A Bad Landlord

A Bad Landlord

Oakland Tenant Evicted for Speaking Truth to Power

Terry Messman
Tuesday, April 10, 2001;


When autumn winds blew the roof off Kendra Wilson\'s apartment last October, followed by a five-day rainstorm that ruined all her belongings and flooded her out of her home, she thought she had weathered the worst of the storm. She soon found that the hard rains had only begun to fall in Oakland, a city where tenants forced out of apartments closed due to uninhabitable conditions or natural disasters have virtually no rights, no protection from becoming homeless, and often no relocation assistance.

Apartment buildings can be repaired and belongings replaced, but Wilson has not been able to recover from the final blow: her landlord evicted her from her rain-damaged apartment after she and other tenants spoke out about their losses on a KRON TV news broadcast.

In an interview with Street Spirit, Kendra Wilson charged that after she exercised her First Amendment rights to speak to the press about the intolerable conditions she faced after the roof blew off her apartment, she was subjected to a retaliatory eviction by her landlord, Jerry Curtis, a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California.

After huge chunks of the apartment building\'s roof landed on the walkway below her second-story unit, the rain poured in through 30 leaks in her ceiling, soaked her bed, ruined her furniture and stereo, and destroyed a closetful of books for her college courses. Finally, the ceiling began to buckle and sag and the rain began streaming in through all the electrical fixtures, forcing the Oakland Fire Department to cut the power off as an electrocution hazard and shut down the building.

Then her real troubles began. Cold, tired, exhausted from the ordeal, the shell-shocked tenants were ignored by their landlord, by Oakland officials, and even by the Red Cross. Finally, Wilson and other tenants spoke out to the press about these unendurable conditions in a desperate attempt to get help. After the tenants described their plight on a KRON news broadcast, the Red Cross responded by providing temporary motel vouchers. But her landlord, Jerry Curtis, responded by locking Wilson and other tenants out of their apartments for criticizing his inaction.

It was a one-two punch for Wilson - a disaster followed by an eviction that left the 26-year-old college student homeless. Wilson and at least two of her fellow tenants were reduced to sleeping in their cars or living with relatives. As of April 1, more than four months after being ousted from her apartment, Wilson has not been able to find or afford housing, and has been forced to move out of Oakland to live with relatives. The morning after the Fire Department cut the power off, Wilson said Curtis finally returned his tenants\' calls, and \"he said we should pack up immediately and look for apartments in the city of Richmond where he said it was a little cheaper.\"

Wilson said she was stunned and disheartened by the landlord\'s refusal to help beyond an offer to pay for moving trucks and return their security deposit. \"His response was extremely cold,\" she said. \"When we first called, we asked him if he could just put us up in a hotel or somewhere dry because we were cold, we were wet, we were extremely exhausted. He told us he could not because he didn\'t have the money. I told him I\'m a starving student and I don\'t have money to pack up and move anywhere. I told him it was the end of the month and I didn\'t even have the money for a hotel room.\"

Wilson was left homeless by the disaster in the middle of her senior year in college at Cal State Hayward, where she is majoring in English and pre-law. \"It\'s extremely hard because I\'m going to school and I\'m exhausted by this,\" she said. \"I\'ve been looking for housing for four months. I can\'t find anything I can afford. This delays my graduation by six months.\"

Wilson was finally forced to move out of Oakland altogether, part of an exodus of low-income tenants who have been squeezed out of the city in recent months due to rising rents and no-cause evictions. She is now bouncing back and forth between her mother\'s house in Hayward and an aunt\'s home in Vallejo, while commuting to school.

Curtis told Street Spirit that he bore no blame for locking Wilson out of the eight-unit apartment building he owns at 3474 Boston Avenue in Oakland, nor any responsibility to pay for her damaged possessions or relocation expenses. Curtis said that the City of Oakland\'s legal codes do not require landlords to pay tenants for any relocation expenses or even grant them the right to move back into an apartment after a natural disaster unless it was caused by the owner\'s actions or negligence.

Asked why he had refused to let Kendra Wilson and two other tenants move back after repairs had been completed, Curtis said, \"If not for them speaking out against me on television, all three could still be living in their apartments.\"

Curtis said that he was so upset that the tenants had spoken out on KRON about the conditions in their uninhabitable apartments, that he had written to them that they would not be invited back if they had taken part in what he called \"slanderous attacks against me in the media.\" Curtis added, \"This in effect precluded them from moving back.\"

Asked if this was a retaliatory eviction for speaking to the press, Curtis said that he was justified because the tenants had \"slandered and libeled\" him by telling the press he had failed to fix the roof.

Curtis said he especially resented the tenants\' complaints because they could cast a cloud on his professional work as a Deputy Attorney General. \"In essence,\" he said, \"judges who hear me in court in future cases might think: there\'s a problem with his integrity because he lets his tenants suffer unjustly.\" Curtis emphasized, \"There is no relationship with what I do for [State Attorney General] Bill Lockyer, and what I do with my tenants.\"

In a letter to Ira Jones, one of three tenants he expelled and locked out after the roof blew off the building, Curtis described the damage he believed had been done to his professional reputation: \"Every judge who knows me may now question everything I represent to him because I have been characterized as someone who is taking advantage of poor tenants.\" Curtis wrote to the tenants that those who spoke to the press criticizing his actions would be evicted: \"Assuming that you may return under the provisions of the City codes, you are informed that I will file a notice to evict against anyone who defamed me. I am thinking about filing a defamation suit against each person who appeared on the KRON broadcast.