Monday, January 23, 2017
A judge ordered the owners of a 30-unit Oakland apartment
building at 1620 Fruitvale Ave. to fix the building within 40 days or face
possible contempt of court charges.
One family slept on the kitchen floor to avoid a bedbug
infestation. Another lived in an apartment with no working fire alarm, and a
tenant and her 8-year-old daughter became aware a fire had broken out in the
building only when smoke began to billow from the walls of their bathroom.
Those incidents appeared in court documents that detail
harrowing conditions endured by the tenants of a 30-unit Oakland apartment
building at 1620 Fruitvale Ave., whose owners have been ordered by a judge to
fix the building within 40 days or face possible contempt of court charges.
Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker filed a
request for relief with the Alameda County Superior Court this month
and won last week when a judge issued an order against the landlords.
“It is critical that the City hold accountable landlords who
violate tenants’ rights and turn a blind eye to inhumane conditions that
persist at their properties,” Parker said in a news release.
The building is infested with cockroaches and bedbugs, lacks
a functional fire alarm system in many of the units and has raw sewage
problems, court documents say. Alameda County has assessed the value of the
property at around $1 million.
Most of the tenants are predominantly Spanish-speaking
families.
Since the building was purchased in 2007 by a group of
landlords — Jad and Suad Jaber; Najeeb and Mary Christina Shihadeh;
Daoud, Hala, Fahed and Haifa Salfiti; and 20 other people unnamed in court
paperwork — it has been the subject of 20 complaints, according to city
records.
The property, built in 1930, was dogged by problems even
before its purchase by the current owners. City records show several complaints
of failing plumbing, moldy walls, leaky ceilings, lead paint, roach
infestations and a collapsed ceiling in the period from 1997 to 2003.
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