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, quote, “This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions.
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 tenants and former tenants, even garnishing their wages. Sometimes residents, tenants would find their bank accounts suddenly just cleared out, because the company had just gone in and gotten a court order to take all their money away.
The way it’s going to work is that if tenants had major maintenance problems in their units and were having to pay rent anyway, they’re now going to be able to file a claim for that rent and try to get some of it back. And starting in three months, they’re going to be able to start filing these claims. They’ll have a year to do so. There’s going to be a, quote, “special master” appointed who’s going to oversee sort of assessing these claims.
And this is uncapped. So that means that the Kushners are paying a $3.25 million fine to the state. Part of that, $800,000 of that, is sort of a down payment on the claims they’re going to be paying out to tenants. But those claims can go as high — you know, the sky’s the limit, basically. If a whole bunch of claims come in, they’re going to have to pay them all.
So, that was his decision to make, to make that investment, and then his decision to pursue these people as aggressively as they did, really to be — to sort of see these tenants as this incredible source of revenue that you wanted to squeeze as much out of as you possibly could.
slumlord millionaire!