This is terrible. Sometimes you just want to smack around these stupid nursing home owners. People like this give them all a bad name.

A legal loophole is allowing a Menlo Park nursing home to evict dozens of aging and ill residents by nearly doubling the monthly rent.

Sharon Heights Care and Rehab, a certified skilled nursing facility located at 1185 Monte Rosa Drive in Menlo Park, sent eviction notices to 36 long-term residents on Sept. 28. The 60-day eviction notice violated state law requiring nursing homes to report transfers of 10 or more people at a time and caught the attention of patient advocates.

Days later the eviction was rescinded only to be replaced with a notice that daily rates were doubling, requiring residents to pay between $127,750 to $164,250 a year. The sudden hike is legal and forcing many aging and ill residents to find new homes by Dec. 1.

“What they’ve done here — because they don’t have legal grounds to get rid of them — they’ve raised the rates to high and unaffordable that they are forcing residents to move,” said Michael Connors, spokesman for the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

On Sept. 28, patients received a 60-day eviction notice. However, the law requires nursing homes to notify the state when they are asking more than 10 patients to transfer facilities.

The letter raised eyebrows with the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, which filed a formal complaint Oct. 4. Three days later, Sharon Heights Administrator Leslee Fennell sent a letter to patients rescinding the eviction. On Nov. 1, Fennell sent another letter to residents notifying them of a rate increase effective Dec. 1.

The rates, effective Dec. 1, will range from $350 to $450 a day. For one 90-year-old resident with Alzheimer’s disease, the rate increase went from $166 to $350 a day to share a three-bed room, said Connors.

Sharon Heights claims the failure to notify the proper authorities about the eviction was a simple oversight and the rate hike is a way to cover its rising expenses.

“The plan had all the components,” Fennell said. “If I knew [about the reporting requirement], I would have followed the letter of the law.”

Patient advocates aren’t buying it and filed two complaints with the Department of Health Services. By not complying, Sharon Heights is putting patients’ health in serious danger, said Tippy Irwin, director of ombudsman services of San Mateo County. Between 10 and 15 percent of patients don’t survive facility transfers — something commonly known as “transfer trauma,” Irwin said.

“It’s illegal, they can’t evict someone for that reason and it only took them two minutes to turn around and raise the rates,” Irwin said.

Sharon Heights was also recently denied MediCal payments for not complying with state law, Irwin said.