Our story is part of a frightening housing trend where wealthy investors buy properties, lower living standards, drive out inherited low-rent tenants with harassment tactics, “warehouse” units to drive up demand and price, and then fetch sky-high rents from new tenants to maximize profit and exacerbate the housing crisis.
In California, rules limit rent increases for current tenants but can be set at any rate for new renters. So, Coastline Real Estate Advisors purposefully create unsafe conditions in order to cause housing instability, anxiety, property and personal damage to drive out inherited tenants.
And the company has a documented history.
In 2019, New York AG Latitia James forced a $500,000 settlement from Coastline Real Estate Advisors after 82 tenants went on rent strike for mistreatment. Her office states that Coastline conducted construction harassment, ignored needed repairs, arbitrarily shut off water, heat and sewer, and left rent-stabilized tenants living in dangerous conditions.
Exposed in New York, Coastline took its tactics to California.
Later in 2019 in Santa Monica, Coastline refused pest control for infested rent-controlled units, allowed unlicensed construction workers to urinate in the building’s parking garage after leaving glass and nails on walkways, issued 3-day eviction notices to tenants that had paid rent, raised rents illegally, refused to notify authorities of tenant buyouts, illegally removed the on-site manager of a building with more than 15 units, perpetrated construction harassment with constant noise outside of legal hours, and did not respond to emergency calls.
Our interaction with Coastline mirrored those in the documented complaints above and can be broken down into three phases: pre-mold harassment, the mold incident and post-mold fallout.
Pre-mold Harassment
In early February 2020, we came back from our monthlong honeymoon through Asia to discover our 19-unit apartment building at 407 N Broadway, Redondo Beach, CA, had been purchased by Coastline, and we experienced the following harassment tactics in the 19 months leading up to our life-changing mold incident:
- Removed and did not replace the on-site apartment manager which is illegal in a building of 16 or more units
- Two separate eviction threats after having paid rent
- Locked out of our own apartment without our knowledge or consent
- Coastline workers routinely attempting to enter unit without warning
- Year+ of a rusty pipe leaking onto our car in carport
- Water shutoff multiple times overnight without warning
- Construction harassment preventing Veronica, an ICU nurse during the height of Covid, from sleeping between shifts
- Intimidated by Coastline’s lawyer after having complained about the construction harassment
- Flooded laundry room ignored by Coastline
- Unexplained sky-high electric bills with no resolution for months
None of these had ever been an issue under the previous owner.
And our previous owners had barely raised our rent for 10+ years of residency, so we were paying far below market value for an apartment walkable to the sand of both Redondo and Hermosa Beaches. We were prime targets. If Coastline could drive us out, they could effectively triple the rent for our unit.
The Mold Incident
Veronica was seven months pregnant and still working at the ICU in September 2021. On September 5th, she discovers a wet spot on the upstairs bathroom floor. What would unfold over the course of the next month would destroy the majority of our belongings and become life-threatening.
A rusty pipe had slowly been leaking into the upstairs bathroom floor causing the growth of toxic mold. The leak would eventually soak the ceiling and walls of our downstairs living room, and the ceiling’s collapse would expose the entire apartment to the spores of toxic molds like Stachybotry, dust and debris.
Coastline executives simply did not react. We reached out to their office and emergency line and were ignored as our apartment disintegrated. We paid for our own hotel, watched our belongings get destroyed, and entered a month of stress fueled by housing instability while pregnant with our fist child. Veronica lost weight during her seventh month of pregnancy and Chris had panic attacks fueled by unrequited rage for the first time in his life forcing him to seek treatment.
Coastline workers arrived ill-equipped to handle the mold and each told us to vacate the apartment; that it was unlivable. Plumbers left our bathroom vanity and floor torn open to exposed upturned nails as an ever-present obstacle in accessing the toilet and shower. And another Coastline worker dropped off an obsolete dehumidifier and then gave us diametrically opposed instructions — leave this apartment immediately but also return twice daily to empty the dehumidifier or it will overflow.
Coastline forced us back into the mold-infested apartment twice daily in order to save what was left of our belongings.
Determined, we drove all around the South Bay of Los Angeles looking for the executives in empty offices. We finally tracked our apartment managers down in a hidden alleyway office and then they attempted to gaslight by stating there was no mold. Over and over again. They even patched over the rotting joists above our living room without remediation before telling us to move back into the still-upturned-nails apartment.
We had to protect our unborn child. We hired Robert Soto of Ameriflood Environmental who performed a mold test that discovered the alarming levels of toxicity, especially for pregnant women and newborns. Yet Coastline continued to insist that we move back into the apartment despite the report’s findings.
Coastline finally acquiesced after a confrontational conference call with Coastline’s Jimmy Ordaz intent on exposing Robert Soto of Ameriflood Environmental as a “lying piece of shit.” Coastline finally agreed to remediate the apartment and professionally clean our belongings before letting us out of our month-to-month lease.
But Coastline would fall short of their promises. Najera Environmental, the company Coastline hired to remediate the mold, relayed a message through Gloria Camou — our off-site apartment building manager whom we never met — to remove all of our belongings from the apartment before remediation. The message was never relayed, so the environmental company threw all of our furniture and electronics into giant piles. This destroyed much of what wasn’t already ruined by mold.
We officially moved out on October 7th, 2021, in a victory for Coastline. The company could now renovate the unit to fetch three times the rent. And we were forced to throw away the vast majority of our belongings, including baby stuff, because Coastline never paid for professional cleaning as Jimmy Ordaz promised on the conference call with Robert Soto of Ameriflood Environmental.
Post-mold Fallout
Veronica lost weight during the seventh month of her pregnancy with our first child. Pregnant women usually gain one pound per week at that time. It startled her OBGYN who ordered a growth scan to see if our daughter was effected by the stress of our housing crisis.
Chris began to experience still-unexplained inflammatory arthritis attacks of the large joints. One by one and asymmetrically, his elbows, knees and ankles would swell painfully with a reduced range of motion during two-week attacks that seemed to come and go every eight to 10 months. Multiple blood tests could not confirm a cause, but the attacks have subsided in frequency and severity ever since moving out. And the NIH has confirmed that exposure to toxic mold can cause mysterious bouts of inflammatory arthritis.
Chris also suffered the first panic attacks of his life in October of 2021 shortly after the housing crisis caused by Coastline. He was prescribed medication for anxiety and sought therapy over the course of 10 months.
We feared retaliation from the company, so we had Coastline send our security deposit to our lawyer’s office. And we started a lawsuit against the company for threatening our livelihoods but Coastline ignored our lawyer’s communications for months. They only responded after being compelled by the court.
Filing a lawsuit puts your name into the public record, so we’ve been contacted by the residents of other Coastline buildings across Los Angeles looking for guidance. Coastline has been perpetrating their documented harassment all over the city and residents want to know how to protect themselves. We were even told a story involving a vagrant who began squatting in an unlocked and “warehoused” Coastline apartment unit (Coastline would leave all renovated units unlocked in our building during construction to open up opportunities for squatters). He eventually attacked and raped a legacy tenant despite tenant warnings and complaints leading up to the incident.
In summary, we’re shocked at the banality of Coastline’s evil.