Los Angeles landlord sues Knock LA reporter for exposing illegal Airbnb listings in rent controlled buildings

Gentle reader,

In March, we stumbled onto an illegal Airbnb listing of one of the RSO (rent stabilized) units in writer Charles Bukowski's East Hollywood bungalow court that we helped landmark in 2008, and published an exposé on the rental housing arbitrage hustlers Pillow and Coffee, calling them operators of "a short term rental empire destroying Los Angeles."

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Update 2/9/2024: Simone Shah, owner of an RSO building at 420 South Burlington Avenue in the Westlake District still renting apartments by the night as The Burlington Hotel, has settled with journalist Lisa Kwon before trial, leaving the freelancer facing $10,760.58 in legal and court fees and no financial support from the story’s publisher Knock LA. Please contribute to her GoFundMe, or share the link.

Update 4/11/2024: Journalist Cerise Castle takes to her personal twitter account to raise the alarm about what she alleges are serious improprieties with political organizing operation Ground Game LA and its control of Knock LA’s fiscal accounts, digital channels and property, culminating in her and other editors being locked out on 4/10/2024. Lisa Kwon’s legal situation is mentioned in the newsroom’s lengthy open letter. We think this is especially troubling as it is happening just as reporter Ben Camacho is being personally sued by the Los Angeles City Attorney. Ben Camacho is personally fundraising for his legal defense. Unlike Lisa Kwon’s case, which we had to expose in this October 2023 newsletter, the Knock LA channel has reported on what’s happening to Camacho. Confidential to L.A. journalists and citizens trying to understand what’s happening here: you can’t do independent journalism while in bed with the City Family.

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That investigation was widely read, and we heard from a number of Angelenos who have suffered and even had to leave town due to illegal nightly rentals in their neighborhoods and buildings.

We even heard from Pillow and Coffee, sort of. In May, we received an odd email from Ben Lambert, who does internet law (though not in California), dangling the promise of additional interesting info if we would just delete what we’d written. We added his communication to the bottom of our post, and heard no more.

But it got us thinking about all the other illegal home share activities that serve to displace, irritate and defraud Angelenos. If it was this easy for us to get to the bottom of Pillow and Coffee’s scheme, then where are the rest of the bad rental housing stories? They’re morbidly fascinating.

Well, here’s one. Earlier this month, a Reddit user posted on r/LosAngeles asking locals if it was safe for a single woman to walk from their Airbnb near MacArthur Park to the Convention Center. We chimed in to recommend she stay in a real hotel, since Westlake is a community with a lot of illegal Airbnbs that have displaced locals from affordable units.

The Redditor responded that they were staying in a real hotel—the Burlington, which they had booked on Airbnb. We’ve been in the hospitality business for a long time, but had never heard of this centrally located boutique hotel.

A few clicks of the mouse revealed that it is actually a rent controlled apartment building operating (more or less) as a hotel, like so many others that we and our preservation pals have exposed simply by looking up its housing status on the city’s ZIMAS portal.

And as so often is the case with L.A.’s housing use crisis, one city department lists 420 South Burlington Avenue as protected RSO apartments even as another grants permits and a certificate of occupancy to turn 24 apartments into 15 nightly rentals with a shared kitchen.

It’s maddening! Ever since Eric Garcetti became Mayor, and because Karen Bass has made no staff or policy changes, there is no enforcement of existing housing laws, no follow through, no accountability, no effort by local representatives to crack down on this crime against our communities. All there is is the constant drum beat that we need to give more money to more developers to build more units.

Instead of going nuts, we try to shine a light. So we took a screenshot of the exchange with the tourist who had blithely booked a stay in some displaced Angeleno’s home and shared it on Instagram—and that’s where things got interesting. A user called bad__tenant volunteered the name of the building’s owner (Simone Shah) and said she owned numerous illegal Airbnbs, but that the city had ignored complaints. Then anniebpowers identified herself as a former Shah tenant, and shared a link to a 2021 KnockLA investigation into Shah’s properties.

Even though it’s a few years old now, anyone who cares about L.A.’s housing use crisis ought to read Lisa Kwon’s story Airbnbs in Los Angeles Are Not Going Away Here's how to — and why you should — fight against illegal Airbnbs in your neighborhood.

Because it’s not just an example of how individuals suffer because the city enables disruptive technologies to displace citizens, but also how one of the landlords who profits from the city’s failings took a story about a failed city policy so personally that she now seeks to stifle the free press.

That’s right: journalist Lisa Kwon has been personally sued for defamation by landlord Simone Shah, and was in court yesterday for a case management conference. You can read the complaint and Kwon’s response here.

Shah doesn’t have a case for various reasons—including having filed after the statute of limitations expired and going after the reporter instead of the publisher—and Kwon’s attorney Matthew Strugar (friend of the orcas) has responded with an anti-SLAPP motion, seeking to have the case thrown out as an attempt to intimidate and censor a journalist working in the public interest.

But with the courts backed up, this case and Shah’s demand for $250,000+ in damages has been hanging over Kwon’s head for months, while RSO apartments all over Los Angeles are held vacant or rented nightly by tourists, a prolific eviction law firm gets caught using AI to generate fake complaints, City Planning still refuses to crack down on illegal listings, and a city commissioner who asks for more information before voting on a rushed move to build 30 tiny houses in a city parking lot is told his services are no longer needed.

Sniff, sniff. Is that gaslighting we smell?

We’re not complaining. It’s an honor to be a trusted news source for the community. Still, isn’t it weird that it falls to the newsletter of an historic tour company to inform Angelenos that an independent L.A. journalist reporting on Airbnb abuses was sued by a landlord six months ago? And isn’t it a shame that because legacy media won’t do its job, the Kwons and Esotourics have to do it for them, and take the heat for standing up for what’s just?

The fact is, if a curious reporter simply scrolled through some of the City Council motions over the past decade that posture as responding to the troubles Airbnb and other disruptive home share apps cause, they’d find compelling stories worth telling, submitted as public comment by citizens eager to be heard and by the Neighborhood Councils and homeowners’ associations that represent them.

In the links below you can track how City Council has kicked the home share enforcement can down the policy road for nearly a decade, even as the politicians who introduced and voted on these motions have been indicted, jailed, defeated and disgraced. And nothing has changed. Obviously, nothing changing has been the plan all along.

• CF# 14-1635-S2: Short-Term Rentals / Preparation of Ordinance / Home Sharing Ordinance (Introduced 06/02/2015, died in committee 02/20/2022)

• CF #14-1635-S3: Short-Term Rentals / Ordinance Draft / Request for Information (RFI) / Permitting and Enforcement Technology Services (Introduced 06/15/2016, died in committee 10/21/2019)

• CF# 20-0995: Short Term Rental Ordinances / Short Term Rental Companies / Implementation and Enforcement (Introduced 08/11/2020, stalled in committee)

• CF# 20-1012: Home-Sharing Administrative Guidelines / Home Sharing Guest Code of Conduct / Interim Control Ordinance (ICO) / Guest Limitation / COVID-19 Pandemic (Introduced 08/13/2020, adopted 10/14/2020)

• CF# 14-1635-S10: Short-Term Rentals / Unpermitted / Non-Compliant Properties / Enforcement (Introduced 08/25/2021, stalled in committee)

And as these motions sit unheard, the public comments pile up, apparently unread by any but public policy nerds. Comments like those of Darryl Kitagawa, who wrote in 2021 to complain that his quiet Silver Lake neighborhood was under siege from an Airbnb profiteer who had purchased five RSO houses, evicted the tenants, and was renting them out for Covid lockdown parties and porn shoots.

Or Luminita Roman, who describes two new big apartment buildings just off Hollywood Boulevard, the Rubix and the Jefferson, operating as illegal party hotels, with subtenants listing as many as 40% of the units as nightly rentals. She hated living there.

Or the Venice, Silver Lake and Angeleno Heights residents whose cries for help expired unread in CF# 14-1635-S2, including the infuriating story of Mary Bagasao, blind and 89 nears old, tormented by shrieking pool partiers and threatened by the next door Airbnb “host” as she sought to die peacefully in her pretty home.

When we read her daughter Elizabeth Anne’s public comment (see pages 17-19, and Tony Butka’s column on page 33), we were overwhelmed with the impulse to call on concerned citizens to march over to Angeleno Heights and form a human wall to keep the illegal partiers out and give Mary Bagasao the peace she deserved.

But this is all ancient history. We can’t help Mary now. But you can bear witness in her memory, add your own public comment to the active council file here, respond to calls to build more new housing by talking about all the vacant and misused units, by supporting Lisa Kwon as she fights this frivolous, intimidating lawsuit, and by reminding your friends to stay in real hotels when they visit.

The only tactic that’s proved effective to stop the city from refusing to enforce its own laws is going to court for a writ of mandate. To date, Better Neighbors LA, the most active organization documenting the lack of home share compliance and talking to the media about this chronic situation has not done that—though they tried to get Judge David O. Carter involved through a 2021 amicus letter that apparently went nowhere—and we’re perplexed why they have not sought a court ruling. If you have any insights, please let us know.

Saturday’s tour is The Birth of Noir, a heady blend of lurid pulp fiction and classic cinema, told as we travel from Skid Row to Hollywood to Glendale tracing the real and filmed landmark locations that figure in the life and work of James M. Cain and the writers, actors and directors who brought his dark vision to life, including Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder and Joan Crawford. Scenes from a past tour are above. New on this date: Hollywood’s lost miniature golf empire and the shocking true crime history of the Double Indemnity death house—join us, do!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking and bus tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.

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UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS

• The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare Bus Tour (Sat. 10/21) • The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 10/28) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 Walking Tour (Sun. 10/29) • The Run: Gay Downtown History Walking Tour (Sat. 11/4) • Downtown L.A. is for Book Lovers Walking Tour (Sat. 11/11) • Special Event: Leo Politi Loves Los Angeles Bus Tour (11/18) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Walking Tour (Sat. 11/25) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop Walking Tour (Sat. 12/2) • Highland Park Arroyo Walking Tour (Sat. 12/9) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness Walking Tour (Sun. 12/17) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Walking Tour (Tues. 12/26)

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photo: Mike Callahan

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