Post by revirdsuba99 on Oct 30, 2017 0:12:08 GMT
I added the but, because it may not go anywhere..........
I am also including the original article from the NYTimes.... However, keep in mind that we peas discussed this several months ago!!
Maryland investigating Kushner Companies over apartments
by Cristina Alesci @cristinaalesci
October 29, 2017: 5:20 PM ET
The Maryland attorney general is investigating one of the Kushner family's real estate businesses after media reports surfaced earlier this year about allegedly abusive debt collection practices and poor conditions at several of its properties.
Kushner Companies said it is cooperating with Attorney General Brian Frosh, Maryland's top legal officer.
"We have been working with the Maryland Attorney General's Office to provide information in response to its request," Kushner Companies told CNN through a spokesperson. "We are in compliance with all state and local laws."
A Baltimore-based attorney is working with Kushner Companies on the matter, according to a person familiar with the attorney general's inquiry.
A spokesperson for the AG's office declined to comment, citing a policy of not confirming or denying investigations.
The inquiry does not mean charges will be filed.
This spring and summer, media reports exposed allegedly coercive tactics and inadequate maintenance in multifamily housing developments run by Westminster Management or related entities. An affiliate of Kushner Companies, Westminster manages about 17 properties in Maryland, including developments in Baltimore, Middle River and Essex, according to its website.
money.cnn.com/2017/10/29/news/kushner-companies-maryland-attorney-general/index.html
Jared Kushner’s Other
Real Estate Empire
Baltimore-area renters complain about a property
owner they say is neglectful and litigious. Few
know their landlord is the president’s son-in-law.
By ALEC MacGILLIS/PROPUBLICA MAY 23, 2017
The townhouse on High Seas Court in the Cove Village development, in the Baltimore suburb of Essex, was not exactly the Cape Cod retreat that its address implied: It was a small unit looking onto a parking lot, the windows of its two bedrooms so high and narrow that a child would have had to stand on a chair to see out of them. But to Kamiia Warren, who moved into the townhouse in 2004, it was a refuge, and a far cry from the East Baltimore neighborhood where she grew up. “I mean, there were bunny rabbits all hopping around,” she told me recently.
In the townhouse next door lived an older woman with whom Warren became friendly, even doing her grocery shopping once in a while. But over the course of a few months, the woman started acting strangely. She began accosting Warren’s visitors. She shouted through the walls during the day. And at night she banged on the wall, right where Warren kept the bassinet in which her third child slept, waking him up.
Warren sent a letter reporting the problem to the complex’s property manager, a company called Sawyer Realty Holdings. When there was no response, she decided to move out. In January 2010, she submitted the requisite form giving two months’ notice that she was transferring her Section 8 voucher — the federal low-income subsidy that helped her pay the rent — elsewhere. The complex’s on-site manager signed the form a week later, checking the line that read “The tenant gave notice in accordance with the lease.”
So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease’s expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn’t recognize: JK2 Westminster L.L.C.
Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster’s lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district-court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney’s fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. “I was so desperate,” she said.
If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.
Much more at the link, it is a long article. They are not nice stories and continue to this day. The one above started years ago.
www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/jared-kushners-other-real-estate-empire.html
I am also including the original article from the NYTimes.... However, keep in mind that we peas discussed this several months ago!!
Maryland investigating Kushner Companies over apartments
by Cristina Alesci @cristinaalesci
October 29, 2017: 5:20 PM ET
The Maryland attorney general is investigating one of the Kushner family's real estate businesses after media reports surfaced earlier this year about allegedly abusive debt collection practices and poor conditions at several of its properties.
Kushner Companies said it is cooperating with Attorney General Brian Frosh, Maryland's top legal officer.
"We have been working with the Maryland Attorney General's Office to provide information in response to its request," Kushner Companies told CNN through a spokesperson. "We are in compliance with all state and local laws."
A Baltimore-based attorney is working with Kushner Companies on the matter, according to a person familiar with the attorney general's inquiry.
A spokesperson for the AG's office declined to comment, citing a policy of not confirming or denying investigations.
The inquiry does not mean charges will be filed.
This spring and summer, media reports exposed allegedly coercive tactics and inadequate maintenance in multifamily housing developments run by Westminster Management or related entities. An affiliate of Kushner Companies, Westminster manages about 17 properties in Maryland, including developments in Baltimore, Middle River and Essex, according to its website.
money.cnn.com/2017/10/29/news/kushner-companies-maryland-attorney-general/index.html
Jared Kushner’s Other
Real Estate Empire
Baltimore-area renters complain about a property
owner they say is neglectful and litigious. Few
know their landlord is the president’s son-in-law.
By ALEC MacGILLIS/PROPUBLICA MAY 23, 2017
The townhouse on High Seas Court in the Cove Village development, in the Baltimore suburb of Essex, was not exactly the Cape Cod retreat that its address implied: It was a small unit looking onto a parking lot, the windows of its two bedrooms so high and narrow that a child would have had to stand on a chair to see out of them. But to Kamiia Warren, who moved into the townhouse in 2004, it was a refuge, and a far cry from the East Baltimore neighborhood where she grew up. “I mean, there were bunny rabbits all hopping around,” she told me recently.
In the townhouse next door lived an older woman with whom Warren became friendly, even doing her grocery shopping once in a while. But over the course of a few months, the woman started acting strangely. She began accosting Warren’s visitors. She shouted through the walls during the day. And at night she banged on the wall, right where Warren kept the bassinet in which her third child slept, waking him up.
Warren sent a letter reporting the problem to the complex’s property manager, a company called Sawyer Realty Holdings. When there was no response, she decided to move out. In January 2010, she submitted the requisite form giving two months’ notice that she was transferring her Section 8 voucher — the federal low-income subsidy that helped her pay the rent — elsewhere. The complex’s on-site manager signed the form a week later, checking the line that read “The tenant gave notice in accordance with the lease.”
So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease’s expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn’t recognize: JK2 Westminster L.L.C.
Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster’s lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district-court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney’s fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. “I was so desperate,” she said.
If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.
Much more at the link, it is a long article. They are not nice stories and continue to this day. The one above started years ago.
www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/jared-kushners-other-real-estate-empire.html
