A real estate investor who for the last two years has been hellbent on kicking out tenants paying below-market rents in order to re-rent units for more money is now facing a lawsuit from City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Anna Kihagi, who also goes by Anne Kihagi Swain and whom we last heard about trying to evict a 70-year-old grandmother is being accused of harassment and "unfair or unlawful business acts" in connection with her consistent practices of intimidating or unlawfully evicting tenants.
The Kenya-born, London-educated Kihagi has waged a war against tenants across the nine properties she's purchased (along with partners) in San Francisco over the last two years, in addition to several properties she owns in West Hollywood, where the Chron reports she "has multiple criminal and civil cases pending against [her]."
Here she's employed notorious eviction attorney Karen Uchiyama who defends Kihagi by saying she buys buildings with "loose management and bad tenants" and has no problem kicking out tenants who break her rules.
Only this is totally disingenuous because Kihagi's path of greed and destruction has been laid pretty plain: She buys a building, offers buyouts to rent-controlled tenants, and when they won't take them she begins instituting strict house rules, neglecting repairs, and threatening owner- or relative-move-in evictions. While such evictions may be legal, she now owns 50 units in the city and couldn't possibly have that many relatives to move into them.
In the case of the 70-year-old woman she was trying to evict from 1135 Guerrero, Sylvia Smith, Kihagi had allegedly cut off the cable to the building, stopped mail delivery, and accused Smith of buying marijuana for all her neighbors.
The City Attorney's Office is now seeking an injunction against Kihagi and her partners to stop their pattern of unlawful harassment and eviction, to correct health and safety violations in their buildings, and to pay fines for their "unfair or unlawful" acts.