LGBT activist who conceived the AIDS quilt - one bedroom rent more than doubling to $5,200
Cleve Jones, a famed LGBTQ activist known for conceiving the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and co-founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said he’s been displaced from his Castro home of over a decade after his new landlord more than doubled his rent from $2,393 to $5,200 — an increase that he called “impossible,” according to a March 21 Facebook post that was later reported by the Guardian, the Bay Area Reporter and the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We will be ok and we are grateful for the financial security that will see us through this unpleasant moment,” wrote Jones, who had been living in the unit with his friend and roommate, Brenden Chadwick. “But it is very clear to us how an event like this could be truly catastrophic for so many others.”
Jones, who works as community and political coordinator for Unite Here, the North American Hospitality Workers union, has been a resident of the Castro since he first moved to the city as a 19-year-old in 1973, subsequently befriending Harvey Milk and working in his office while he studied political science at San Francisco State University. Five decades later, he’s moving out of his rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment after the new property owner, Lily Pao Kue, notified him of the increase in a letter on March 18. Jones said the letter stated that she believed he had vacated the property and was entitled to invoke a Costa-Hawkins petition, a California law that allows landlords of rent-controlled units to raise the price of a property to market rate if a tenant has moved out.
“With all the misery in the world today it feels somewhat self-indulgent to post that the building in which I rent an apartment in San Francisco has been acquired by a remarkably aggressive, hostile and greedy new owner,” wrote Jones. “In just a few weeks she's transformed our sweet little one-bedroom home in the Castro into a truly wretched example of how rent-controlled housing units are lost to wealthy investors.”
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/SF-LGBTQ-activist-Cleve-Jones-Castro-rent-doubled-17032088.php
= new reply since forum marked as read
... from the headline, I thought this story would be about how sad this guy's life had become... being thrown out on the streets... sad...
now I see he's going to be okay and turned it into an opportunity to speak about those less fortunate. Bravo, Cleve Jones!
Because he stayed somewhere else during the pandemic?
If he was paying his rent, he didn't move out. 
