Massive Tenant Union Demands Its Corporate Landlord Bargain With Them

Last year, San Francisco passed a first-of-its-kind law that mandated that landlords must bargain in good faith with tenant unions when more than half of a building’s tenants sign on.

Yet members of Veritas Tenant Association (VTA), a city-wide union that pushed for the law’s passage, say their corporate landlord has refused to bargain in good faith and is refusing to recognize several unions in Veritas-owned buildings that organized under the law. 

Veritas owns more than 200 apartment buildings in San Francisco and is one of the city’s largest landlords. The VTA says the company is refusing to negotiate on rent and insisting on taking many members to court individually, sometimes over a month’s worth of missed rent. 

“They have not respected us, they have not wanted to negotiate anything with any of us, they don't accept us. Basically, it's like we don't exist for them,” one Veritas tenant, Adriana Mendoza, told Motherboard through a Spanish language interpreter.

Mendoza, a Veritas tenant since 2004, received an unlawful detainer notice—in which a landlord requests the right to evict a tenant—from Veritas over $1,200 of unpaid rent. Mendoza says she received a 3-day notice asking her to leave in September 2022 and that the company stopped accepting her rent altogether in November 2022. Because she could not pay, her past due rent grew to about $8000 when the company filed the notice. 

Under the “Organize at Home” law, Veritas does not have to negotiate with VTA’s citywide body—it only has to negotiate separately with individual building associations.

“It's currently a fight as to whether Veritas will actually negotiate with the VTA as a city-wide union,” said Brad Hirn, an organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco. “The law doesn't obligate them to do that. And we know that, but it is what the VTA thinks is necessary and is working and aspiring to do right now.”

But the law is very clear that Veritas has to recognize and negotiate with building-wide tenant associations. The company is currently recognizing 20 building associations and is contesting another 12. Two more buildings plan on submitting petitions in the next few weeks, Hirn said.

Hirn says Veritas is trying to invalidate some building associations by calling each tenant individually to confirm their signature. If the tenant doesn’t respond to a phone call or email, Veritas rejects their signature. In many cases, Hirn says, residents who were contacted don’t speak English, so they might not necessarily be able to easily respond to the company’s emails.

“They insist on contacting each and every tenant individually and asking them, 'Did you sign this?' It has become a way for them to actually claim that some of the signatures are not valid,” Hirn said.

Hirn said Veritas’ method of individually contacting tenants “creates a lot of room for intimidation.” Even in buildings where Veritas has recognized the union, “The one thing that is still common across those is that Veritas refuses to negotiate in good faith on anything related to rent,” Hirn said.

Mendoza lost her job as a restaurant cook during the pandemic and had trouble paying her $951 monthly rent. She applied for and received $17,000 worth of federal rent relief last year, which Veritas accepted. But she was still short $1,200 when Veritas gave her a 3-day notice to leave, she said. 

Mendoza, her attorney, and the VTA claim that Veritas made promises to waive rent not covered by pandemic rent relief, but has since suggested those assurances were misinterpreted by tenants. 

A December 2021 email to tenants from GreenTree Property Management, a subsidiary of Veritas that handles tenant communication, says “GreenTree will GUARANTEE that any resident of ours who applies for and qualifies for state ERAP funds but may be denied some or all of the benefit to which they’re entitled (should funds become insufficient to cover the need at some point in the future), has our commitment that the remaining balance—up to the maximum coverage period—will be forgiven, period.”

In a February 2022 email viewed by Motherboard, Veritas Chief Operations Officer Jeff Jerden seems to walk this back, writing, “It is uncharted territory, but my thinking is along the lines of a partial repayment over some period of time in exchange for the balance being forgiven. Our earlier rent relief actions back in the summer of 2020 probably provides a good model.”

Mendoza’s case did not go to trial and ended last week with a court settlement in her favor: Veritas offered to waive $5,000 of her past due rent and agreed she would apply to a state program for the rest. 

Mendoza’s attorney says that Veritas may have been eager to reach a settlement after a visit from the Department of Buildings (DOB). A few weeks after Mendoza received her 3-day notice, “The DOB came in their routine checks and found this building has a lot of violations,” says Tim Kelly, an attorney representing Mendoza and many other VTA members pro bono. San Francisco has a law barring landlords from demanding rent or initiating an eviction if a health and safety code violation has not been abated 35 days after a notice is received. 

A notice of violation viewed by Motherboard shows that a building inspector arrived on September 26 and found 15 violations, including broken handrails, windows that couldn’t open or close, a broken latch on the front door, malfunctioning lighting, trash buildup and storage items blocking hallways and fire escapes.

Other Veritas cases may be on similar footing, Kelly says, but the company is still pursuing them. The so-called “Organize At Home” ordinance requiring landlords to negotiate could have helped avoid this trial and about 20 others involving VTA members with pandemic rent debt. But Kelly says that the company is refusing to negotiate and moving ahead with evictions.

“They've started way too many evictions against people over relatively modest amounts and avoided any sort of good faith negotiations ahead of time,” Kelly said.

Veritas has been propped up by massive Wall Street loans, including an $815 million loan from Goldman Sachs in 2016. Earlier this year the company defaulted on a $448 million commercial loan, which it blamed on pandemic vacancies and tenant-friendly laws.

Since the VTA was founded in 2017, the tenant union has frequently come into conflict with the corporation.

A 2018 investigation by San Francisco news outlet 48 Hills found that debt service in one of its neglected buildings had nearly doubled, and that the company’s business model was based on deregulating rent regulated apartments in order to raise rents. That year, the city’s Board of Supervisors passed a law, which the VTA advocated for, making it illegal for a landlord to pass the cost of the building’s purchase—including Veritas’ ballooning mortgages—onto tenants. 

In October 2018, 68 Veritas tenants sued the company alleging that it was harassing them into leaving by neglecting repairs, shutting off gas and water and engaging in loud construction. 

In 2020, the VTA seemed to get some concessions from Veritas: the company agreed to waive rent debt from the first few months of the pandemic. The concessions came after Veritas had been criticized by Nancy Pelosi for accepting $3.6 million in PPP loans intended for small businesses despite being valued at $3 billion.

When the Organize At Home law was passed in 2022, Veritas attempted to dissuade tenants from organizing with a series of harsh rules prohibiting public notices and soliciting. 

The company also once provided a free yoga class at the exact date and time that the VTA was holding a meeting for its citywide union, Kelly said. “You guys have never done that before, that's that's an interesting date and hour to pick...never done that since then,” he recalled thinking.

The Organize at Home ordinance contains some enforcement for violators; complainants can request a rent reduction from San Francisco’s Rent Board, but cases can take months to process. Five Veritas building unions have petitioned the Rent Board on this basis, claiming the company is refusing to bargain in good faith. One of those petitions went to a mediation with Veritas, but the company is not following through on the mediation, Hirn said.

He said that while Veritas buildings haven’t won rent concessions through negotiation, the ordinance is still helpful in that it encourages tenants to organize. “We have definitely heard from tenants that they feel a greater sense of community, they know more of their neighbors,” he said.

The ordinance may still need to be tweaked, but Hirn said the VTA will continue organizing regardless. “It's never going to provide everything,” he said. “And it would be a mistake to rely on it for everything. At the end of the day, the VTA believes in public action and holding Veritas accountable in very public ways.”

Veritas did not respond to multiple requests for comment.