Tenants Win $3.5M From San Francisco's 'Cruelest Landlord'
San Francisco is full of horrific landlord stories. There was the eviction of 100-year-old Iris Canada from her home of more than 50 years. There’s the nasty building owner at Haight and Fillmore who continually terrorizes his tenants. But the two above barely hold a candle to Anne Kihagi, who San Francisco Magazine dubbed the city’s “cruelest landlord” in a lengthy exposé this week. And now, Kihagi is being forced to pay for her crimes.
Kihagi and her sister Christina Mwangi are a bit of a mystery. They showed up in San Francisco in 2013, and quickly bought ten buildings worth more than $25 million, with 50 rent-controlled dwellers.
Immediately, tensions between the new landlord and her residents began to rise. She allegedly entered tenants’ apartments without the legally required heads up, locked them out of backyards, failed to pay water bills, and even publicly accused a 73-year-old tenant of running a sex hotline out of her home. Her offenses were ruthless and classist — she would give keys to a garbage area to market-rate tenants, but not rent-controlled ones, for example — and simply cruel; one building’s hot water heater hadn’t worked in years, because she refused to repair it.
But karma — and the legal system — appears to have come for Kihagi, her sister and their company Zoriall LLC. A lawsuit filed by the city attorney’s office has resulted in a 163-page ruling and $2.7 million in government penalties for more than 1,612 violations. As an added kicker, all pending evictions from January of this year were voided.
Read more: http://www.sfweekly.com/news/tenants-win-3-5m-from-s-f-s-cruelest-landlord/
