Oakland is suing a prominent Bay Area landlord, alleging the company failed to fix two broken elevators for 52 days last summer, endangering disabled and elderly tenants in a six-story downtown building.
The lawsuit, about the Mosser Companies’ La Peralta building on 13th Street, is the city’s first case invoking its new Elevator Ordinance. The 2024 law requires landlords to pursue immediate repairs to inoperable elevators, communicating their plans to tenants and offering alternative housing to people who can’t easily use the stairs.
“Throughout the nearly two-month elevator outage, Defendants failed to comply with any of these requirements, jeopardizing the health and safety of their tenants,” the Oakland City Attorney’s Office wrote in the lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The legal complaint, naming Mosser and CEO Neveo Mosser as defendants, details how several tenants were allegedly impacted by the delayed repairs. A fourth-floor tenant with lung disease and asthma has difficulty walking or talking, the suit says. She was allegedly relocated by Mosser to La Peralta after she dealt with similar elevator outages — and was once trapped for hours in an elevator — at another of the company’s properties in San Francisco.
During the 52 days the fixtures were inoperable, this tenant “was forced to climb four flights of stairs to get home, an ordeal that required her to stop and rest for ten to fifteen minutes between each landing just to recover her breath,” the city alleges in the lawsuit.
She visited Mosser’s San Francisco office to ask for accommodations. According to the city, she was offered a smaller lower-floor apartment but was asked to pay the same rent and a new security deposit. She declined. A few months later, after the tenant told Mosser that litigation would be coming, according to the lawsuit, they moved her to another building in Oakland, though allegedly didn’t provide any relocation funds. At that property, on E. 18th Street, she again found elevator troubles, the city says.
Another tenant, Kathy “Kit” Vaquilar, is quoted in a city press release saying the outage was particularly difficult because it occurred during the hot summer months.
“I had to plan every trip up and down the stairs, which, at my age, would take about 10 minutes every time,” she said.
In the lawsuit, Oakland blames the outages at La Peralta on “avoidable delays,” claiming Mosser failed to pay its contractors who service elevators. Chronic elevator issues existed before the 52-day period the lawsuit focuses on, according to the city attorney.
“In just one year, from 2024 to 2025, the Oakland Fire Department freed tenants trapped in La Peralta’s elevators fourteen times,” the city claims.
Reached by phone this morning, a Mosser employee directed us to email a property manager with the company. We requested an interview but did not hear back from him today.
The Mosser Companies was founded by the Mosser family in San Francisco in the 1950s. Today, the corporation owns and manages more than 3,000 housing units in California, according to the city and Mosser. It’s especially active in San Francisco, where it owns dozens of buildings. Over the past decade, Mosser bought, and then sold, a number of Oakland properties, as well.
Mosser has run into financial troubles, including foreclosures, over the past couple of years.
The city attorney alleges that it was only after media coverage of the lengthy outage last summer that Mosser took action and notified tenants the elevators would be fixed. The city claims Mosser said in this notice that tenants would have access to on-site help with groceries, laundry, and packages in the meantime, but never provided this service.
A group of tenants has filed a separate lawsuit against Mosser that details similar accusations around broken elevators and mistreatment. Credit: Darwin BondGraham/The Oaklandside
Earlier this year, a group of tenants at La Peralta also sued Mosser, making similar allegations about habitability, broken elevators, and mistreatment by the landlord. Their lawsuit, which is ongoing, alleges that Mosser has a history of neglecting elevator issues at many of its properties.
Ethan Silverstein, an attorney at Movement Legal who’s representing the tenants, said he’s pleased to see the city filing suit too.
“I’m very happy the city is enforcing its laws,” he said.
Silverstein previously represented tenants who filed a series of lawsuits against Mosser and another company, Invesco, alleging habitability issues and harassment at their Oakland properties in 2021. In one of those cases, a class-action suit alleging illegal utility charges, the tenants settled with Mosser, which agreed to pay $975,000, according to public information.
In addition to accusing Mosser of violating the Elevator Ordinance, the city alleges the company has broken other tenant protection laws. The suit mentions water and fire damage Mosser has allegedly failed to repair after multiple notices by the city, which eventually recorded a lien against the property. The city also accuses the company of “constructive eviction,” or the process of forcing tenants out by leaving habitability issues unaddressed.
City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose district includes the 13th Street building, threw her support behind the lawsuit in a press release.
“No Oaklander should be trapped in their own home or forced to risk their safety on a stairwell because a landlord fails to provide basic maintenance,” she said.
The city is asking for Mosser to fix violations in the building, provide restitution to tenants, pay attorneys’ fees, and relinquish any profits made through illegal actions.
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