Title says $25, which makes it sound hilariously petty.

Surely suing the city will help his reputation.

25 million is pretty extreme obviously, but he does kind of have a point.

Elected officials calling you out by name as a "slumlord" is pretty defaming, and way different than the media or private citizens doing so, and at the very least creates a suggestion that the council or Sawant personally may have targeted him as an individual, and possibly harming his business for no real reason other than a good sound bite.

It is not a good look for the council, or Sawant.

Relatedly, fuck Peter Thiel.

@3:

slum·lord

sləmˌlôrd

noun NORTH AMERICAN informal

a landlord of slum property, especially one who profiteers.

If the cockroach-infested shoe fits...

@3

I'd agree that it's a little unfair to single out one guy to serve as the face of all landlords who let their properties decay, and who don't appear to give a crap about the suffering their tenants endure due to their neglect.

What would be fair is to treat rental housing the same way we treat restaurants-- every building gets periodically inspected and scored, the scores are made available to the public, and the owners have to show you the score when you're considering doing business with them.

@6 I endorse this idea.

Though the sticky part is that people forced to rent from slumlords rarely face other options.

"shockingly inhumane"- what blather.

@3

Isn't it the case that if something unflattering is true, it's not defamation? So I guess you have to judge whether the tenants are living under slum conditions.

@7

I'm not entirely sure the people eating in restaurants with low health department scores are able to avail themselves of the full range of dining options, either.

"shockingly inhumane" is gay execution in Saudi Arabia. "Shockingly inhumane" is FGM. "Shockingly inhumane" are conditions in the City of God. The conditions presented here a cause for concern but certainly not "shockingly inhumane". Another bout of hysterical exaggeration from that idiot on the council.

@11. Check your privilege. NO one, and I mean no one, is oppressed more than a Carl Haglund tenant.

The audacity!

I'd agree that it's a little unfair to single out one guy to serve as the face of all landlords who let their properties decay, and who don't appear to give a crap about the suffering their tenants endure due to their neglect.


A case can be made for unfairness, but it's unrelated to the case for defamation. The latter requires that the assertion that Haglund is a slumlord is demonstrably false. "Other landlords do it too" is irrelevant.

He claims that Haglund is “just the opposite of a slumlord” because he planned to improve the apartments.

This is hilarious. If he was engaging in patterns of behavior (failing to keep buildings up to code while jacking up rents) that might reasonably lead one to label him a slumlord, but planning to behave differently in the future, that doesn't make him any less of a slumlord in 2015, when the words were uttered. If I rob banks for a living, but have a plan to get an honest job and go straight, that mental state doesn't make me any less of a bank robber today.

Thing is, though, it was Mr. Haglund's responsibility to know, as the landlord and owner, what the conditions in the building were, especially if he was about to increase the rent. Perhaps he did plan to fix the problems after being challenged, but that in no way gives him a pass. And it's pretty likely that his reputation wasn't worth $25 million to begin with.

Also, come on, guys, this isn't the Oppression Olympics. Living without heat is a legitimate huge complaint. And it's not as though we can't care about several problems in the world at once.

If the shoe fits...

Here's an example of the kind of slumlordism some people in Tacoma are having to deal with:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local…

Is Carl Haglund's name in the official designation of this law? Or was Kshama Sawant simply encouraging the use of his name to be associated in popular speech with a law against slumlords? Pretty sure that's protected under the First Amendment. After all, our own dear Dan Savage successfully used his column to associate the name of noted asshole Rick Santorum with something equally gross and disgusting.

I'd almost buy his "I'm the new owner who bought the buildings to make them better" defense. Except two things:

1. His plans to make all these repairs are proof that he knew how bad conditions were. Yet he raises the rent knowing exactly how inadequate the apartments were?

2. He threatened to sue poor people to silence them. Prevent them from saying that repairs were needed, which he knew to be a fact, per #1 above.

So that adds up to one thing: he IS a slumlord. Looking forward to the city recovering costs. And Sawant? He's so asking to be ordered to write her a check that she will deposit right into the coffers of Big Socialism. And the publicity is catnip to her. Make her look like a martyr and her nationwide GoFundMe will bring $20,000 a day. Also to be spent planting the seeds of Socialism.

Back down, and go fix your buildings, slumlord.

@18

You mean it already exists, but without the "score" part (inspections are pass/fail), or the "publicly available scores" part (you can't even get the date of last inspection), or the "must show the customer the score" part?

That's kind of not exactly what I described then, is it?

And while it's reasonable to go longer between rental inspections than we do with restaurants, 10 years strikes me as kind of a long time for mold, flooding, leaks, or pests to persist before an inspector comes around and suggests that perhaps something ought to be done about it.

If you're a public figure like Santorum, then you have few protections. Unfortunately or not Haglund is a private citizen who hasn't put himself in the public spotlight. There is a real liability risk to the city.

@6 Great idea, I support that too. In general I think Sawant is a race-baiting anarchist with horrible ideas but, in this case, she is probably right that Haglund is a slum-lord. If the shoe fits as someone else here stated...

@23

The news are: here's a new law (new:news. Get it?); here's one man this new law is designed to stop, and who may have been the catalyst for this new law in the first place.

The news are public by definition, therefore, -just a guess- i bet being in the news makes one, ipso facto, a public figure.

I bought property from him and then sued. He is a slumlord.

On the one hand Kashama and the City Council support and encourage squalid festering slums under every freeway overpass and park, but here they are fighting against someone who is a slumlord? Perhaps the real problem is that the wrong slumlord is profiting here? And not the "non-profit" slumlords usually in bed with the city?

@23 and 24:

What about an argument that calling someone "slumlord" is equivalent to calling him "asshole?" It is a statement of opinion, not a statement of fact, and therefore protected under Milkovich v. Loraine Journal Co. as an example of "loose, figurative, or hyperbolic language." One man's slumlord is another man's affordable housing provider, so the label is not "provably false."

I gave up on Kshama Sawant when she told people to protest outside my home under the false pretense that it was Carl Haglund's office. He is the worst, and she comes in second.

By $300 million I think you mean $100 million. And the value of the real estate Sam Israel left to his foundation was drastically undercut by the looming costs of repairs and upgrades due to his decades of neglect. Imagine if all that historic Seattle property had been owned by someone who gave a shit?

Maybe if Sawant had been denouncing him in the 1970s, his tenants wouldn't have not been gouged so badly, and made him so rich. Maybe his tenants could have left more money when they died, to whatever gets them off. Their pet private religious school, or whatever.

And by "benefit the city" I think you mean " benefit Jewish Day School, plus a little on the side to the government of Israel. I guess helping to finance a theocratic private school kind of lessens the public cost of the Seattle School District, though the City of Seattle doesn't pay for that. Anyway, what was he going to do with the money? Take it with him? And did he really deserve to amass that much wealth the way he did?

It's hard to imagine a local pol like Sawant doing more harm to Sam Israel with a couple fiery statements than the New York Times did by calling Sam Israel a slumlord to a nationwide audience. Even the Times couldn't add much to a reputation that Sam Israel himself had been destroying for decades of infamous behavior.

You know, if Sam Israel or Carl Haglund or any of these guys really gets so sad when they're called slumlords, maybe they should do the obvious thing: fix their damn buildings. That's a lot easier than trying to silence people's speech or wring money out of them when they say out loud what everybody thinks about you.

Fortunately, Seattle will soon overtake Silicon Valley as the center of our digital universe, having just replaced number two, Washington DC, and slums like this will soon be gone. At the rate Amazon alone is growing there simply won't be a market for the kind of product Haglund offers. Buildings like his will be torn down, along with all the other crappy housing, and replaced with far more attractive and interesting housing that's far more suitable to the young, well educated and high-paid workforce that is taking over the city.

Props to Jeff Bezos for having the vision to see that with the right technical infrastructure, these often very outdoorsy types would be far happier here than in hell holes like San Jose or DC, with have shorter commutes and more affordable housing. Like Jonathan Raban said, Seattle is the only city in the country where people move to get closer to nature. And it's ironic that Bezos, the guy who's in the business of killing businesses, is now in the business of killing slum lords. Thank you, Jeff!

@34
You're slipping; there's nothing in your comment about how hard you work.

It won't survive summary judgment.

spunk: Oops, thanks for catching that. But, yeah, that's why I get to sit in the big chair.

@37
They're Super-Sizing toilets now? Who knew?

JULY 21, 2017 9:19 PM. A Pierce County judge says a notorious Seattle landlord — not thieves — tried to profit from cutting wires throughout a vacant Tacoma apartment building and ordered him to pay $1.1 million. Developer Carl Haglund was unsuccessful defending himself against a lawsuit related to the scheme, and Superior Court Judge Kathryn Nelson ordered him to pay for it June 29.

So he is a slumlord AND a moron. Good luck with that lawsuit, doof.

@3 I see your point but I'd also offer as others already have that you have to be a special kind of simple idiot to buy a building so fucked up that it netted 200 separate code violations, in the first place and be mystifyingly unaware that the building hasn't sunk into the earth through the sheer will of duct tape and prayers.

Sucks to be called out by the city like this but if we pretend that he's not lying through his butt hurt teeth, he looks like a willfully obtuse asshole who just wanted to get in on the real estate speculation. There's no good look here for him and I have to wonder if suing the city is in part a way to fund the massive amounts of money required to bring the building back from the brink. He might be better served by suing the former owners for not disclosing the extent of the trouble the building was in (if that's the story he's going to stick to) but I suspect that will just reveal that he knew how in trouble the building was and simply didn't give a shit.

spunk: Thank you for the laugh. It's probably the million dollar idea - you could call them 'generously sized', like they call pants for the weight challenged. I might buy one myself, but not for an office chair. I have Herman Miller Aeron for that. Large size.

Slumlords are great. In college I rented from this dude who gave us rock-bottom rent. He never fixed anything in the place, but then, we didn't expect it, due to the cheap rent. We unclogged drains and snaked toilets ourselves. Thank god for cheap housing. I didn't have any money at all back then.