USA Herald – In the case of Duncan v. Kihagi (2021) 68 Cal.App.5th 519, 284 Cal. Rptr. 3d 426, a landlord in San Francisco, California, who allegedly tried to drive tenants out of a rent-controlled unit, lost her bid to overturn a $2.7 million verdict.

The Court of Appeals of California, First District, Division One upheld the lower court’s award resulting from a lawsuit filed in 2015 by Dale Duncan and Marta Munoz Mendoza, who lived in the unit with their minor daughter.

Duncan and Mendoza, who are represented by attorneys Steven J. McDonald and Ariel Gershon of Greenstein & McDonald, said in their complaint that a corporation that was controlled by Anne Kihagi, had harassed them for more than a year in an effort to force them out of their apartment so that they could obtain higher-paying tenants.

Attorneys for Duncan and Mendoza said that the landlord wrongfully evicted the couple under the guise of an “owner move-in eviction” that allows an eviction if the owner is going to move into the building.

In the eviction complaint filed by Kihagi, she claimed that a family member who also had an ownership interest in the apartment, would be moving in, but according to the couple, that never happened.

After the family was evicted, they moved into a two-bedroom house and paid rent that was nearly three times as much as they were previously paying for the apartment, and the couple sought damages for these and other claims.

In 2017, following a trial, a jury awarded Duncan and Mendoza more than $3.5 million, but the court later reduced that amount to $2.7 million.

The three-panel of judges presiding over the appeal, upholding the award, said in their decision that the landlords “ignored or delayed responding to maintenance and upkeep issues, were uncommunicative and uncooperative, and became increasingly hostile.”

The court pointed to incidents wherein the landlord removed recycling bins, refused to fix a leaky water heater, blocked access to the laundry room, and allowed the couple's power to be shut off.

This is not the first run-in with the law for the landlord. In 2017, Kihagi was hit with $5.5 million in penalties resulting from a lawsuit filed by the city attorney for San Francisco, Dennis Herrera who once described Kihagi as “a ruthless predator targeting tenants in rent-controlled apartments for harassment and illegal evictions, and singling out seniors and people with disabilities for particularly despicable abuse.”

The three-judge panel said that Kihagi and her co-defendants showed a “persistent pattern of bad faith harassment, retaliation, and fraud” that was specifically aimed at renters.