SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
The Mercury News
April 5, 2018
By Marisa Kendall
Cindy Chau seemed to have it made. She paid $1,200 a month for a rent-controlled, one bedroom apartment in San Francisco – a city where tenants regularly shell out nearly three times that.
But Chau alleges living there came with a hidden cost not spelled out in any lease – a property manager who bombarded her with sexual text messages and persistent come-ons, once propositioning her in her own home while he was supposed to be fixing her sink.
“I just couldn’t go back to living there,” Chau said. “I didn’t feel safe.”
While the #MeToo movement has shed light on workplace sexual harassment in California’s technology sector, entertainment industry, politics and beyond, little attention is paid to the same abuses between landlords and tenants. But tenants-rights lawyers say the harassment Bay Area women are reporting – from unwanted touching to offers of free rent in exchange for sex – is particularly chilling because it involves someone with keys to the victim’s home and the power to take that home away. And with local rent prices soaring, many women can’t put an end to the harassment by moving out, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else.
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