Eviction Specialist
Want to get rid of some tenants? Call Andrew Zacks

One cloudy afternoon in December, about a dozen people prepared for a showdown in front of 511 Elizabeth Street in Noe Valley. Under the watchful eyes of TV cameras, reporters, photographers, and rent-a-cops, the protesters formed a picket line on the sidewalk, waved placards denouncing Ellis Act evictions, and ardently chanted slogans like "Step back, it’s a Zacks attack."

It took no more than five minutes for the object of their rage to confront them. Andrew Zacks, holding a video camera to his face, swung open the front door of his house, flew down the stairs to the sidewalk, and charged toward Randy Shaw, one of the city’s leading low-income housing advocates. For a few seconds the two were face-to-face, or face-to-lens; the shouting match that followed seemed like a perfect portrait of San Francisco’s landlord-tenant war.

But Zacks, whom the marchers described as their archenemy, is not a landlord. He’s a lawyer. For the past two years he has defended the right of property owners to take their units off the rental market without interference from pesky rent controlled tenants. In October alone, he represented the owners of more than half of the units petitioned for removal from the rental market.

Zacks told us he doesn’t know exactly how many Ellis Act cases he’s handled, but tenant advocates who have spent hours defending clients threatened with Ellis Act evictions say Zacks and his wife, Denise Leadbetter, who is an attorney in his office, have probably represented more than two dozen landlords in such cases. There’s a reason the clients keep coming: Zacks has never lost an Ellis Act lawsuit.

To the lawyers who represent tenants, and to many of the tenant themselves, Zacks is the very emblem of greed.

"He is marketing a way to profit at the expense of the most vulnerable people," said Shaw, who is executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which is defending dozens of tenants threatened with Ellis Act evictions. "It is the worst form of bottom feeding you can find. It is literally speculating the lives of disabled and elderly people."

Zacks charges $350 an hour. At that rate he must have raked in at least hundreds of thousands of dollars from dozens of Ellis Act cases over the past two years.

Zacks says Ellis Act evictions are his specialty, and he makes no apologies. On the day of the protest, minutes after the last activists left the scene, he seemed scarcely ruffled - a far cry from the irascible, abrasive caricature painted by his foes.

"I do what I do ethically and compassionately," he told us, "I offer generous relocation assistance and time for tenants before they move out."

He called the Ellis Act "a valuable tool for my clients, not to the community of San Francisco."

And he denied charges that he actively encourages landlords to use the Ellis Act. "That is false," he said. "I don’t need to solicit business. I have enough business." He blamed the surge in Ellis evictions on tenant activist who push for greater tenant protections. "Landlords are being regulated to the point that they can’t breathe," he said. "They are being forced to go out of business."

Zacks claims to be compassionate - or at least willing to throw tenants a little money as he helps throw them out on the street. But his response last month, when he was confronted by some of the people he’s helped evict, suggests otherwise. When Gianni Incardona, a 69-year old with a monthly income of $400, joined other in berating Zacks for helping his landlord evict him, Zacks shot back, "You are nobody!"

"He came up to me later and apologized, but I will never forget what he said," Incardona told us. "He thinks he’s somebody because for him what is important is to make money."