By Katie Wilson

The Seattle Times recently published an opinion piece by Jason Roth, whose story of a “nightmare tenant” has been making the rounds of talk radio and TV news, reaching national and even international audiences. It’s a harrowing tale. 

The Times’ author bio calls Roth “a working mechanic and pilot school student who owns a home in South Seattle and currently lives in his van.” How did this hard-working homeowner become homeless? Roth had the misfortune of renting his home to a deadbeat tenant. Not only did the tenant fail to pay rent, he had the audacity to illegally list space on Airbnb! Roth finally resorted to eviction, but he found the court process convoluted and biased in the tenant’s favor. His legal fees piled up and he had to give up the apartment he was renting and sleep in his van. He was so desperate he even started asking for help through a GoFundMe page.

Renter advocates often point to the homelessness crisis as a reason to strengthen tenant protections. Roth’s story suggests a different picture, one of progressive overreach: The scales have tilted so far toward renters’ rights, now it’s the landlords who can’t keep a roof overhead! This is the kind of story that could cause lawmakers to think twice before approving funds for tenant legal counsel or passing laws to prevent unjust evictions.

I wouldn’t expect Jason Rantz and Brandi Kruse—two local conservative talking heads who helped amplify Roth’s version of events—to let the truth spoil a politically useful story. But The Seattle Times really should have done some fact-checking. A little digging reveals a different picture. 

While news stories mention Roth making mortgage payments on the Beacon Hill rental house, there’s no evidence of a mortgage or deed of trust in the land records. Instead, it appears to be owned outright by an LLC of which Roth’s father, Cary Roth, is the only listed governor and executor. The same LLC (under a previous name) owned a West Seattle beachfront home worth over $2 million, which was transferred to Roth’s parents in 2022.

In an interview, Roth seemed surprised that he was not listed as the “sole member” of the LLC. “I do make payments on the house but it’s a private loan,” Roth said, then declined to elaborate. “I don’t want to discuss my personal finances.”

There’s also an industrial property directly adjacent to the rental house, worth $1.3 million, named “Jarbo Collection” in the King County property records. Jarbo is a chain of boutiques co-owned by Roth’s mother and sister; Roth’s LinkedIn page, which he said is outdated, lists him as production manager at the company. He said he now works as an apprentice to an aircraft mechanic.

So, although the Times piece has Roth “working and saving money to purchase a house from the time [he] was in high school,” this isn’t exactly a rags-to-homeownership tale. But whoever legally owns the property, Jason Roth was apparently given free rein with it. How did he get saddled with a “nightmare tenant”?

News coverage, including the Times piece, implies that Kareem Hunter moved into Roth’s house in early 2023 and never paid a lick of rent beyond a $1,000 deposit, and maybe never even intended to pay. In reality, Hunter had been living there, and paying rent, for a full year before his dispute with Roth began. 

The property in question is a duplex, and Hunter first rented the upper unit in March 2022 through a company called Loftium, which furnished the lower unit as an Airbnb; he received modest rental discounts for functioning as on-site host and cleaning the unit between guests. Hunter said the experience was awful. It wasn’t an auspicious location, in a commercial area off Rainier Ave and near a homeless encampment; Loftium kept the unit full by dropping the price.

“There were some issues with safety. I had my daughter staying with me at the time,” said Hunter. “We had no control over it. People would get mad and come upstairs. I had a guy come up with a gun one time. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone with Loftium. It was random people in other countries.”

In May 2022, Hunter applied for a short-term rental license from the City of Seattle to operate the unit himself, after “the property was left in extremely miserable condition” by a guest. He said Roth encouraged him to do this because they were having so many problems with Loftium; plus, if they cut out the company, Roth would make more money. Hunter said Roth told him to leave Roth’s name off the application. Loftium had “put the license under Jason’s name, which would potentially have tax repercussions” since the license-holder should be the one receiving the income and paying taxes on it. “That was one of the problems Jason had with Loftium,” Hunter said.

Roth disputes this account. “I never encouraged him to do anything,” he said. Roth maintains that he never had problems with Loftium and has never been directly involved with the short-term rental; he simply rented the whole property to Loftium and the company was responsible for taking care of all licensing and insurance requirements.

In fact, it’s likely that this whole arrangement was illegal. According to Seattle’s short-term rental rules, “renters may not obtain STR operator licenses except if they live in the Downtown Urban Core and their units have been operating as short-term rentals since before Sept. 30, 2017.” As the owner, Roth could not legally foist his licensing and insurance responsibilities onto a tenant, whether a corporation or an individual.

In any case, Hunter never ended up operating the Airbnb himself that year. Instead, he said that Loftium would promise to make changes to address the problems Hunter was having as on-site host, then fail to deliver—a situation he said persisted throughout 2022.

Loftium was also going through larger convulsions. Both Hunter and Roth said they thought the company went out of business; it was actually acquired in February 2023 by another Seattle-based startup, Flyhomes. Flyhomes intended to adopt a “host-to-own” program Loftium had recently started, and appears to have ditched the renter-managed Airbnb model altogether.

Near the end of Hunter’s first yearlong lease, he and Roth discussed a new arrangement, in which Hunter would rent the whole property for $4,300 a month and run the Airbnb himself. In March 2023, they signed a new lease (which is included in court records) that explicitly allowed this: “Tenant shall be permitted to engage a commercial short- and/or mid-term rental website listing service (e.g., “VRBO,” “Airbnb, Inc.,”) and any other brokerage or marketplace for short- or mid-term rentals, whether online or not) to sublet the Basement Residence.”

The Seattle Times and other news and opinion outlets ignored all that background when they decried what Roth called, in his Seattle Times op/ed, “the tenant’s illegal vacation rental operation.”

The story is more complicated in other ways, as well. Hunter was unable to pay his March rent on time. Around the same time, Roth refused to give Loftium its deposit back. (Hunter said Roth falsely claimed the unit needed repairs, which was fine with him since he hated Loftium too; Roth said the company’s moving van caused structural damage.) But Loftium then took the deposit amount, approximately a month’s rent, out of Hunter’s bank account, so Roth agreed to waive that first month’s rent. This waiver, and its relation to a previous deposit, is reflected in a payment plan they ultimately signed, which is part of the court record.

According to Hunter, he then approached Roth with a proposal. He was trying to get a tech startup off the ground and needed money for marketing and advertising. He said Roth agreed to defer three months’ rent payments for that purpose, with a repayment plan that included a two percent equity stake in Hunter’s company. Roth denies that he agreed to this: “I couldn’t afford to do that,” he said. (They were at least serious enough about the equity stake that they went back and forth editing a Common Stock Purchase Agreement, according to documents that Hunter shared with me.)

Hunter said he moved forward with his business plan on the assumption that they had an understanding. But in mid-April, Roth surprised him with a dramatically different proposal. It allowed only a single month of deferred rent, to be paid back in installments starting in May on top of the monthly $4,300, but it still assigned to Roth a two percent equity stake in Hunter’s company, along with several additional forms of security that would severely penalize Hunter for any late payments. Hunter objected to the lopsided terms, but finally consented to the altered plan on the condition that the equity stake be removed. (Hunter sent me this payment plan document and email correspondence that backs up this account.) But, he said, the damage to their relationship was done and Roth was angry.

Hunter said he didn’t make the May payment on time, in part because March and April are slow months for Airbnb. Nine days after the due date, Roth started eviction proceedings. He also took steps to shut down the short-term rental.

According to Hunter, he didn’t want an eviction on his record, so he asked Roth if he could leave and pay Roth what he already owed, plus whatever Roth wanted for breaking the lease—one or two months’ rent, he assumed. But Roth demanded full payment for the remaining nine months of the lease. Roth denies that he ever demanded full payment, or that Hunter made this offer.

The eviction process has unfolded from there. Roth’s lawyers and Hunter went back and forth about settlement terms over the summer, but couldn’t agree; Roth finally filed in court in August, and an initial hearing took place in October, at which point Hunter was assigned an attorney. The court date is currently set for March 2024, and the parties are still discussing resolution.

In his piece in The Seattle Times, Roth made second-hand claims about the eviction process and the challenges it creates for landlords: “I’m told that King County Superior Court commissioners regularly have changed the formats for which eviction notices and payment plans are served. Hearing commissioners are now throwing out cases that, although appropriately filed before the changes took effect, do not meet the subsequent new rulings. The goal posts keep moving, and filing a proper case can be impossible even for the most seasoned attorney.”

“That’s just not what’s happening,” countered Edmund Witter, director of the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project, which is representing Hunter. “Landlords are losing because they’re not following the law.”

How about Roth’s new identity as a homeless landlord? In a conversation with Brandi Kruse, he admitted that he’s not exactly destitute. “I mean, could I go find another apartment, like a dirt cheap bedroom somewhere? Probably,” he said. But he doesn’t want to “go into debt, or start struggling in other ways,” so he will “sacrifice his comfort right now to get this done.”

Life in what appears to be a custom GMC camper van is, I’m guessing, still much more comfortable than what the 13,000 to 41,000 King County residents living in vehicles, tents, shelters, and doorways experience on a daily basis. 

But the landlord sleeping in a van and barely scraping by is an arresting image, and Roth isn’t shy about playing up his purported poverty. Business Insider reported that Roth “said all he could do now was ‘struggle and wait’ and eat the ‘value meats that are in the on-sale section at Kroger.’” And KIRO7 filmed him standing in front of the house he said he owns: “I do come here often just to look at my house, and miss it …and wish I could be in it.” The press has lapped up Roth’s sensational story as eagerly as he tells it. 

Hunter has had less luck. Of the news stories, he said: “They’re infuriating but they’re comical if you have the facts… I tried to give the facts to KIRO, I tried to give the facts to Daily Mail, I tried to give the facts to Business Insider. I would send them actual proof of everything, and none of that mattered. They just wanted that [online] engagement.”

Headlines about a nightmare tenant and a homeless landlord get more attention than stories about a somewhat rudderless guy from a privileged background making a hash of managing his father’s property. Hunter said The Seattle Times didn’t even contact him before running Roth’s self-serving version of the story.

The media circus had real repercussions. TV reporters have hounded Hunter at court hearings. His name and location were broadcast, and he said he received hundreds of death threats, threats of bodily harm, and threats of vandalism and arson. “The place was vandalized on one occasion, and the place was burglarized on another occasion,” he said. “Not to mention the severe hit that my tech company has taken because of the negative press.”

No one comes out of this story looking blameless or deserving a gold star for good judgment. But even without the pieces for which we have only Hunter’s word, the documented reality is a far cry from the media’s tableau of tenant as leech and landlord as hapless victim. Our widely-read daily newspaper should not be amplifying such distortions of the truth.