Plastic bags hang on nails in the living room, next to a rack of clothes and a double bunk bed. Legos are strewn over the floor of the 10-foot by 6-foot bedroom, which everyone goes through to get to the only bathroom.This is where Ming and Wai Ming “Jason” Luk and their two sons, ages 8 and 1 1/2, live—a one-bedroom apartment that makes up only a small part of the Noe Valley building that the couple bought for $335,000 in October 1997.

“When we bought the house we planned to increase the space for the family. We didn’t intend for four people to live in one bedroom,” said Jason Luk, speaking in Cantonese through a translator.

The Luks last month convinced a jury to allow them to evict their two tenants—Wilfredo and Carmen Mendoza and Marta Mendoza (who is unrelated to the couple). But on Monday, San Francisco Superior Court judge Dorothy Von Beroldingen effectively overturned that verdict when she ordered a new trial. While she issued no comment, the judge’s move came after Tenderloin Housing Clinic advocates had implied that the Luks’ request might be linked to complaints of substandard conditions.

“Our lawyer charges $200 an hour. I can’t afford it,” said Jason Luk, who has been paying lawyers since he began eviction proceedings 18 months ago. “The Tenderloin Housing Clinic has a lot of money.”

That group, which is representing both Mendoza families for free, sees the case as a microcosm of a problem they have worked against for years—the squeezing out of longtime residents by landlords with more money. For more than two years, it has pushed to tighten owner-move-in restrictions—with notable success. In November, city voters approved a ban on owner move-in evictions of elderly and disabled tenants, along with other restrictions, and this year, in response to a soaring number of Ellis Act evictions, the city began requiring that all owners get the Planning Commission’s permission before evicting tenants under that law to move in themselves.

None of that, though, supersedes the 1986 Ellis Act, said the Luks’ lawyer, Alex Weyand. “If you own a house, you don’t have to rent out the backyard, or rent out a room. The state of California says you don’t have to rent it out.”

The Luks, he said, “bought property understanding that they could live in the entire upstairs. At every step of the way the THC [Tenderloin Housing Clinic] has been trying to stop them. This brings up broad questions how the non-profit THC is proceeding against this couple just trying to make a home.”

But the tenant-rights group sees the Luks as the latest manifestation of the Ellis Act’s harm to tenants, especially in North Beach and the Mission. “There were no Ellis cases last year at this time, none before September, and now I have five cases,” said the lawyer for both Mendozas, THC attorney Raquel Fox.

“Ellis says if you don’t want to be a landlord, you don’t have to. But it doesn’t allow a landlord [to merge units] if he wants to live in six units,” Fox said.

Some 20 people showed up Tuesday night for a rally that the Tenderloin Housing Clinic sponsored in front of the Luks’ yet-unnamed laundry on 23rd Street. For about 20 minutes, they chanted, “Evictions gotta go,” and marched with bright orange-and-brown signs that called for the Luks to let the tenants stay.

Said protester Paul Nixon, a ESL teacher at City College: “Anyone of moderate income who lives in this neighborhood and is evicted will not be able to live anywhere near this neighborhood.”

Neighbor after neighbor spoke highly of the two tenant families. “I don’t want them evicted,” said Tamara Patri, who owns a building next to the Luks’ laundry. “I want them as neighbors—they are a real asset to the community.”

Bob Frank, an electrician who has lived nearby for eight years, said many families have left Noe Valley, driven out by high rents. He misses the children who used to play on the street, and he misses the sense of community he said his neighborhood once had.

“The families, in particular the Latino families, watched out for each other. Now that they’ve started to move out, people don’t know each other. They tend not to come out of their houses.”

But Weyand said the jury that heard both sides empathized most with the Luks’ dream to own their own home—a dream shared by many other Asian American small landlords. Given that many homes in the city have rental units, either legal or illegal, their numbers of such owners likely runs into tens of thousands. A poll by the Chinese American Voter Education Committee last year found that 56 percent of Chinese Americans owned their homes, versus only about a third of the city’s residents as a whole. And of the 10 most common buyer surnames in the California Realtors Association February 1999 economic profile, nine were Chinese.

“Whether they are born elsewhere or in the United States, they dream of a better life,” Weyand said. “It’s something the jury really understood and appreciated.”

Fox, though, said the jury’s young and prosperous makeup may have swayed it against her clients. “They were all Caucasians, except one Hispanic. The ones against us were young tenants in their 20s who had lived in San Francisco less than two years.”

Weyand retorts that Fox may have her own biases, alleging that she mimicked Jason Luk’s accent and halting English in front of the jury and had pointed out that he was in his mid–30s and had arrived from Hong Kong about nine years ago to run a dry-cleaning business. “I was offended by that and took exception to that on the record,” he said.

Fox denied the characterization. “He’s trying to make this a racial issue. I have nothing against Chinese people,” said Fox, who noted that her daughter is applying to a Chinese American school.

“This is an unfortunate struggle between property rights and tenants’ rights. It’s a sad situation where my clients have lived in their homes for many many years, Luk wanted to make a profit, and he bought in a rent control jurisdiction.”

The building itself sold at a bargain price, she said, only because of the rent-controlled units it contained. “This building generates low income, and the selling price reflected it,” said the attorney, who estimated that vacant buildings like the Luks’ would have gone for $600,000 or more that year.

If upstairs tenant Wilfredo Mendoza “were paying $2,440 vs $244 ... we wouldn’t be here,” Fox said.

Though his rent and that of downstairs tenant Marta Mendoza together amount to less than a fourth of the Luks’ $2,400 monthly mortgage payments, the Luks insist that money is not the issue. “Even if they pay $20,000, it doesn’t matter to me; we still don’t have enough room for our family,” said Ming Luk.

“We bought the house for the whole family. Family comes first, this is not for profit,” said her husband. Pointing to his older son playing with blocks on the crowded floor, he said, “How can we live here with my son growing up?”

When they bought the house, said Ming Luk, their broker told them they could easily convert the two upstairs units into a single-family home. “I trusted her, otherwise, I wouldn’t have bought it.”

Jason Luk said that right after he bought the building, he told his lawyer to convey to Wilfredo Mendoza that he would need to leave because the Luks needed space for their family. “When we bought the building, the first day, we wanted to evict them,” said Ming Luk.

The Luks didn’t need the space downstairs, but they soon found themselves contending with a long list of tenant complaints. Marta Mendoza had filed eight complaints of substandard housing with the city in 1994 and two more this year and Housing Inspector Ivan Sakany, who had inspected the building before the Luks bought it, said its previous owner had invested little in improvements to the building over the 23 years that he owned it. When the building changed hands, he said, some rooms didn’t have required heating.

Soon, the Luks decided that “Ellising” their building would be their best option. Still, neither Marta Mendoza, who pays $300 for her two-bedroom apartment, nor Wilfredo and Carmen Mendoza, who pay $244, wanted to move, given that they had no chance of finding a similar deal in Noe Valley.

“All my relatives were raised in the area, and I went to school up that block,” said Marvin Mendoza. He said his parents, Wilfredo and Carmen, had lived in their unit for nearly 30 years. “Where are you going to find a place for 55-year-olds? You can’t make them start all over.”

Marvin Mendoza, who now lives nearby in the neighborhood with his own children, said that he believes “a hundred percent” that Jason Luk and his family don’t really intend to live there for good. “He just wants to tear down and build brand-new condos,” the son said. “He owns a couple of dry cleaning stores. He has nice cars. He owns a BMW.

“If he owns that many businesses, he’s a businessman. He can just fix the place up and charge a nice price for condos.”

Mendoza said the upstairs unit has had fewer problems than the downstairs one because of the work his father had put into maintenance, including fixing the roof, painting the hallways, and installing new kitchen cabinets and tiles. “You pay low rent for 30 years, it’s not your own place but you try to fix it nice because you have families coming over,” he said. “My parents have the best unit.”

Until Jason Luk came along, Mendoza said, “there were never any problems. He said, ‘I’m the new guy; it’s my way or the highway.”

Fox said that a month after the Luks bought the building, Jason Luk began shutting off gas, electricity and water. In June 1998, Wilfredo and Carmen Mendoza filed suit for wrongful eviction, and five months later, the Luks invoked the Ellis Act.

Both Mendoza households fought the eviction, claiming that Jason Luk was kicking everyone out because Marta Mendoza had complained.

“He is a slum landlord,” Fox said. “The place is horrible.”

In January, Sarkany found multiple violations of the city’s housing code, including cracked paint, damaged floor covering, damaged windows in the apartment downstairs. The Luks made the repairs within 30 days, he said. Two weeks ago, after Marta Mendoza filed another complaint, he found evidence of rodents, lack of heat in the living room and roof leaks.

Yet while the building had problems, “it wasn’t totally run-down,” Sarkany said. Referring to the rodent finding, he said, “Rats are in the community and not specific to that apartment. It wasn’t an infestation, just one or two.”

The Luks have until April 21 to bring the building up to code. “He told me if I could give him any guidance or suggestion as far as to how to better the apartment, he would cooperate to the full extent,” Sarkany said. “He promised that to me personally.”

But Marvin Mendoza said the Luks had been far less courteous and cooperative to his parents. Jason Luk, he said, had embarked on a campaign of harassment against them over the past year, including leaving garbage in the halls and cutting utilities “more than a dozen times. One week would be electric, the next would be water.”

The Luks, he said, have deliberately shut off utilities to his parents’ apartment but not their own. “My mom can’t cook something to eat, my daughter can’t watch TV,” said Mendoza, who frequently leaves his daughter at his parents’ apartment. “If you go to my mom’s apartment, you can see that the toilet has no water pressure, but he has washers and dryers downstairs.”

When Mendoza tried to intervene on behalf of his parents, who speak mostly Spanish, Luk “would shut the door on my face and say forget it. He was basically trying to get my mom frustrated, mentally harassing her so she would give up.”

Jason Luk said electricity and gas service had been disrupted only once each, when he was remodeling the dry-cleaning business. Both deny any harassment. Said Ming Luk: “We follow all the laws, step by step. There is no other way. This is the last resort.”

Still, trying to follow the rules hasn’t kept them from trouble. As Ming Luk put it: “This is the first time we bought a house and the last time—it’s been a big experience.”

Her advice: “Don’t buy a house in San Francisco.”