It'd be easy to think that Seattle doesn't have real slumlords. Not Seattle, the city of niceness and quiet good taste, exuding prosperity from its lakefront manors to its downtown boutiques and sleek coffeehouses. Easy, but wrong.
Seattle has more than a few slumlords who could hold their own in any major city in the country. "There are so many around it's unbelievable," says Jack Alexander, a veteran building inspector with the SeattleKing County Department of Public Health, which brings criminal charges for such things as rodent and cockroach infestations. "The main thing is that they take money in and they don't put any out—that's the name of the game."
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There has perhaps been no better time for slumlords to flourish than in the current housing squeeze—which makes this a fitting time to ferret out the worst of them. Given the competition, this proved no simple task. Several worthy candidates in the metropolitan area didn't make the cut: the owner of the
Bothell apartments so plagued by mold that the children of one family developed respiratory problems and were told by their doctor to move out immediately; the owner of the dilapidated cabins in the woods off a
Tukwila highway that, in the words of one county official, "looks like
Appalachia."
While the designation of "worst" is inevitably arguable, the individuals featured here are renowned among tenants and their advocates, as well as housing and health inspectors. Their reputation derives not merely from the condition of their buildings but also their unpleasantness and sometimes abusiveness towards tenants. Testament to their management style can be found among criminal charges, tenant lawsuits, and housing code violations. Last, but not least, there are the buildings themselves—ranging from shabby to nearly unlivable.
Though at least two of these landlords live in cushy circumstances themselves, those that agreed to be interviewed portrayed themselves as victims—of tenants and city officials out to get them. There is, it seems, a certain amount of game playing in the slumlord biz, and it can get bizarre. Witness the following stories: of a Chinese immigrant who says he is being persecuted because of his race; of a secrecy freak who presents himself as destitute and fights off criminal charges with public defenders; and of a former Aryan Nation member who claims that his tenants are "guests."
ALAN HUA
Margarita Martinez, a young woman from Mexico, looks around her one-bedroom apartment in Alan Hua's Empire Courts at Martin Luther King Way S and S 68th Street. At a distance, the Empire Courts could be mistaken for a cluster of abandoned train cars.
Wearing cornrows and a black bodysuit, and maintaining an ebullient sense of humor despite her surroundings, Martinez pulls back an area rug she has put down in the living room. Underneath is the tattered, gray carpet Hua has provided. It is damp and putrid. "Just look at the walls," she says, through an interpreter from the Tenants Union, a nonprofit advocacy group. The walls are cracked, covered in big brown patches of dirt or grease, and marked by occasional holes. "That's also why it gets cold in here," she says, adding that "the heating system doesn't work very well." She pulls a couch away from the wall to show a big rusty vent, which she says is the apartment's only heating source.
Before going on, she suddenly flies across the room with a sneaker in hand and swats a cockroach on the wall, smiling at her victory. There are lots of cockroaches, lots of mice too. "I see them running around from one side of the room to the other sometimes. Want to see one?" Heading into the kitchen, she rustles through a cupboard and pulls out a trap from which dangles a tiny white mouse. Her 3-year-old daughter steps toward it, fascinated. She says her other daughter, who is 8, has been bitten all over by mice-borne fleas.
In this kitchen she's also dealt with missing and broken cabinet drawers, a stove that gave her electrical shocks before it was finally replaced, and plumbing under the sink that spewed dirty black water—which also issues from her bathtub faucet.
Finally, there's the mold—a thick, brown film that covers entire walls in the bedroom and bathroom, making the place seem like a cave. For the privilege of living here, she pays $425 a month. If she thinks too much about it, she starts to cry.
Empire Courts is only one of 14 King County properties owned by Alan Hua, formerly a farmer in his native China. His holdings, built up over 20 years in the business, have a total assessed value of almost $6 million.
Most have drawn censure from tenant activists and city officials. "Alan Hua's buildings are in absolutely inexcusable condition," declares Tenants Union organizer Siobhan Ring. "There's no reason people should have to live in that kind of housing."
City prosecutors are now pressing a criminal case against Hua arising from Health Department inspections of the Douglas Apartments, a sprawling four-building complex on S Henderson Street in the Rainier Valley. After three unsuccessful prosecutions against Hua on other landlord-related charges, housing officials are closely watching this case, which charges him with four counts related to maintaining health hazards, including "failing to take reasonable measures to maintain a building free from rats, mice, and other rodents."
