Amanda Hickman

Noah Bundick

That's us. Our names. If you Google us (or otherwise plug our full names into a search engine, which is something I do all the time) your first search result will be some legal filing site that has the details of the time our landlady took us to small claims court. And if I were looking someone up on the internet, I would probably be a little curious about that small claims thing. So here's the deal:

We were renting an apartment in San Franciso in 2015/2016. In the bay area it can go months without a drop of rain falling. We moved in in late Spring, so we had been in the apartment for months before the rains started. During that time there were a lot of annoying things we discovered (the faucet handle would fall off in your hands all the time, our buzzer never worked). It was irritating but not the end of the world. And then winter rolled around and it started raining. The first heavy rainstorm was coming in the living room everywhere. We had multiple buckets catching water, moved all of our furniture out of the way, and we had towels picking up water that was sheeting in around the windows.

We let the landlady know what was going on. She stopped by several days later (when it was not raining) and said it didn't seem like there was any water coming in (I wish I was joking). We showed her the buckets in the living room and she said "oh, that's not that much water!" -- it was 2-3 inches -- and then accused us of filling the buckets ourselves to stage a scene.

We were completely floored, but did some research and discovered that the place had been cited numerous times by the Department of Buildings for this same issue. And the landlady is still telling us "oh, it doesn't rain much! Just use a bucket". So we filed a complaint with the City of San Francisco Rent Board. We were awarded several thousand dollars in back rent.

We also found a new place to live, because this place was not okay. We were expecting to walk away.

We scheduled a walk through with the landlady to confirm any last things that needed to be addressed before we could get our deposit back. At that walk through, she served us with a small claims court summons. She claimed that we had misrepresented our dog, and that she had lost a prospective tenant because of our dog, and therefore was suing us for lost rent on the unit they would have rented, if it weren't for our dog barking while she tried to show it.

The whole thing was completely ridiculous. She had never said anything to us about our dog previously and he was described accurately on the rental application. We countersued and asked her to return our deposit. She lost.

So that's the context for the "Trellis.Law" motions that show up when you search for our names. In 2022 I talked to Miles Howard about our experience for a story in Shelterforce.