CitiApartments: Scourge of The Loin
By John Coetzee
When James walked home one evening in 2004, he wasn't expecting anything unusual. As he neared the entrance of his apartment building, however, he saw a young woman being dragged out by two large Samoan men in Hugo Boss business suits. The woman was a frequent visitor to his neighbor and recognizing him, called out, "JAMES! THEY BROKE MY ARM!" Alarmed, James immediately called the police while the two men threatened him and demanded he put his cell phone away.
No, this isnt the opening scene of a made for TV movie. The two men were "The Wilson Brothers"-notorious CitiApartments employees. Apparently, they'd confronted the woman in the hallway while she was waiting for her friend, and when they discovered she was not a resident, they performed a "citizen's arrest." Placing plastic handcuffs on her wrists, they physically and violently removed her from the building. "We know she was visiting you!" they threatened James. "We can evict you for having unauthorized guests!"
Unfortunately, stories like this are not uncommon. The SF Chronicle, the SF Bay Guardian, and Yelp.com reveal similar tales of tenant abuse. Stories of harassment or threats --even violence, are common occurrences at the hands of CitiApartments (a.k.a., Skyline Realty).
Imagine my surprise then when, as I was perusing ads on Craigslist for a cheap studio in the Tenderloin, I noticed that CitiApartments ads were touting their award for "Best Property Management Company of 2007" from the San Francisco Apartment Association.
What?!
I didn't know much about CitiApartments at the time, but this didn't fit with my conception. In an effort to learn more, I looked up the SFAA website and discovered they're an association of San Francisco landlords. Not only are they geared entirely toward the interests and concerns of property owners, but their own website even includes an article about CitiApartments being sued for racketeering by local attorney Drexel Bradshaw.1
Also, in case you missed it, in 2006 CitiApartments won "Best Change in SF since 2005" in the SF Weekly. Unclear about what this category even meant, I contacted the SF Weekly, but predictably they could provide no further information, stating only that the reader's choice awards are based purely on votes. I suspect that CitiApartments mobilized their employees to vote, selecting a vague category thus engendering minimal competition.
Recently, City Hall hearings were organized for the express purpose of allowing CitiApartments tenants (and ex-tenants) to air their grievancesPerhaps not surprisingly, a number of people showed up wearing t-shirts exclaiming, "I support CitiApartments!" and cheered every time the CitiApartments attorney made a statement. Legitimate tenants were not shy about expressing their belief (during the hearing) that the t-shirt clad crowd was on the CitiApartments payroll. A woman even claimed that before the hearing, a man wearing a t-shirt had stopped her to ask, "Is this where I go to get paid?"
So why does CitiApartments find it necessary to engage in such baldfaced deception? When you start talking to current and former tenants, you quickly find out. The stories below are representative of typical tenant harassment claims. False names have been used for their protection..........
James moved into the Blackstone Apartments, 81 9th Street, in 1999. A six story building with ten units on each floor, it had studios for $750 at a time when the dot-commers were driving up rent elsewhere. CitiApartments owned the building, but things were normal enough at first, and being new to the city, he was unaware of their reputation.
Sometime in 2002, however, James experienced the first "security sweep." One evening when James was relaxing at home, he heard barking in the hall, and when he opened his door to check what was going on, he saw two large men patrolling the hall with baseball bats and a rottweiler. Noticing James watching them, one of the men yelled, "GET INSIDE!" and not wanting to cause trouble, he complied. They came back three nights in a row and then disappeared.
Things were quiet after that until 2004 when the second "security sweep" took place. A young man had moved in to the building and had friends over at odd hours (Not that this was odd. He had a normal young man's social life). The building manager, however, contacted his superiors, thus leading to the incident at the beginning of this article
The next day James returned home to find that the two men ("The Wilson Brothers") and a third man had set up a laptop and printer on a table in the front lobby. As people entered the building, they demanded identification. Non-residents had their ID's scanned and photographs taken, and a background check was performed. If they had any sort of criminal record, they were immediately escorted from the building, and a poster with their photo and the word BANNED was posted in the lobby. The lobby was soon entirely covered with such posters. James, upon arriving, was asked to stand aside and wait until they had a chance to speak to him. While waiting, he grew frustrated and yelled, "Hey, you don't have to show these guys your ID's!" to some folks who had just entered. In response, the third man at the table turned to James and angrily insisted that the woman from the night before had been visiting James, demanding to see James in his office the next day. "Or what?" James asked. "Or we start the eviction without you!" the man replied. As he would later learn, this was the famous Andrew Hawkins.
Hawkins is in charge of "tenant relations" and was mentioned frequently by the tenants I spoke with. His name also crops up in the newspaper articles and Yelp reviews. He is a figure who engenders much anger and fear among CitiApartments tenants and seems to like it that way. About 50 years old and 5'8", Hawkins is squat looking, with a spiky flat-top haircut, and resembles an ex-marine. He appears to be wealthy, always wearing expensive suits, fancy watches, and drives an assortment of luxury cars. He enjoys intimidating tenants by creating the impression that he is involved with organized crime and is perhaps capable of violence. The rottweiler was his dog.
Hand-written note taped up in CitiApartments building lobby on O'Farrell Street in the Spring of 2006. At first believed to be the deranged ramblings of a mentally unstable tenant, reports of this kind are common. The note reads, "To Whom it May Concern: (Training for Homeland Security?) If this apartment complex is needed for training, please call the manager to get the O.K. as per the S.F.P.D. We support out homeland security forces! Please be respectful of the tennants! [sic]"
James' meeting with Hawkins took place at the Skyline office at Church and Market. The building was once a bank, and the meeting took place in the basement, in a former vault, the door of which was closed after James' arrival. During their conversation, Hawkins was loud and threatening, producing a file and waving it around, saying things like: "You've accumulated a lot in this file in the past two days- You took one of our posters down! That's an infraction! That is going down on your eviction!" And then most startlingly, he claimed: "I can enter your apartment and tear it apart if I want to! The Patriot Act gives me the right! I will do whatever it takes to secure the building!" James tried hard to take this all as a joke, to smile and be smug, but in the end, Hawkins had him nervous.
Because of what Hawkins had said about entering his apartment, James decided to get a restraining order, but Hawkins failed to show up for the hearing, leading to its rescheduling. This continued and despite James' many attempts, he was never able to get the restraining order and was never told why.
Meanwhile, the drama at the building intensified. Many long-term residents were being evicted now. Hawkins and his goons had started to photograph not only visitors but people who were merely standing outside for what Hawkins regarded as suspicious lengths of time. "I can tell an addict by the way they look!" he would say. At this point, James' phone was turned off, and perhaps most ominously, there was at least one suspicious death. One night a man who lived on the 5th floor was on the fire escape drinking and fell to his death. Other tenants were aware that there had been a lot of tension between him and Hawkins who viewed him as a troublemaker, and rumors were circulated about whether the man slipped or was thrown. When Hawkins was asked about the incident, he would only say slyly, "Well, accidents happen!" Eventually they tried to pin the death on the man's live-in girlfriend, who was their last remaining obstacle to putting the apartment back on the market at current rates. 2
James' battle eventually came to a rather ignominious end. His toilet broke and he withheld rent in order to get it fixed, but CitiApartments simply used this to do a speedy eviction. He realized he had been "checkmated". Now, with an eviction on his record, he can't rent an apartment anywhere in the city, and has to live in rented rooms, but he is proud he stuck it out as long as he did. When asked why CitiApartments tries so hard to harass people, James' answer was very clear: "They want to get rid of troublemakers and raise the rents to the market rate."
Lynette Shields has lived in the Tenderloin for around 15 years. She was quite happy with the first two landlords she had until about ten years ago when CitiApartments/Skyline bought her building. According to Lynette, things were "immediately different." The building was not clean anymore, and she began getting strange phone calls. At first, a different person called each time, and the calls would start out friendly enough: "How do you like the apartment? Is there anything we can change?" Eventually, however, they would get to the meat of the matter: "Can we pay you to move out?" Lynette would always respond, politely, that no, she was quite happy with the apartment, and that would be that--until the next phone call. At first there were just a few calls a year, but each year there were more, until they were calling every month
And then the calls stopped, all at once, and she began receiving a different sort of call. These new calls were all from the same person, "A.J.," and they seemed to have little to do with the apartment. He would just call up to chat like an old friend checking in. "How is everything? How was your day?" Lynette found it deeply inappropriate, but A.J. called more and more until around Christmas, he called up, singing Christmas carols. Lynette did not find this amusing. In fact, his persistence and off-key tone of voice was frightening to her. Lynette stopped answering her phone and just let all calls go to the answering machine.
Christmas came and went, but the caroling continued! One day the phone rang and Lynette answered it. Of course, it was A.J. again. He did his usual chatty thing, and then began asking about Lynette's neighbors. "Oh, you know that little old lady across the hall from you? What do you think of her?" he would ask. It sounded like A.J. was at his desk, pulling out tenant files and leafing through them. "Oh, and do you know the older man who lives down the hall from you? Well, I see we have a letter here from his psychiatrist! It says: 'Mr. Jones is not competent to make decisions. Please stop asking him if he would like to move out.' Wow! He's crazy! Aren't you worried about having a crazy man living down the hall from you? I mean, there's no telling what he might do! And you, a little old lady all alone in the world! I'd be very worried if I was you. Maybe you should think about moving? You know, I happen to live in another CitiApartments building that is quite nice. You could move in there! Then I could protect you and look after you, what do you think?" Not long after that call, Lynette contacted her lawyer and got a restraining order to prevent A.J., or anyone else at CitiApartments, from calling her with relocation offers anymore.
During this time, Lynette also got to meet Andrew Hawkins. Lynette was contacted by CitiApartments while she was at home with a prolonged illness and was told that it was "very important" that she come down to the main office and meet with him. She protested that she was very ill and didn't think it was good for her to go anywhere, but the caller was insistent and she finally agreed.
She met with him in a glass-walled office in Skyline headquarters where he accused her of being habitually late with rent. Although it was untrue and she protested, he said it could be grounds for eviction and pressured her into signing an opaque legal document that she didn't understand. During the meeting he had a tape recorder, which he would frequently turn off in order to lean closer and tell her something "off the record." His voice and body language also changed rapidly from quite pleasant to very angry, and back again, which Lynette found very troubling. Eventually, she succeeded in getting a restraining order, and she still lives in the building, but screens all her calls and has frequent legal confrontations with the organization.
Why did Lynette succeed where James failed? Why was she able to keep her apartment and successfully obtain restraining orders? Well, there are two simple reasons. The first is that she documented everything about her interactions with CitiApartments, no matter how trivial, and the second is that, unlike James, she has a lawyer. In fact, she has quite a good lawyer. Her lawyer, Drexel Bradshaw, normally represents landlords but took on her cause pro bono because he was personally disgusted with CitiApartments' business tactics.
I spoke with Drexel over the phone, and he said that CitiApartments has a long history of tenant intimidation, often through the use of "inspections." They give tenants the required 24 hours notice and then send security guards with guns and flack jackets to their door. They ring the doorbell but then use their pass key to burst into the apartment before the tenant can answer. It was Drexel who brought the racketeering suit against CitiApartments on behalf of a tenant, a case which was resolved two to three years ago "to the satisfaction of both parties." Due to client-lawyer confidentiality, he was not able to give me more information; however, he did tell me that a recent court decision declared that tenants who sue CitiApartments can no longer recover attorney's fees, making it financially difficult for tenants to fight them. CitiApartments, on the other hand, is flush with cash and maintains a large legal department specifically to handle lawsuits.
I asked Drexel if he thought anything could be done to kick CitiApartments out of our fair city, but he was not optimistic. Local government cannot deny them the right to rent and manage their own property. The Federal Courts could order them to divest themselves of property, but that is highly unlikely. The only real way that we, as tenants, can fight back, is by by boycotting their rental properties and suing them quickly when they engage in harassment. The effect would be to reduce their income and increase their operating costs, but since they still make a LOT of money from their rental properties, it's definitely an uphill battle.
The only other way to fight them is through guerilla warfare. For example, after James got evicted, he learned that in San Francisco, by law, landlords are required to pay you interest each year on your deposit. CitiApartments typically does not do this unless you specifically ask about it. So those goldenrod flyers in the plexiglass boxes that are mounted outside every CitiApartments property? James simply got some goldenrod paper and printed the words: "DOES CITIAPARTMENTS OWE YOU MONEY?" along with a reproduction of the bill that requires interest on deposits. He replaced their flyers at several buildings, and whenever he could gain entrance, he scattered them around the lobby or even taped them to tenant's doors. Kudos to you, James!
BREAKING NEWS: As this article was going to press, we heard of an important local proposition on the November 4th ballot. Proposition M would amend San Francisco's Residential Rent Ordinance to prohibit specific acts of tenant harassment by landlords and provide for enforcement by means of court orders, rent reduction, monetary awards, and criminal penalties. It is written with systematic offenders like CitiApartments in mind and has been endorsed by Supervisors Ammiano, Daly, Maxwell, McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, Peskin, and Sandoval, as well as by the SF Tenants Union, the SF Democratic Party, and many others. If you rent in San Francisco, go to the polls on November 4th and vote YES on Prop M!
1Apparently, "racketeering" charges are usually reserved for organized crime. I suspect the award was really a coordinated effort by SFAA and Citiapartments to whitewash their sullied image.
2 James clarified that he doesn't believe Hawkins committed murder, but he thinks Hawkins intentionally created uncertainty about the matter because it pleases him to have tenants think he might be capable of such things.
ARE YOU BEING HARASSED BY CITIAPARTMENTS?
Don't despair! Help is available. Check out the following resources.
www.citistop.org
(A website devoted to fighting CitiApartments and protecting their tenants.)
citistop.live.radicaldesigns.org
(ANOTHER website devoted to fightingCitiApartments.)
SF Tenants Union, 558 Capp Street
(Counseling hours online at www.sftu.org or 415-282-6622)
Housing Rights Committee, 427 So. Van Ness Ave. 415-487-9203
Drexel Bradshaw, the attorney described above, offers free consultations.
www.bradshawassociates.com
Note: I contacted CitiApartments multiple times to request an interview for this article, but they never responded.
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