What you are saying, is after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization? Where, exactly? I mean, she went to one town, who knows where the other 5/10/50 people went.
That kind of argument comes from a very privileged position of a person who hasn't been gentrified out of their neighborhood.
This is a direct result of greed; not capitalism or democracy (I mean, we aren't even a democracy, but a representative republic).
No. By then it's obviously too late. You have to act before laws are passed that drive your constituency out of town. But there are a lot of places where this has happened and renters have a lot of rights. And, BTW, the city of San Francisco is one of them. I am not a landlord, but I am told that it is nearly impossible to evict someone in SF.
Because of this, I don't think local governments should have control over zoning. The impacts are at least state wide so they should be regulated at the state or national level.
[UPDATE] Let me clarify: I can see how you could object to various aspects of our political system. I myself am active in trying to tackle the problem of income inequality and getting Citizens United repealed. But the housing problems in the SFBA are just symptoms of this much larger overlying problem. You can object to those, and I'll be right beside you. What I'm talking about is focusing on the high cost of housing in the SFBA in isolation as if it's a standalone problem that has a simple and obvious solution that the Powers That Be are just too dim to see or too corrupt to implement. That is not the case.