A property management company partly owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has agreed to pay $3.25 million to the state of Maryland and to reimburse tens of thousands of tenants in Baltimore. Maryland’s Attorney General Brian Frosh said, “This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions.” The state of Maryland sued the Kushner-owned company after ProPublica detailed how the company hounded low-income tenants with a barrage of lawsuits, eviction notices and late fees, even when the tenants were in the right.
This is really big settlement. It’s really hard to find precedent for a settlement this big in a case like this — more than $3 million, as you said. Residents are going to be able to file claims for rent that they had to pay on these incredibly shoddy units. I was in units back in 2017 that had holes in the wall, that had leaks all over the place, that were riddled with mice. One woman had raw sewage coming out of her kitchen sink. She had maggots coming out of her carpet, appliances not working, gas leaks — just these endless problems that tenants had to deal with, and they were still having to, of course, pay their rent and being constantly taken to court by the Kushners.
What my article described was just this constant hounding of tenants for alleged missing rent and broken leases, where they would just, for years and years and years, go after
— source democracynow.org | Sep 27, 2022