Over the past couple of decades, the San Francisco Bay Area, known as a hub of diverse, progressive, and freethinking spirits, was hit with an influx of transplants recruited to build the future of technology. The rise of Silicon Valley and its innovation came at the cost of eradicating the soul of America’s anti-capitalist capital along with affordable rent in the metro area.
As former and current residents direct their frustrations toward gentrification and the outsiders, new reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle mapped out 12 power players who own the majority of the area’s real estate. After a year of culling through 2.3 million unique records with the help of machine learning—and good old-fashioned journalism—reporters at the Chronicle created a map highlighting property ownership in nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.
The networks of property owners include Veritas Investments, Invitation Homes, Michael Marr, Greystar, Woodmont/Tad Taube, Equity Residential, John Vidovich, Neill Sullivan/REO Homes, Essex, UDR Inc., Tricon Residential, AvalonBay, and Ardenbrook/Ardenwood. They’ve become the antithesis of the Bay Area community and have found themselves on the receiving end of lawsuits by residents who claim maltreatment and foul play.
Veritas Investments - With 293 buildings in San Francisco, Veritas is the largest property owner in the Bay Area. According to the report, “though Veritas Investments says it operates thousands of apartments, its name didn’t appear on a single Bay Area county property ownership record as of mid-2021.” Veritas’s business model relies on working with investors to buy rentals or manage tenants. More than 200 investor LLCs tied to Veritas offices are registered to the CEO, Yat-Pang Au, and his family members.
Invitation Homes is a publicly-traded Real Estate Investment Trust that owns at least 1,625 homes clustered in the East Bay and North Bay and spread across at least 29 unique entities, including subsidiaries like IH6 Property West L.P. and companies it recently acquired, like Starwood Waypoint. The Chronicle's analysis found that Invitation Homes’ Bay Area properties are concentrated in cities whose populations are disproportionately Black compared with the overall region. In July 2022, The House of Representatives’ Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a panel examining what Democratic Rep. Al Green called the “mass predatory purchasing” practices of corporate owners like Invitation Homes. Another House committee, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, conducted a yearlong investigation of Invitation Homes and several other corporate owners of real estate, finding that I.H. “engaged in abusive tactics to remove tenants from their homes” during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic even as it “reported record profits.”
Michael Marr - One of the East Bay’s largest private landlords, Marr made a name for himself in the real estate world by buying and flipping homes. Marr was so successful that he caught the government’s attention, which led to an FBI raid of his offices in 2011 and subsequent jail time six years later. “According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Marr privately agreed with other bidders not to compete against each other at the public auctions, having members of the groups purchase the properties at the public auctions for artificially low prices, then holding second, private auctions among themselves,” the Chronicle’s report says. Marr was released in 2020.
Greystar Real Estate Partners - The subject of 200 federal lawsuits over the past 26 years, Greystar is not only the bane of renters’ existence in the Bay Area but that of renters across the country. An international real estate corporation, Greystar is the largest property management group in the U.S. with almost 750,000 multifamily units. Greystar became a notorious landlord villain when it demolished a 216-unit rent-controlled complex in Silicon Valley to build one-bedroom units starting at $3,299 per month.
Woodmont is a real estate company founded by Thaddeus “Tad” Taube, and companies tied to Taube are listed as owners on at least 345 assessor-defined properties across the nine-county Bay Area. Taube has recently attracted controversy for donating $70,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Foundation, an organization that later helped organize the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Woodmont Real Estate Services has spent heavily in opposition to rent-control measures and recently attracted controversy for its role in a 2015 mass eviction of the Park Royal Apartments, a 73-unit complex it managed in San Mateo following months of steep rent increases.
Equity Residential, led by CEO Mark Parrell and chairman Sam Zell, is the fifth-biggest apartment owner in the U.S. Equity Residential has come under fire for its handling of apartment rentals in Silicon Valley’s few remaining working-class enclaves, including cities with high shares of Black and Hispanic residents like East Palo Alto. In Sept. 2014, tenants filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court alleging “excessive” and “unlawful” late fees, including “auto late fees” charged without necessarily notifying tenants for balances of $100 or more.
John Vidovich and his South Bay family have amassed one of Northern California’s largest real estate empires, building or acquiring 16 apartment communities as well as mobile home parks, fancy subdivisions, shopping centers, and more than 100,000 acres of prime Central Valley farmland; John Vidovich’s ownership network owns at least 308 unique assessor-defined properties in the Bay Area. In 2017, Vidovich was sued by mobile home tenants who accused him of violating a 2003 law that capped rent increases; the case was dismissed in July 2018 after the parties entered into mediation.
Neill Sullivan is a California-based real estate entrepreneur, whose companies purchased hundreds of properties in foreclosure following the 2008 financial crisis. As of 2021, companies tied to Sullivan were listed as owners on at least 292 properties according to the assessor data, most of which are located in West Oakland. Sullivan positions himself as an “Oakland, California, entrepreneur” who “emphasizes quick, responsive service and quality relations with his hundreds of tenants” and is “interested in promoting financial literacy in inner-city communities” and “breaking cycles of poverty.” Tenant advocates and organizers have called Sullivan’s community engagement efforts “shallow gimmicks” that obscure his role in displacing longtime residents and profiting from mass foreclosures.
Essex Property Trust is a San Mateo-based, publicly owned real estate investment trust, whose companies own and operate more than 19,000 units within at least 84 apartment buildings in the Bay area. The company has been sued numerous times in federal and local courts. In 2016, it settled a class-action lawsuit filed in Alameda County Superior Court where tenants at multiple Fremont apartment complexes alleged they were subject to improper rent increases.
UDR Inc. owns at least 3,300 rental units in the Bay Area, including at least 14 apartment communities in San Rafael, Dublin, Mountain View, San Mateo and Santa Clara. UDR has largely stayed out of the spotlight in the Bay Area’s housing battles by buying apartment complexes after they were completed or approved.
Tricon Residential (formerly known as Tricon American Homes) is one of the oldest industrial-scale home-rental companies operating in the U.S., and owns at least 543 properties in Bay Area region utilizing at least eight separate subsidiaries. In July 2021, the company averaged a 21% increase in rent on new leases, with a 5% increase for existing tenants It also launched a $5 billion fund in summer of 2021 to purchase and lease out 18,000 new homes; it has also begun to pursue “build-to-rent” construction projects.
AvalonBay Communities Inc. is a Virginia-based REIT and is the nation’s fourth-largest apartment owner, according to advocacy group the National Multifamily Housing Council. Like other REIT's and investor-backed landlords, the company has also attracted criticism for a business model that depends on maximizing profits and raising rents, despite growing public concern about unaffordable housing. In 2020, California housing activists highlighted the political efforts of AvalonBay and other large landlords, including Essex and Equity Residential, to defeat ballot measure campaigns to expand rent control, including Prop. 21. RenĂ© Christian Moya, director of L.A. activist group Housing is a Human Right, criticized the companies for employing tactics “to camouflage the true motive behind their opposition: keeping in place a broken system that’s fueled unfair, excessive rents and the housing affordability crisis.”
Ardenbrook, Inc. is a Fremont-based, privately held real estate company founded by the family of John "Jack" Brooks, the late real estate developer and Oakland Raiders co-founder. In the Bay Area, Ardenbrook’s 1,300-plus properties are concentrated in the East Bay and South Bay. In May of last year, Ardenbrook was subject to an inspection by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after an accident at one of its apartment complexes, according to public records. The OSHA inspection yielded two “serious” safety violations, and Ardenbrook received a fine of nearly $25,000. The case is still open, however.
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