Three eviction notices filed July 20 on the 1100 block of Kearny Street in North Beach all cite the Ellis Act — the state law that requires a landlord to empty an entire building at once. They account for three of the neighborhood's five eviction notices in the last 90 days.

On the 1100 block of Kearny Street, where the north edge of downtown gives way to North Beach, three eviction notices were filed on the same day — July 20 — and every one of them cites the same cause: Ellis Act withdrawal. In DataSF's eviction dataset the three run consecutively — cases M261602, M261603 and M261604 — each logged to the same block, each in Supervisor District 3, none marked for non-payment, breach, nuisance or owner move-in. Only the Ellis Act box is checked.

That grouping is not incidental. The Ellis Act, a 1985 California law (Government Code Chapter 12.75), lets a landlord evict tenants only by going out of the rental business entirely: to invoke it, an owner must terminate every residential tenancy and withdraw all the units in a building at once. It cannot be used to clear a single apartment. Three notices filed together on one block, on one day, under that one cause, describe one building being emptied in a single filing — three households, at minimum.

The scale stands out against the neighborhood's baseline. North Beach has recorded five eviction notices in the last 90 days, according to DataSF — and three of the five are this one building. The other two, on Vandewater Street and the 300 block of Union, were filed for nuisance and breach: ordinary, one-off disputes. The Kearny filings are a different kind of event.

They are also not the neighborhood's first Ellis cluster. On November 3, 2025, six Ellis Act notices were filed the same day on the 2000 block of Powell Street — cases M252015 through M252020 — another building withdrawn in one stroke. In North Beach, Ellis Act withdrawals arrive in batches, a building at a time.

What happens next is set partly by the statute itself. Under the Ellis Act, San Francisco requires relocation payments to displaced tenants, and it bars the owner from putting the units back on the rental market for years — if they are re-rented within a decade, displaced tenants must be offered first refusal, and within five years, at their old rent. Critics have long argued the law is used to convert rent-controlled buildings into tenancies-in-common or to reset rents to market rate.

The eviction dataset records the cause and the date for the 1100-block filings, not the number of units inside, who lives there, or what the owner intends once it is empty. What it establishes is that, as of July 20, the paperwork to stop renting there for good had been filed.

Walk the block today and there is nothing yet to see: no scaffolding, no notice you would catch from the sidewalk. The record moved first.