Hat tip to Charles P. Pierce for pointing to excellent work at Pro Publica by Alec MacGillis. The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville’ is a look at the appalling way Kushner makes money by going after the most vulnerable section of the housing market. “Slum Lord” doesn’t begin to describe it; “Scum Lord” would be more accurate. The business model Kushner has developed works like this:
In the cases that [legal firm] Tapper has brought to court on behalf of JK2 Westminster and individual Kushner-controlled companies, there is a clear pattern of Kushner Companies’ pursuing tenants over virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease — even in the numerous cases where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side. Not only does the company file cases against them, it pursues the cases for as long as it takes to collect from the overmatched defendants — often several years. The court docket of JK2 Westminster’s case against Warren, for instance, spans more than three years and 112 actions — for a sum that amounts to maybe two days’ worth of billings for the average corporate law firm associate, from a woman who never even rented from JK2 Westminster. The pursuit is all the more remarkable given how transient the company’s prey tends to be. Hounding former tenants for money means paying to send out process servers who often report back that they were unable to locate the target. This does not deter Kushner Companies’ lawyers. They send the servers back out again a few months later.
The article has some horrendous case studies of people with few resources being subjected to legal extortion. As Pierce notes:
The grift runs deep in this family. Once, here in the shebeen, we used to say that, to the Romneys, there were only two kinds of people: the Romneys and The Help. To the extended Trump clan, it appears there also are only two types of people: the Trumps and The Carrion. And young Jared has a buzzard's eye for the latter.
There is this about going after people with not a lot of money. They don’t have the resources to fight back. While they may not have a lot of money individually, collectively it adds up. And of course, where responsibility runs the other way (fixing things that are broken, addressing safety hazards, etc.) it’s an entirely different story.
The worst troubles may have been those described in a 2013 court case involving Jasmine Cox’s unit at Cove Village. They began with the bedroom ceiling, which started leaking one day. Then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet. Then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink. “It sounded like someone turned a pool upside down,” Cox told me. “I heard the water hitting the floor and I panicked. I got out of bed and the sink is black and gray, it’s pooling out of the sink and the house smells terrible.”
Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.
“Get that [expletive] out of here,” she said.
If you want a metaphor for the way the GOP plans to manage America under the Trump regime, this pretty well nails it.