City oversight of major East Oakland landlord extended 61%
By Natalie Orenstein12%
7/18/2026, 12:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Confirmation Bias, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23.3% saturation with 183 hits. Analysis detected 1,523 faulty-reasoning hits from 785 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 56.7% and a BS Rank of 61% (8,597 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 60.70% of the article peer group.
The city will continue oversight of a prominent landlord found to have rented dangerous and illegal residential units in properties across East Oakland.
In 2019, Oakland sued Baljit Singh Mann and Surinder Mann and their companies Dodg Corp. and SBMANN2 for numerous alleged violations of the city’s Tenant Protection Ordinance — from renting illegally converted units with windowless bedrooms and no hot water to shorting renters on required relocation payments.
Many of their tenants were low-income immigrants.
In 2021, a state judge ordered the Manns to pay the city $4 million in civil penalties, plus more than $2 million in attorneys’ fees.
He also issued an injunction forcing the landlord to fix code violations across their portfolio of properties, hire a third party to manage their properties for five years, and regularly provide updates to the city.
The Manns appealed the ruling, and the court ended up dismissing penalties and fees, saying the city hadn’t exhausted other options for remedies.
They sent the financial decision back to the trial court to reconsider.
The Manns ended up settling with the city for about $221,000 instead of $4 million, court records show.
They later had to pay the city around $1.7 million in attorneys’ fees, too.
The injunction remained intact, however, with expiration set for this fall.
This February, Oakland City Attorney Ryan Richardson took the Manns and their companies back to court, accusing them of failing to comply with the injunction.
The office “uncovered evidence of ongoing violations at Dodg Corp. properties, including unresolved severe fire damage, nonfunctioning heaters, cockroach infestations, and black mold, sometimes persisting for years,” the City Attorney’s Office said in a press release Friday.
In a court filing, Richardson details issues at eight East Oakland properties, including two where he says fire damage has gone unaddressed for years despite multiple tenant complaints and city notices of violation.
Overall, the city says it’s issued 38 notices of violation and reinspection notices to the Manns at the eight properties since the 2021 court order.
The city asked the court to find the Manns in contempt of the injunction, which could have come with a financial penalty.
A judge never took up that question because the Manns and the city instead reached an agreement to extend the injunction for three more years.
This means all requirements — such as the outside property manager, the regular reports to the city, and repairs at the rental buildings — will continue through 2029.
“Predatory landlords in Oakland should take notice,” Richardson said in the press release.
“The City of Oakland takes tenant protection seriously, and my office is willing and ready to hold them accountable.”
A lawyer for the Manns said “the city and the defendants in this case have had drastically different interpretations of what the law requires; we just disagree.”
That lawyer, Aaron Hancock, declined to comment further.
Court records show that he opposed the city’s attempt to find his clients in contempt.
He pointed out that some of the properties the city mentioned in its filing weren’t subjects of the 2019 suit and notes that others have active permits for repairs, so effectively the deadline to fix them should extend through the duration of the permits.
Addressing citations can take years, he and his clients argued.
“To be sure, defendants’ remediation process has not been a perfectly smooth one,” Hancock wrote.
“In the City of Oakland, there always will be hiccups, delays, and setbacks.
However, the records before the court do describe a track record of diligence and good faith compliance with the court’s injunction.”
The city disagreed, saying permit timelines were irrelevant to the Manns’ obligation to address violations.
Court records show that in January, before filing its latest motion, the city had sought further compensation from the Manns in the form of interest payments it believed should have been included with the $1.7 million in attorneys’ fees.
This motion was denied by the court.
At the time of the 2019 court case, the Mann family owned 130 residential and commercial buildings in Oakland, as well as Friendly Cab, the largest taxi company in the city.
In that lawsuit, Oakland said one of the cab company employees rented an illegal unit owned by the Manns on Hegenberger Road, which had conditions that a building inspector described as “by far the worst I have ever seen.”
The city said it had no windows, heat, hot water, ventilation, smoke alarms, or a means of escape in the case of a fire.
When the city found that unit uninhabitable, the lawsuit said, the tenant was forced to leave.
The landlord, according to the lawsuit, never paid them relocation funds.
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