50% over the past 18 months.

“Every time we see one of these surges in displacement and eviction pressures, the most vulnerable residents are the ones who suffer the most,” he said. “Seniors and low-income working families face the greatest risk of being forced from their homes.”

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Further muddying the waters in the case of 1120 Jackson is a sales listing from last year (opens in new tab) that explicitly highlighted the potential gains to a buyer if tenants were to vacate rent-controlled units. “Current rents are significantly below market, with an estimated 224% rental upside achievable through unit turnover,” the listing says.

Los Angeles-based Nabob Hill LLC purchased the building in July for $1.5 million from its longtime owners, a Chinese family, according to property records. The price was remarkably low for a 16-unit apartment building in Nob Hill, likely due to the rent-controlled status.

The nuisance claims “don’t seem to be arising from a true health and safety need,” said Shelby Nacino, housing rights program director at the Asian Law Caucus, which is representing some of the tenants facing eviction. “Rather, it feels like it’s part of an effort to actualize the building’s potential profit.”

Kit Ying Mak and her mom moved into 1120 Jackson in 2002, the year after they immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong. Mak left for several years to live in Daly City but in 2021 moved with her husband and two children into an open apartment in the building to make it easier to care for her mother, who has diabetes and is unable to walk. Mak works remotely as a medical interpreter, which allows her to care for her mother during the workday.

“ I have to cook for her,” Mak said. “So it‘s easy for me to live really close to her. She feels dizzy, she feels sick, I could get to her very fast.”

In October, a few months after the building was sold, Mak received notice that the new managers would inspect her apartment. The inspection was brief, and a few photographs were shot. Two weeks later, she received another notice that her apartment would be inspected. This has continued for months, with inspections spaced out over weeks or, sometimes, days.

“Every time the management comes, I feel like it‘s harassment,” Mak said.

Residents facing eviction, including 92-year old Yan, have also experienced a high frequency of unexplained apartment inspections.

“This tactic of inspecting repeatedly using some rubric that the tenants aren‘t even aware of is not something that we regularly see,” Nacino said. “To do these intrusive, repeated inspections to check for something, it’s just very paternalistic.”

The inspections weren’t all that changed with the new ownership. The previous resident manager spoke Cantonese — useful in a building with several elderly, monolingual speakers. But Nabob Hill installed a manager who doesn’t speak the language, according to several tenants.

Shortly after assuming ownership, Nabob Hill raised the rent of several tenants. The rent at Mak’s mother’s unit jumped 350%, from $628 to $2,820 per month. As the prior landlord chose not to hike the rent by the maximum percentage (opens in new tab) allowed by law, that gap built over time and was “banked,” allowing the new owner to apply the increase all at once.

Mak’s mother and stepfather cannot afford the new rate on their fixed income, so her brother now pays a portion of the rent.

“This is something we’ve seen in the context of SROs,” Shelby said, referring to the slew of tenant-unfriendly practices that the new owners put into place. “It’s a series of tactics that make it more and more unwelcoming for long-term tenants to remain.”

Both Mak and her mother received eviction notices on March 10. The notices included language identical to that of Yan, claiming that an accumulation of items in the apartment constituted a nuisance. A month later, Mak received a notice of unlawful detainer, signaling a formal beginning to the eviction process.

“ I feel like I’m having a mental breakdown,” Mak said. She claims that the eviction notices have  put such stress on her that she’s been unable to work full time and has begun taking an antidepressant. Her husband, a mechanic, is providing for the family.

The Standard reviewed photographs taken in Mak’s apartment, provided by her attorney. While it appears full of possessions, in a manner consistent with a family of four living in a one-bedroom apartment, clothes are neatly folded on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and there are clean and passable walkways.

The Standard visited Yan’s unit and one inhabited by another woman facing eviction, who would provide only her last name, Ly. Both have lived in the building for decades, and their one-bedroom units are full of belongings. But the apartments are clean and easy to traverse, with nothing preventing entry or exit. There were no piles of garbage or debris.

Daniel Bornstein, an attorney representing Nabob Hill in the eviction proceedings, provided The Standard with pictures of Ly’s apartment taken in 2025. The images show a messy apartment with paper debris and pill bottles littering the living room floor and piles of garbage around the kitchen. Bornstein wrote in an email that the garbage was “an invitation to pests” and that the bedroom window leading to a fire escape was inaccessible.

Nevertheless, clear walking paths through the mess still exist and would appear to provide the apartment easy paths for entrance and exit.

The inspections of Mak’s apartment have continued. Mak claims that the family has thrown away what they can and tried to better organize their belongings, but she hasn’t received confirmation that this has satisfied the owners.

“I feel like no matter what I do, when I try to cooperate, I try to work with the landlord, there‘s no communication,” Mak said. “I feel so exhausted and frustrated. I think they’re doing it on purpose.”

“The owners are confident that these matters will be resolved properly and lawfully, based upon their faith in the judicial process,” Bornstein said in a statement. “At every stage, the owners have endeavored to act in full compliance with the law and have extended numerous courtesy notices to the tenants in an effort to address these issues amicably before pursuing further action.”

The statement disputes the claim that Cantonese language services aren’t provided and says management employees are fluent in the language, and interpreters are also available. He claims that many of the issues cited in the eviction notices have been resolved and that the notices were used to pressure tenants into remedying unsafe clutter. 

“The owners are pursuing these matters with the expectation that a resolution with the tenants will be fair, just, and equitable, considering the allegations of each particular matter,” Bornstein said.

Ly, a 70-year-old who has lived at 1120 Jackson for 37 years, refers to her one-bedroom apartment as “my palace.” She loves the building. When packages are left at the entrance, neighbors bring them to her door. She brought flowers to the previous resident manager. “ I never felt unsafe or insecure, because every time when I travel, I know that if something happens, someone will call me,” Ly said.

When she received an eviction notice March 10, she felt more annoyed than scared. “Because the notice said that ‘you’re causing nuisance to others,’ my first reaction was, ‘I’ve been here almost 40 years. No one has ever complained about me.’  I wasn’t that concerned, because I felt that we have very strong tenant protection laws here in the city.” Ly was already irked because the new owners had increased her rent by 39%, from $787.23 to $1093.23 per month.

But in late April, when Beam Properties refused to accept Ly’s rent payment, her feelings changed. “I got very scared, because the idea of me being a homeless person all of a sudden became very real to me.”

Especially unsettling to Ly has been the nature of the nuisance complaint. If the eviction process proceeds, a judge will determine whether she has too much stuff or arranges her possessions in her apartment correctly. “ It’s totally out of my control,” Ly said. “There is nothing I can do. It is so subjective.”

The legal process for evictions is largely dictated by landlords. They issue eviction notices, decide when and if to file unlawful detainer claims in court, and exercise great power in determining the speed of proceedings. Nabob Hill has filed an unlawful detainer claim against Mak and could begin formal legal proceedings against Ly, Yan, and the others who’ve received eviction notices next week, next month, or never. Shelby says the Asian Law Caucus will vigorously defend the tenants of 1120 Jackson. In the interim, the only thing tenants can do is wait and worry. 

“This is not my story,” Ly said. “This is not my neighbor‘s story. This is the story of renters in San Francisco and seniors in San Francisco.”