Bellevue landlord Jaskaran Singh will host a second “Landlord Lives Matter” protest this Saturday against a financially unstable family of five facing eviction from a Bellevue rental home after his protest last weekend caught national media attention.
While conservative press insists Singh faces a great injustice because tenant Sang Kim is “exploiting the system,” the family in crisis told The Stranger that the spectacle at their rental home is just the latest episode in their landlord’s use of intimidation tactics to bypass “the system,” the proper channels of eviction, all together.
The “Exploitation” in Question
Kim, his wife, and three school-aged children moved into the Bellevue rental home in 2022. At the time, Kim said his job related to “business development and procurement for PPE loans” paid him enough to afford the $4,500 monthly rent for the five-bedroom, 1950s home. But then, Kim said, he unexpectedly lost his job in April of 2023. He stopped paying rent in May 2023 and has not paid since.
According to King County court records, Urbanview 2110 LLC, the company that owns the home, tried to evict Kim and his family in July of 2023. The judge dismissed the case in November without trial because the landlord did not plead a “cause of action” such as non-payment of rent.
Seemingly learning from its mistake, the company filed another eviction with King County Superior Court in January 2024 that listed non-payment as the reason. When Kim missed his deadline to respond to his summons, his lawyers filed an emergency motion to avoid eviction. According to court documents, Kim missed the deadline because his landlord gave “confusing” instructions, he had to attend to a family emergency, and because of the mental toll that negative press and alleged harassment has had on his family. The judge gave a stay, which pauses the eviction until the judge decides on Kim’s motion.
“I don’t know what [Singh] means by ‘exploiting the system’,” Kim said. “I’m just going through the legal system like I’m supposed to.”
What’s going on here is that the right-wing media wants to perpetuate a narrative that tenants have learned how to game renter protections passed by the communists in the State Legislature, which is causing mass injustice for those who profit from renting houses.
Sen. Patty Kuderer (D-Bellevue) led the charge on much of the tenant protections passed in recent years, most notably the 2019 reforms to the decades-old Residential Landlord Tenant Act.
In a phone interview with The Stranger, Kuderer said that landlord attorneys wrote the original Residential Landlord Tenant Act and made it a “slam dunk” for their clients to evict tenants, creating some of the most unfair eviction laws in the nation. Kuderer and her colleagues made “modest changes” to “level the playing field” in their 2019 edit. Then, once the pandemic hit, she passed the first-in-the-nation right-to-counsel for tenants facing eviction.
Landlords sometimes blame these bills, or the Democrats more generally, for creating a backlog of eviction cases. Eviction cases shot up in King County to about 55% of pre-pandemic levels when pandemic aid dried up, but it’s unclear if judges rule any slower when defendants have a right to counsel. One lawyer said for the most part cases seem to happen at about the same rate as they did before the new law.
“The law was not intended to slow the process,” Kuderer said. “The law was intended to make the process more fair.”
Kuderer doesn’t take tenants losing their housing lightly, but she didn’t make evictions impossible. Between April 2020 and March 2023, the Housing Justice Project (HJP) Eviction Tracker reported more than 3,300 eviction filings. Of those, HJP could only verify 10% of tenants staying housed. In most cases–about 40%—the landlord won and the tenant got evicted.
Not only do they still come out on top in evictions, the State Legislature also compensated for the new renter protections with additional protections for landlords, Kuderer said. Landlords receive assistance from the State’s Landlord Mitigation Program, the Tenancy Preservation Program, Landlord Survivor Relief Program, the $2 billion in rental assistance distributed by the Legislature during the early days of the pandemic, and they enjoy an exemption from business and occupation taxes on their rental income.
The State also cut its mediation program when landlords and tenants complained about it slowing or muddying the process. Plus, it’s not like the Democrats could even gather the gusto to pass the wimpiest version of rent stabilization known to man this year or any time in the last five years.
And, of course, the law still offers many more protections for those who pay mortgages rather than rents, as homeowners have months and even more than a year to avoid foreclosure in cases of nonpayment.
But, sure, the State Legislature, which is composed almost entirely of homeowners, has a bias toward renters.
Extrajudicial Action
While a judge could rule in the landlord’s favor as soon as next month, Kim said Singh is “cutting corners” to evict his family through a months-long intimidation campaign.
Kim accused Singh of complaining about him and his family on online forums. Singh then took those complaints to reporters in November 2023, putting Kim’s name and face on the internet for public ridicule. Kim’s children accused Singh’s children, who go to the same school, of bullying. In a January text message, Kim accused Singh’s child of taunting his daughter. The child allegedly said “my dad owns your house, bitch” and then asked her why Kim doesn’t pay rent. In a March text message, Kim accused Singh’s son of “leaving poops on my son’s car” and continuing to bully his daughter. Singh responded, “you are making up these stories” in a subsequent text.
The latest action, the “Landlord Lives Matter” protest outside the rental property on Saturday, left Kim and his family fearing for their safety, particularly when a man with a hockey stick allegedly broke into Kim’s backyard.
The protest stands in clear violation of a temporary protection order a judge granted Kim against Singh the day before. According to posts from Singh’s supporters on Twitter, the landlord plans to host another protest outside Kim’s house this Saturday. Singh allegedly plans to stay 1,000 feet away from Kim to comply with the protection order. It’s giving “I’m not touching you!”
Edmund Witter, the managing attorney at Housing Justice Project, a pro bono legal group representing Kim, told The Stranger that in the state of Washington, landlords have “always been prohibited from ousting tenants by using force, menacing, or threats of violence.”
In this case, Witter said, the LLC, acting through Singh, is “encouraging harassment of a renter and his minor children” in disregard of the anti-harassment order, in violation of the state’s anti-doxxing law, and in defiance of the state’s long prohibition of coercing tenants in “an effort to cause extreme distress to the tenant and his family.”
“There is no justification for that,” Witter said in a text to The Stranger.
Singh’s lawyer, Steven Freeborn, did not respond to my request for comment, but I will update if he does.
Reporter or Rallier?
But Kim doesn’t put all the blame for the protest on Singh. He said the last action appeared manufactured by right-wing journalist Jonathon Choe. For one, Choe leaked Kim’s address in an open-invitation to the protest on Twitter. Kim thinks the invite did its job—he did not recognize many of the protesters, calling into question Choe’s claim that “neighbors” came out in support of Singh. He also said he saw Choe “egging on” the protest, encouraging participants to bang on his door for videos and antagonizing the cops as if he were hoping to escalate the situation. Another eyewitness told The Stranger he agreed that Choe was “riling up” the crowd.
This is highly disturbing.
Choe, at the behest of a private landlord in Bellevue, has embarked on a harassment campaign against a tenant.
The landlord organized a protest, while Choe blasted the tenant’s address on social media.
Yes that’s a landlord lives matter sign 🙄 pic.twitter.com/XAPvBKrVFb
— Alycia Ramirez (@AlyciaRamirez3) March 17, 2024
Most recently, Choe advertised Singh’s upcoming action, once again posting Kim’s address. He also encouraged his large following to donate to Singh’s GoFundMe, which raised more than $2,000 in its first 12 hours online.
“Choe doesn’t care about my family, he doesn’t even care about my landlord. He cares about getting a story, even if it means making one up,” Kim told The Stranger in a phone interview.
When asked for comment, Choe said, “…do I really need to respond to this absurd allegation from a serial squatter who’s currently fleecing an Indian immigrant? Please show me proof. Didn’t think so cause it never happened.”
Kim said the media wants to make him look as bad as possible in order to get more attention. Reporters usually highlight Singh’s complaint that Kim has two “new” cars in his driveway despite not paying rent. First of all, those aren’t Kim’s cars, technically. His son, who has his own job and his own income, bought a used car for himself. The other car—“not a Lexus, not a Mercedes, a no-down-payment Mazda” belongs to his wife, which she bought so she could get to work after Kim gave his car to his mom so she can drive to take care of his dad in the hospital.
Efforts to villainize Kim do not help the situation, even for the landlord, Kim argued. He claims the negative attention has cost him a job opportunity that could have helped him pay rent. So now Kim’s training to become a paid caretaker for his aging parents.
Kim also fears landlords won’t allow him to rent if they recognize him from the negative press. That said, an eviction over non-payment of rent would similarly fuck him over.
Kim didn’t have anything to say about his hopes for his next hearing. Right now, he’s just taking it one day at a time. When asked about his thoughts on the upcoming second protest, Kim said in a text, “I can’t do anything about it….”
If you want a sympathetic poster child as an example of someone who shouldn’t be evicted, a family containing two members who have jobs and can afford to buy cars but still has not paid rent in 10 months is not it. There are deadbeats in the world and these people would appear to be them.
“Eviction cases shot up in King County to about 55% of pre-pandemic levels when pandemic aid dried up . . . .”
I’ve been waiting for the Stranger to circle back and report on the predicted “tsunami” of evictions. Sounds like it never materialized.
Hasn’t paid rent in 10 months but claims he’s being harassed.
Ridiculous, but completely believable in a place like Seattle.
It’s very hard in TS reality bubble to admit that while an overall policy can be beneficial there are going to be cases where people abuse said policies. Instead of doubling down and demonizing those who are victims of these abuses TS should admit when an abuse has taken place and then they would have much more credibility when they comment on these things. This goes for tenant rights, the serial shoplifters and the various vagrants populating parks. The only thing TS accomplishes by leaning into nonsense like this is losing more and more of the popular support for these policies which is why you saw the police chase ban completely overturned in the last legislative session.
Completely absent from this story is the fact that Kim apparently pulled this same non-payment squatter scam on the last house he was in. From the Daily Mail:
“But the squatter’s freeloading dates back almost four years, according to a declaration signed by local estate agent Jani Spencer in support of Singh’s eviction proceedings against Kim.
In her statement, Spencer claims a couple she had sold a $1.3million Bellevue property to contacted her in September 2020 complaining that they had rented it to Kim but he was no longer paying up.
Kim was served with a 90-day eviction notice, which he ignored, but it then took until March 2022 to get a court date and the summer of that year for him to finally be evicted, Spencer stated.
She said that during that time she spoke to Kim ‘several times’ and he ‘always had a story about getting money, waiting for some partner or employer to pay him’.
Ultimately, the landlords lost two years of rental income, worth around $100,000, $5,000 in unpaid utilities, $20,000 in repairs and around $100,000 in the value of the property once they were finally able to sell it, Spencer claims.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13215967/serial-squatter-refuses-leave-seattle-property-landlords-rent.html
Sadly, this squatter and the rental policies of Tammy Morales, Teresa Mosqueda, etc will make it very difficult for people with lower incomes or credit scores below 700 to find housing.
If this is what people want, than local government must build massive public housing projects.
Seattle’s $1Billion Housing Levy only promises to build 3,100 units over seven year 2024-2031. 3,100 apts.
In 2022, Seattle lost over 10,000 apts–yes, in just one year. (Source: Seattle’s Rental Registration database)
Small landlord are selling out to developers and affordable apartments are being turned into $900K townhouses.
Good luck finding an apartment!
@3 and 6 this is in Bellevue you’re embarrassing yourselves
Facts aside, co-opting a slogan originally intended to bring attention to police brutality is low. It’s laughable, considering the growing influence of corporate property owners. Will someone think of the portfolio please!
@6 – that’s exactly right. There are lots of decent people who have low credit scores but will pay their rent just as they should. Pieces of shit like this guy are precisely why most landlords won’t consider renting to them. Requiring a high credit score is the best way (and really the only way in Seattle) to weed out the Mr. Kims of the world.
@8 – whether this particular scumbag is in Bellevue or not is irrelevant. This is a Seattle paper, and the major laws that are making it hard for tenants (e.g., pushing landlords to require high credit scores) are mainly Seattle ordinances. While most of the discussion we see here pertains to Seattle, this case nicely illustrates the problem created by 1) making it hard to weed out bad tenants before you sign a lease and 2) making it almost impossible to get rid of them once they turn out to be deadbeats.
@11 “the problem created by Seattle laws is perfectly illustrated by this example from Bellevue” is absurd on its face.
But engaging with the merits anyway for the sake of argument, the article says absolutely nothing about the landlord having had challenges screening tenants, and he probably would have got his eviction last year if–as the article explains–the suit he filed in July didn’t inexplicably neglect to mention that the tenant had stopped paying rent in May. This landlord isn’t in this situation because of any unfavorable laws, he’s in this situation because all available evidence indicates he’s incompetent.
@12 Perhaps the guy is not incompetent but rather a small time property owner without experience in this world. He is paying taxes on this property and these people, with a history of this foolishness are taking advantage. No attempt to make any payments at all. Sorry but the wrong poster children for your cause.
@12- I’m not arguing that this happened because of Seattle’s laws. Obviously it’s Bellevues that would matter. I’m pointing out that there really are deadbeat tenants in the world, as this demonstrates, and that the raft of “tenants’ rights” laws that have been enacted in a variety of jurisdictions are raising the risk of getting into this situation dramatically. Yes, the landlord here screwed up procedurally. If he were in Seattle, he might not even have had the chance to try an eviction. No evictions during the school year, for example if the city wants to make housing a guaranteed right whether you pay your bills or not, fine. But that cost should fall on the entire city, not the minority who own rental property.
@10 dvs99 Exactly right.
There are so many people that have had hardships–like divorce, medically bankruptcies, etc–that has ruined their credit scores. The Stranger and liberal leftists would excoriate these renters. They will never qualify to rent an apartment in today’s rental market. No small landlord will ever risk renting to a rental with less than a credit score less than 725.
The Stranger and progressives think this is great. Small landlords think this is tragic.
Seattle will now be dominated by big, corporate, Wall Street landlords. Progressive have removed small, mom-and-pop, local landlords from Seattle Fuck you Tammy Morales, Teresa Mosqueda, and Kshama Sawant–you have fucked over marginal renters.
So the son and wife live in the house, work, bought cars and they haven’t paid anything towards rent for over one year? And you defend this? How about if your employer did that?
so, like, i’m a fucking landlord. of one property, which i inherited because my parents died of cancer at an unfortunately early age. i rent the rooms out, at cost, often to friends, or friends of friends. i have been treated well by many. sometimes been fucked over. whatever. the problem i see here is that we have a defecit of affordable housing. its unachievable to rent a fucking house on a single family based income. so, yeah, people are going to default on their stuff. sucks for the landlords right? also sucks for the fucked and bound lower class. even in this city, we are not catching up. how can any one of you argue that its the “landlords fault” when our rental housing market got entirely bought up by shitbag investment firms. for fuck sake, i get about 7 calls a week from those companies asking if i will sell my property. i refuse. TS is actually calling out a legitimate problem here and you all can’t even be spared the expense to see what’s wrong in our system. please take some time to see why our housing situation is so messed up.
@17 – you’re right there is a housing crisis. We have not built enough houses. THAT is the root of the problem.
But the way we manage what we have also matters. And the crowd who insist that tenants have a God-given right to stay in a rental place whether they pay rent or not are contributing mightily to the problem. People like Mr. Singh, who own one or a few rentals, are getting out of the market as fast as they can because the risks have become untenable. And the only landlords left will be the large corporate ones (your “shitbag investment firms”). And what rentals are going to be left will be increasingly unavailable to tenants seen as higher risk. Some of them are asshats like the Kims. More of them are probably people who had medical debt or are coming out of a crisis like a divorce, as @15 notes. But the Kim of the world and their enablers (as in the good Sen. Kuderer, or the Seattle City Council) are ruining it for everyone.
Reminder to 12 Thirteen12: Teresa Mosqueda is now on the King County Council. Her rental laws from her time on the Seattle City Council resulted in the loss of over 10,000 locally owned affordable rentals–in just 2022 alone. Seattle will never get those rentals back.
Mosqueda’s war on landlords and The Stranger’s “I hate landlords” articles–are hurting lower income renters and/or renters with credit scores under 700.
As local, mom-and-pops sell their rentals to developers and leave the market, Corporate Landlords–with teams of lawyers–fill the void.
Be careful what you wish for….
@19 you’re wrong, Seattle added housing units during that period
https://publicola.com/2023/12/26/decline-in-mom-and-pop-rentals-driven-by-national-trends-not-local-renter-protections-city-audit-finds/
@20 “both the renter and landlord seem like assholes here”
100% agree that’s why all the people protesting on behalf of one of those assholes (in this case the landlord) are weirdos
@21 thirteen12 – I was not there for the protest last weekend, but I would love to go for the next protest. You say – “both the renter and landlord seem like assholes here”. Yes, landlord was perhaps naive (for screwing up the eviction process) and overzealous (for organizing the protest in front of his house). But the renter is a thief. If he does not have money to pay for rent, he should have moved. I am sure there are other houses available in the Seattle metro that will fit his budget. If you cannot pay, you cannot stay. The owner of the house, Singh, has to pay the mortgage too – if he does not, his house will get repossessed. He is running a business – and Kim is stealing from him. It is as simple as that.
@22 – I wonder how many of the people defending Kim would be sympathetic if Kim moved but the landlord kept taking rent out of his bank account for the next year? It’s really no different.
@22 the landlord’s not running a business he made an investment in housing. Sometimes investments don’t work out.
And the tenant isn’t a “thief” the parties are having a contract dispute which is playing out in court per the applicable law. Like I wrote, if the landlord wasn’t incompetent the tenant likely would have been removed last year. Given the way he’s now choosing the handle the situation the landlord appears to be not just incompetent but also a clown. I don’t feel bad for him at all.
@23 presumably Kim would contact his bank to report and put a stop to the fraudulent withdrawals. Or maybe he’d be too stupid to accomplish that and instead a year later organize a ridiculous protest in front of the landlord’s house in conjunction with a local failed journalist Twitter influencer.
This is the low quality of journalism I’ve come to expect from the far-left news site, The Stranger (it couldn’t even make it as a newspaper. It’s a glorified blog at this point).
The author of this article makes Kim out to be a “victim” of a vindictive landlord. She doesn’t even bother interviewing the landlord because doing so would be inconvenient to her strongly biased narrative. I found it amusing that she referred to the house as “Kim’s home” even though it belongs to the landlord, Singh, and Kim hasn’t paid any rent for over a year. I suppose, by that logic, I can walk into any house and say it’s mine, even if I don’t live there, own, or pay rent.
Turns out Kim also skipped out on paying rent in the last place he lived, costing that landlord over $80,000 in fees. Additionally, he makes over $400k a year in combined family income. Did he have to give his car away to his parents when he knew he was behind on rent? Is there any reason why the son with the new car is unable to contribute towards the backlog in rent payments.
He’s not the victim here: He’s a thief and a criminal who’s dragging his entire family down with him. The real victim here is the landlord, who bought the house and is now losing money on his investment.
Stranger, get your act together and at least pretend to have a shred of journalistic integrity.
@24 – thirteen12, the landlord is running a business. He is a small business owner. And this is not just a ‘contract’ dispute. The WA housing laws clearly say that no matter what, the tenant has to pay the rent and cannot withhold the rent. Similarly, the landlord has some obligations too – they cannot change the locks or shut down utilities or make the house uninhabitable in any way. Kim is not withholding his end of his bargain – whereas Singh is doing what he is supposed to do. Do you see that?
@27 Washington housing laws say that no matter what a tenant must pay rent? What if you let family stay in a house you own, they have to pay too? If you don’t make them pay do you get arrested or your house is confiscated or what? That sounds crazy, can you link me to the law you’re talking about?
An evicted person walks away whole A foreclosed person looses everything they’ve invested in the house, usually hundreds of thousands of dollars. This reporter obviously doesn’t understand the difference.
@28 thirteen12 – Yes, the tenant MUST pay rent no matter what. That is one of the most basic expectations from the tenant. The WA housing laws are here – https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=59.18&full=true
Or a simplified (non-legalese) version is here – https://www.washingtonlawhelp.org/resource/your-rights-as-a-tenant-in-washington
Even if the landlord refuses to make repairs, the tenant cannot skip rent. That is the only way the renter can fulfill their obligations. Of course, they can take the landlord to court. Under certain circumstances, the renters can deposit rent in an escrow account – pending court judgment. And so on.
I did not understand the example you gave about renting to your family. I cannot comment on that. But net-net, if you sign a rental agreement with your family, they are obligated to pay. You are, of course, not obligated to make them pay (or evict them). I hope you understood the difference.
@24- in what universe is a landlord not running a business? An “investment” is when you put money into stocks or whatever and see what happens. A business is when you buy what’s needed to engage in business (a house), deal with clients or customers (tenants), incur costs of operation (taxes, repairs, etc.), and generate income from sales or contracts (rents). The effort involved in night and day different. And when you’re running a business, you expect that your customers will honor their end of the bargain. Kim didn’t and hasn’t. It’s pretty simple.
Wow, these numbers turn on each other worse than the lessee and landlord in the story.
I was a small holding LandLord ’til the City Council went insane. My 3 units, a total of 5 bedrooms, all at below market rate are now renting at a premium. I cashed out, retired, but I do look back from time to time… thinking I’d consider renting, banking my current equity, reducing my monthly outlay.
The idea scares me into indecision.
If all you ever have done is rent, you likely don’t understand all that is at stake. At the short end is non-payment, through to cooking meth or other public nuisance. That means serious financial hardship through to bankruptcy. No wonder so many in my situation jumped ship, leaving the properties in the hands of vulture capitalists.
I enjoy the anecdotal tale of a worst case scenario that isn’t a worst case scenario. But this is the margin. This story is in the less than 1% of cases. This is hype and noise, not signal.
Not the majority of what happens when the able bodied are unemployed in the easiest economy to get hired in decades.
Something smells like desperation here.