I can't help but suspect that this is exactly how this story was designed to read.

They could have chosen between any of the Ellis Act evictions in the dabrownstein figure (~4000 of them), and yet the person they chose to interview

* has health care retirement benefits

* has the ability to go back to Germany and use their social programs

* has personal attention from social workers and relatives finding her options

* has a car

* has a shelter offering a place to stay for the night

* is a member of a social group (female, white, older) that is not the bottom of the charity priority list

* hoards, smokes, intentionally antagonizes her landlord

All of this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."

I think she is likely representative of the kind of undiagnosed mental illness evictees often have.

There are many working-age, highly-paid individuals who rent housing, and are evicted for various reasons, so this may not be the least sympathetic case of eviction.

A sample can be unrepresentative of the mean/median/mode of a distribution without being maximal or minimal.

I intentionally avoided use of the word "unrepresentative", as I was not sure what would qualify as representative of those who have been evicted. I understand that my use of "sympathetic" may be viewed as similarly vague, but I believe that its meaning may be more well-understood.

What point were you trying to make? I assumed you weren't talking about rich assholes getting evicted for unconscionable behavior, since that would be completely irrelevant to the discussion about gentrification (at least, as far as I could tell). Instead, I fuzzily matched your argument to the nearest one that I thought made sense in context ("they could have found an even less sympathetic postergirl for evictees if that was their agenda") and I answered the fuzzily matched argument.

It seems you were talking about rich assholes getting evicted for unconscionable behavior after all. Sorry, but I still don't see what they have to do with gentrification. Explain?

I was addressing your original point that said:

>"this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."

You are correct in your fuzzy logic, I was first making the point that the author could have picked a less sympathetic individual, if the author's intent had been to malign evicted tenants. My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted; criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.

> I was first making the point that the author could have picked a less sympathetic individual, if the author's intent had been to malign evicted tenants.

Your specific example was outside the scope of gentrification, which is what we were all discussing. I accused the article of baiting us into falsely generalizing from Inge's case to conclude (fuzzily) that "evicted poor people only mind being kicked out because they're a bunch of ungrateful slobs that turn down the abundant opportunities everybody heaps upon them because they believe they are entitled to something better". Inge's hypothetical wealthy twin evictee would not have been a better candidate to advance this agenda because smearing her would not have smeared the protesting masses who, by and large, are not as wealthy.

> My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted

I gave you three examples. A fourth example would be to choose an evictee at random and investigate them. It's entirely possible that this is how the story came about and that it's coincidental that she is such an unsympathetic figure. My original post observed that the likelihood of interpretation #4 is lowered by the extreme nature of Inge's case.

> criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.

In a world of incomplete knowledge, finite opportunity cost, and human-resource-intensive processes for rigorous inference it's entirely fair to have a complaint that is not mathematically precise.

I have little sympathy for her, or the new owners (who failed to report the illegal situation to the city immediately after becoming owners of the property).

My main take-away from all of this is that being evicted in SF is quite the feat, right up there with climbing Mount Everest or swimming the English channel. We should commend her for accomplishing something so difficult, despite all the people who told her it could not be done (read: tried to help her).

Why, because they were nice enough to still let her stay there? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's illegal so they should kick her out immediately.

It was illegal, and they made the decision to do it. Anything that follows that gets little sympathy from me; I believe that people should own the consequences of their actions in situations like that. Your illegal tenant refuses to pay you rent, leaving you with no legal recourse? Cry me a river.

And make no bones about it, it wasn't a sense of charity that made them decide to let her stay. They were charging her rent (and in fact, attempted to raise it at least once).

well, actually not really. Even if you were a perfect tenant, there's nothing stopping you from getting evicted short of human kindness.

I feel exactly the same. She even got a $14k resettlement fee! If she didn't want to be evicted out into the cold she should have been a little warmer to her landlord and neighbors instead of being such a nuisance.

I also feel that way, but the fact that I'm having an emotional reaction tells me that the article was probably written to trigger that. So I'm trying to ignore it.

SF's land use policies are horrendous, but anecdotes (in any direction) are not evidence for specific changes.