I Tracked Down My Anonymous Landlord... Here's What Happened.

When Chai Dingari's landlord abruptly raised his rent by 25%, Chai tried to track them down. What he found led him into the shadowy legal world of housing, where landlords hide behind anonymity to exploit tenants and keep rent high.

We dug into how landlords use LLCs to conceal their identities and shield themselves from liability for not paying taxes or letting buildings fall into disrepair.

But that could change. There are two bills going through the New York state legislature that could give more rights to tenants. The LLC Transparency Act would require LLCs to make the names of beneficiaries public. And the Good Cause Eviction bill would give tenants the right to remain—meaning they'd have the option to renew when their lease term is up—and put a cap on rent increases.

Both these bills would be huge wins for tenants, but face a tremendous uphill battle.

Also, if you are a New York state tenant, you can check to find out if your apartment is actually rent stabilized here:

Want to organize your building to fight rent increases or get improvements on the building? Tenant activists have made a toolkit and it can work anywhere!

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[chrispychicken]

When a landlord can pay the rent and upkeep for a 63 tenant building off the backs of only 18 tenants there is something horribly wrong.

[badsamaritan]

I'm 100% convinced that landlords are hoarding property for the sole purpose of creating artificial scarcity.

[kellymoses]

Automatic eviction if you cite legal code is absolutely insane and should be illegal as hell.

[yournan]

I cannot appreciate enough the irony of a law firm being used to issue an eviction for citing legal code.

[heHorror]

Good example of how multiple "competing" companies within an industry can still act as a monopoly. Price fixing, black listing, lobbying for policy outcomes.

[AliciaGuitar]

The Health Department is an important ally in fighting slumlords. I had two vacant mouse-infested garbage filled apartments on each side of me, and manager refused to clean it up. The mice ate the electricals in the oven/stove. I kept my place clean, but the smell was nauseating and unhealthy. The day after i called the health dept. management sent workers to pull apart the cabinets, give me a new oven/stove, and clean up the vacant apartments. This was after months of refusing to act. I wish i had called sooner.

[crp]

THIS type of thing where these unscrupulous people are called out BY NAME also serves an important purpose. Sunlight is the great sanitizer. Keep exposing them!

[polkjm]

My sister's friend was threatened by her landlord with a knife. When reported, she was sued for defamation and eventually evicted. The part that stuck out to me is that a lawyer friend of hers defended her and the prosecution and judge were so smug the whole time. Focusing more on telling that young lawyer that he's "doing good" and "should be careful as he's just starting his career".

[tanterouge]

"Why don't tenants have negotiation leverage ...?"

Well, in Sweden we do. We have an actual forceful tenant's union. The landlords are currently trying to raise the rent again this year, breaching this year's agreement with the union. They won't legally be able to, in the end, because they've signed a contract with the union about it.

[thatjeff]

It all boils down to three words: private equity firms. They buy up real estate, drive up rents to increase their portfolio profits, and run folks out who can't afford the new rents. The land will be considered more valuable due to their price fixing, so if they have to, they sell it off to a developer for a profit. Developer "renovates" the property and starts the whole thing up again. Lather rinse, repeat.

[Coast-to-Coast]

The apartment we used to live in was owned by some company. They did not respond to any of our concerns or requests. We had to buy tokens from their office to use the laundry, but their hours were very inconvenient, and often the tokens would break in the machines without the machine counting them, so we would have to use more. When it would rain, water would come in from around the window frame and from the ceiling above the windows. We were not allowed to take a bath because the water would leak into the unit below us. We literally had water come into our bathroom from the unit above us through the light fixture in the ceiling, but nothing was ever fixed. Now we rent from people we actually personally know. Its not totally perfect, but its much much better. Its good to actually know the person you are renting from, instead of having to deal with some faceless corporation.

[Galeigh]

Our old landlord changed the time frame to inform them that you aren't going to renew from 60 days to 30 days without informing us then told us they were gonna increase our rent by 30 percent. When we obviously informed them that we weren't gonna renew, and they not only told us that due to us being "late" that we'd not only forfeit our security deposit they were gonna charge US for the renovations to the apartment. I pulled out all the emails and the copy of the lease we signed basically said " try me bitch". We never got the deposit back but they backed out of the additional charges. Fucking crooks.

[Cyberfoxxy]

The anonymity is really the problem. They can blacklist you personally. For life. But you don't even get a name.

[thevinyltruffle]

I love how the generation that’s always talking about “bootstraps” is the same generation that got housing, education and lifesaving medical technologies for dirt cheap and then turned those things into the most broken for-profit systems imaginable.

[gavinquinton]

I'm a reporter covering mass evictions in Burbank California. Most of the landlords engaging in a recent wave of just cause evictions are under LLCs, and its been a tough search for me and the tenants to try and confront them.

[MsRikkiTikki]

I’ve been dealing with this since I was 18 and moved out for the first time, I’m 27 now and still dealing with this bullshit and nobody wants to hear it. Everybody says I’m crazy and people get their deposits back and know who their landlord is and their maintenance requests always get handled……like am I living in another reality or something??? Thank you for validating my experiences and bringing me comfort in knowing I’m not crazy and I’m not one of the only few out here dealing with totally corrupt corporate rental situations.

[zencat]

Landlords should certainly not be allowed to operate anonymously - that is total BS.

[gardenlifelove]

Being able to sue another doesn't fix anything when they can just tie it up in courts for decades.

[SourcefedNostalgicViewer]

The fact he was able to not get angry throughout this whole video or call the landlord names...class...just pure class. Slow clap. Takes a lot of courage and self-control to stick with the facts and just tell the story.

[eupi]

Doxxing landlords to let tenets know who owns them is not only moral, but is the correct thing to do.