SAN FRANCISCO / Tenancies-in-common battle hits courtroom / North Beach owner wants to convert a 6-unit property
This article, sent to me by Nancy Levy, talks about the weird practice of buying buildings as tenants in common, a San Francisco staple. People get together and buy apartment buildings as TCs, instead of doing condo conversions. It can be enormously profitable because they city regulates the purchase price in order to help tenants become owners, but after they buy as TCs they can then sell the building at market rate.

The high-stakes, often cutthroat contest of who buys and who rents homes in one of the world's most competitive real estate markets will play out in a civil trial today in a San Francisco courtroom. The case will determine whether the owners of a rent-controlled North Beach apartment building can evict the 13 tenants who currently live there in order to convert the property into tenancies-in-common for sale and, perhaps one day, lucrative condominiums. But the debate stretches far beyond the six-unit property at 424-434 Francisco St. and strikes at the heart of affordable housing in the city by highlighting the contention surrounding increasingly popular tenancies-in- common, or TICs, in which a group of people collectively own a building but live in separate units and share the mortgage.