It’s another day of reckoning at San Francisco’s eviction court. 

For tenants facing imminent eviction, the Real Property Court hearings held every Tuesday at the civil courthouse at 400 McAllister represents a last-ditch, desperate shot at staying housed. Tenants who successfully plead for mercy from the court’s presiding judge might get one more week in their homes. Those who fail can be forced out less than 24 hours later, when the sheriff’s office conducts its weekly round of evictions starting at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays.

It’s a process that has become achingly routine in San Francisco, where a resurgence of evictions after a pandemic moratorium has reached crisis levels.

Court proceedings on May 5 began at 9:30 a.m. Per usual, the judge, Charles F. Haines, remained in his chambers for the initial segment of the hearing. A lawyer for the court called the names of defendants facing eviction and addressed any filings they had submitted prior to that morning. 

But what should have been a straightforward roll call became something much sadder. 

The court’s lawyer called the name of Brian Chiu, a gray-haired man facing eviction. He stood from his seat at the front of the gallery and declared himself present. Like most of the defendants in court that day, Chiu did not have a lawyer. 

After reading the court’s rejection of a request Chiu had filed to dismiss the eviction ruling, the lawyer asked Chiu if he wanted to argue his case in open court. “Yes,” Chiu said. Asked what point in the ruling he planned to contest, Chiu again said simply, “Yes.” 

The court’s lawyer took a deep breath and repeated herself. “Is there any particular part of this you plan to argue …”

“Yes,” Chiu said.

“ …  just all of it?” the lawyer finished.

“Yes,” Chiu said again.

This continued for more than a minute before the lawyer showed mercy on Chiu’s tenuous grasp of spoken English. “Never mind. I’ll just tell the judge you’re contesting his ruling.” 

The next defendant, William McDonagh, seemed equally out of his depth. Asked if he wished to contest a tentative ruling in his case, McDonagh replied, “I’m here on special visitation.”

“I don’t know what that means, sir,” the court’s lawyer said. “The court has issued a tentative ruling. Are you contesting the ruling?”

“I’m here on special visitation,” McDonagh said again, seemingly unsure that even he knew what he meant.

“OK, I’m going to have to take that as a no,” the lawyer said.

Rashawn Gonzalez, another lawyerless defendant facing eviction, was more explicit in communicating her lack of comprehension. When told that her filing required a hearing, Gonzalez said, “I don’t know what that means.” The court’s lawyer explained that Gonzalez would have to appear before the judge later that morning to plead her case. “He needs to talk to you,” the court’s lawyer said. “OK?”

“No, it’s not OK,” Gonzalez responded. “ I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have proper counsel.  I’m gonna break. I have PTSD and anxiety. And to put me through this stress and to make me feel like I’m gonna go homeless this very second is unacceptable. … I have to go home.”

Gonzalez stormed out of the courtroom. But sensing that she might not have a home for much longer, she was soon back in her seat, waiting for the next step in a process she did not understand.

Most Tuesdays, the Real Property Court’s gallery, which seats dozens, is so full that the court uses the jury box for overflow. The crowd does not reflect the city’s demographics. Black people, people with disabilities, and the elderly are overrepresented among those facing imminent eviction. Of 14 tenants present to fight their evictions May 5, six were Black, six had disabilities, and seven were senior citizens.

The crowded gallery reflects San Francisco’s skyrocketing eviction crisis. Despite the sheriff’s office reporting that lockouts have reached a decade high, those numbers aren’t representative of the total. They don’t include instances in which tenants move out prior to the eviction date, meaning the sheriff isn’t called to perform a lockout. According to the Eviction Defense Collaborative, the nonprofit that leads the city’s Tenant Right to Counsel Program, which grants legal assistance, the number of eviction notices filed in civil court jumped by more than 1,000 from 2024 to 2025.

“ We’re at a new peak,” said Jacqueline Patton, an eviction defense attorney who has worked at the EDC for 10 years. She offered two theories as to why evictions have skyrocketed: a delayed reaction to the end of COVID-related protections and an increase in rental prices attributed to the AI boom. 

Whatever the reason, lawyers from four organizations that provide tenants with free legal counsel told The Standard that the $17 million EDC program is buckling under pressure as city funding has stayed flat since 2021, even while the number of evictions has more than tripled.

The program, born of 2018’s voter-approved No Evictions Without Representation Act, doesn’t provide legal assistance to those tenants who lose their cases simply because they didn’t respond to an initial notice to evict within 10 days, so-called “default evictions.”

At Real Property Court, most of the tenants facing imminent eviction had suffered default eviction rulings. In other words, the court had ordered their eviction without giving them the chance to engage a lawyer or argue their cases. 

Without legal help, the man would’ve been evicted the week prior. But he’d been lucky and received legal help from Andres Salerno, a law fellow with EDC who was admitted to the bar seven months ago. While working at North Beach Citizens, a social services nonprofit, prior to attending law school, Salerno had helped the man secure permanent supportive housing, escaping homelessness. The previous week, Salerno had gotten him a “stay of execution,” in which the court allowed the man to stay in his home for another week while Salerno tried to have the initial ruling thrown out.

Skinny and with a baby face that belied his 28 years of age, Salerno tried to sound upbeat, but his client’s case wasn’t looking good. Motions to vacate eviction rulings are rarely granted. If he couldn’t get the judge to vacate, the client could be evicted the following day or within a couple of weeks. Salerno had also asked for another stay of execution and planned, as a last resort, to appeal to the opposing counsel’s sense of humanity to keep his client housed.

“The landlord attorney is hopefully a little more reasonable with me, and we’re able to reach some sort of agreement,” Salerno told The Standard. “But that’s totally up to them.”

The morning progressed slowly, the tension of tenants learning their fates over several slow and boring hours punctuated by moments of harrowing drama. Gonzalez, the woman who’d threatened to go home due to her anxiety, paced the hallway outside the courtroom, periodically poking her head in to see if it was time to plead her case. In the interim, she reminded onlookers that the San Francisco woman who in October murdered her family and then committed suicide did so perhaps because financial ruin endangered her housing. 

“People kill themselves because of what happens in this room,” Gonzalez said repeatedly. 

Shortly after 11 a.m., the court’s lawyer began calling tenants. For two hours, one by one, tenants rose from their seats in the gallery and stood before a podium facing the well of the court.

Cael Brown, a 33-year-old who lived at an apartment complex in the Fillmore, dejectedly buried his chin in his palm as he addressed the court. Moments earlier, in the hallway outside, he had been more animated, explaining that last year he’d hurt his spine while working as a special education para-professional at Rosa Parks Elementary School. His workers compensation hadn’t come through in time, so he’d missed a few rent payments. When he started working again, his landlord refused to accept the back rent.

But before the court, he didn’t mention any of that.  “There’s 20 days left of the school year,” Brown said. “I’m just trying to make it to the end of the school year with my kids. I am currently looking for a new place to stay. It’s just very hard in this economy.”

Another tenant, Nicolas Woodward, asked the court to consider his value as a community member. A young white man wearing a hat embroidered with two colorful skulls, Woodward told the court that he often helped elderly neighbors restore their power by managing his building’s electrical panel. In a barely audible, boyish voice, he said he’d addressed the nuisance complaints that had led to his eviction notice. 

“ I got my dog neutered,” Woodward said. “I put a muzzle on her when she goes outside. I’ve been there for five years, and I feel like I’ve been a pretty good tenant.”

Eventually, Haines emerged from his chambers to hear testimony in a few of the cases. For this part of the proceedings, defendants entered the well of the court and sat at a long table a few feet from their landlord’s attorneys, both facing the judge. This part of the day exhibited the adversarial nature of eviction cases and showed how overmatched lawyerless tenants are as they face their landlord’s attorneys in open court.

A tenant named Phil Naranjo argued that he’d never been properly served with his eviction notice and so had never responded, then lost his case by default. The attorney for his landlord had brought along a process server who claimed he’d properly informed Naranjo of the notice to evict. When it was Naranjo’s turn to cross-examine, he asked how the process server could’ve entered the building to access the door of Naranjo’s apartment.

“The landlord provides a key,” the process server replied.

Naranjo didn’t have any follow-up questions, and moments later, the judge rendered a verdict. He denied Naranjo’s motion to vacate the eviction. 

“Who’s next?” Haines asked. Naranjo didn’t budge from his seat, a stunned look on his face. “Your motion to vacate is denied,” the judge repeated, annoyance creeping into his voice. “We need to get to the next case.”

Naranjo stood up and made his way toward the courtroom exit. He’d been homeless before, years ago, but at least back then he’d had a car to sleep in. Now he had no car and didn’t know where he’d sleep once he was kicked out of his apartment. 

As he was leaving the courtroom, an EDC attorney told him he still had a chance to win a stay of execution and remain in his apartment for a week. The attorney gave Naranjo a granola bar and told him to stay put until the hearing was over.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, the young attorney Salerno sat on a bench, his hands lightly shaking. The judge had denied the motion to vacate his client’s eviction. He’d lost.

“Unlawful detainers” — the legal term for forced evictions — “have an expedited timeline compared to other court proceedings,” he said. “It’s the most vulnerable population of formerly homeless individuals who get a notice on their door, and then they have to show up within 10 days or they lose on a technicality.”

The reasons given for his client’s eviction were an unauthorized dog and a messy room. Salerno claimed that both issues had been remedied. “In the time since this case happened, there was a deep clean of his room, and the dog was given to SPCA and then adopted out. … But now he’s evicted.”

As he spoke, one of his colleagues from EDC approached and, without saying a word, gave Salerno a hug.

At the same time tenants were in court fighting to keep their homes, Mayor Daniel Lurie was celebrating the success of his administration’s homeless housing policy. On Tuesday morning, Lurie held a press conference to crow that the city had recorded its fewest unsheltered residents in 15 years, according to preliminary data from  the federally mandated Point in Time Count in January. 

“Today, San Franciscans feel like our city is on the right track again,” Lurie said.

But as the number of evictions has spiked, so too has the risk of the city backsliding in its efforts to staunch homelessness. In fact, the mayor’s “boom loop” cheerleading amid a period of extreme unaffordability could have the unintended consequence of inducing further rental spikes, which spur even greater numbers of evictions. 

After the last tenant had finished pleading at the podium, the court’s lawyer went into the judge’s chambers to confer on the day’s decisions. The proceedings had stretched past 1 p.m., an abnormally long session. An elderly defendant clutched his cane and complained loudly, “What is the judge doing back there? Making coffee?”

Finally, at 1:30, the court’s lawyer emerged from chambers and began to read out the judge’s rulings. She read deliberately, without emotion.

Brown’s request for a stay of execution was granted. He’d get another week in his home. Sitting in the gallery, Brown wept. 

Naranjo’s stay was also granted — the EDC attorney’s last-second intervention apparently worked. 

Representatives of the Bar Association rounded up those who received stays to guide them downstairs, where they would pay the court in advance for a week of rent.

Gonzalez’s stay was not granted. When her judgment was announced, she rushed out of the courtroom without saying a word. 

Woodward also had his request denied. He stood and walked into the hallway, where he crumpled on a bench and cried.

“I was homeless for 12 years,” he said. “It took me two years to get this place.”

He didn’t know where he would end up after the sheriff locked him out the next morning. He considered staying with his mom, then second-guessed the idea because, he claimed, “she’s on drugs.”

“I don’t want to be alive,” he said. “I’m scared something bad is going to happen. I almost hope that it does.”