At the corner of New Montgomery and Market streets in San Francisco sits a stately tower, neoclassical columns and an antique-looking clock at street level, long strips of windows rising up 20 stories, ending in tight arches just shy of the roof, where another clock — this one massive and spare — nests under a spire. Three hundred miles away, near the end of H Street in Arcata, are two apartment buildings, separated by a parking lot. They’re residential, not commercial, dirtier and about 18 floors shorter than the tower. But they’ve got something important in common: they’re owned by the same company.

The Arcata apartments — Woodridge Apartments, at 1895 and 1935 H Street — were purchased in May by a San Francisco investment company, Ridge Capital Investors, for $11.9 million from Strombeck Properties, a local property-management company. RCI claims to own somewhere around $1.3 billion in real estate, much of it located around the western U.S. They’ve developed and invested in roughly $5 billion in real estate since its founding in 2011. The company created a new entity to buy it — “RCI Woodridge LLC” — and founded it in Delaware, a state prized for its lax tax laws.

The company’s website highlights Arcata’s unstable rent situation — or, at least it did, until July 8 or 9, when RCI deleted its page on Woodridge shortly after we contacted them. (Fortunately, your Lost Coast Outpost took a screenshot.) Arcata, it said, is a fantastic place to invest in real estate. Cal Poly Humboldt only has space on campus for around half its students, RCI claimed, and housing is a “persistent issue” for the university. RCI will “transform” Woodridge, beautifying the exterior and upgrading the amenities in all 126 units, which will allow them to raise rents.

“Ridge will implement professional management and an institutional approach toward expense control and revenue management,” the page read. “In combination, this repositioning plan will increase rents, occupancy, and asset desirability.”

The “professional management” is a property management company called Asset Living, itself a behemoth. It operates in around 40 states, with 10 corporate offices scattered around the country. Asset Living was itself recently snapped up for $2 billion by another financial giant, a global private equity company called New Mountain. New Mountain manages around $60 billion in assets, spread around a wide variety of money-generating endeavors. Its portfolio lists a staggering number of companies it owns, everything from footwear to an “AI-powered healthcare intelligence platform” to a cleaning supplies firm. 

Asset Living also gussied up a website for Woodridge. To an unknowing eye — an incoming Cal Poly student, perhaps — the website makes the apartments appear aspirational. 

“Elevate your everyday at Woodridge,” reads the site’s copy. “Located moments from Cal Poly Humboldt, our…residences are designed for effortless living. Experience a perfect balance of natural charm and modern convenience, complete with private balconies and a serene community atmosphere. Welcome to simply better living in Arcata.”

“Elegance?” one gobsmacked tenant told the Outpost. “OK — I like my apartment plenty, but it is not elegant.”

The apartments definitely aren’t dumps, but they’re hardly “premium” like Asset Living claims. [Full disclosure: several years ago, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Woodridge Apartments for a bit over a year.] They’re decent for the price (around $1,350 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, $1,550 for a two-bedroom), though some of them only have a few windows and capture little sun. Some of them get moldy and the walls are thin, but those are hardly unique problems for Humboldt apartments.  

However, by and large, many tenants aren’t pleased with the results. The main impact of the upgrades have been fairly insignificant, several residents told the Outpost. Workers replaced the faux-wood linoleum flooring in several units, as well as several of the small, electric four-burner stoves common in dorms and cheap apartments. Some bushes outside got trimmed. They don’t outweigh Asset Living’s handling of the apartments, which has been “sloppy,” as one of them put it. (All of them requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.) 

The issues started immediately. Strombeck used a simple pay-online system that allowed for direct, free transfers from residents’ bank accounts. Asset Living switched to a new system that forces residents to pay online in two installments (one at the beginning of the month, the other in the middle) with around another $50 in added fees tacked on. The only other option is to pay with a cashier’s check, an annoying hassle for many of the complex’s residents, some of whom are students without a nearby bank. 

Paying via any of the approved methods is far from foolproof, one resident told the Outpost. In June, shortly after the sale, a representative he believes works for Asset Management had told him he could continue to pay through the old online system. He paid his $1,400 and forgot about it until Asset Living sent him an email informing him he’d failed to pay his rent. He didn’t get the money back. 

His troubles compounded. He attempted to pay with a cashier’s check, hand-delivering it to the on-site office. He got another email informing him his rent wasn’t paid. He asked, how was that possible? They’d lost the check. Fortunately, the bank had given him a receipt. He gave a copy of the check to the office. They managed to lose that as well. He never received any update on the situation, neither confirmation that they’d processed a payment nor asserting that he was still on the hook. 

“Fun!” he said. “I was pretty stressed the fuck out, like, ‘what the hell is happening?’ That’s where the whole they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing feeling comes from, because — how are you gonna mess this up?”

Another said that his lease was set to expire in June. He’d lived there for a couple years, and enjoyed it. The apartments were just fine for what he was paying, and Strombeck had been good at fixing broken appliances or clearing the drain when he asked them to. He shared the apartment with his new fiancee, and they were planning on living in Arcata for another year to save up some money. Woodridge acquiring new owners didn’t bother them. He went to the office twice to let them know he wanted to renew the lease. The managers told him they’d send him an email both times; he never got one, so he sent one, which went unanswered. 

One day, he came home to a note on the door: you are being evicted. California’s Just Housing laws protected that from happening, but they were forced to transition to a month-to-month lease that allows Asset Management to terminate their lease at will.

There are other miscellaneous complaints: loud construction noises in the morning, piles of trash spilling out of the compactor, odd landscaping choices. But an even larger kick in the teeth was in store for them and the other dozens of Woodridge’s residents: Asset Living posted a notice on every tenant’s door informing them that they were planning on charging residents for their utilities. Strombeck had included the price of utilities in their rent, which made paying the slightly inflated rents tolerable. (WiFi was excluded, but trash, electricity, water and sewage were all covered.) They’re unsure if it’s even possible to do it fairly. Asset Living said residents will pay a third party (Conservice) for their water, water heating, sewer, and trash, but electricity and gas bills go straight to PG&E. 

The apartments aren’t individually metered. Asset Living shared a formula for splitting up the building’s total usage per-person, but the tenants said they were concerned that one person’s excessive usage would end up costing everyone. And they were insulted by an attempt to greenwash the change — brand the move as being for the environment.

“When utility bills are paid 100 percent by owner, residents have no incentive to conserve,” the notice reads. “This results in a waste of our state’s natural resources and adds to the overhead of the property and that usually adds to higher rents. Utility billing saves money for residents because it encourages them to conserve.”

“They’re blaming us,” one tenant told the Outpost. “They’re blaming us, and justifying it to raise the fucking expense on utilities, because we aren’t fucking smart enough to turn off the goddamn water. I’m sure maybe somebody leaves their lights on, and shit, and that’s pretty dumb, but, like, you’re just gonna throw all of us under the bus? That’s ridiculous.”

They were willing to deal with the rest of it, but the switch to being charged for utilities — without the rent going down — was enough to convince them it wasn’t worth it. Their apartments simply aren’t worth that much. Everyone’s planning on moving, the engaged couple to Redding where the rent is cheaper, the other guy to a new spot, hopefully elsewhere in town. 

He’d like to find another Strombeck apartment. It was a shame they sold the complex, he said. They weren’t perfect landlords, but they often went above and beyond what he thought was necessary. He baked the maintenance guys treats and was looking forward to sticking around Arcata, an “ideal” town, he called it. He’s lived there for only a year, loves the walkability, the nature, the freewheeling youthful vibe. But staying there might not be feasible. 

“It’s all kind of shocking, I guess,” he said. “I know that this is a normal thing that happens to people that live in apartments, and it sucks, but — what the hell, man. It all felt very short notice, and moved quickly. And not in a good way. More of a stumble.”

“It’s just disorganized,” he continued. “I guess that’s what I would call it. Seems like we’ll just have to roll with the punches until we can either get the fuck out. Or keep your head down and just hope for the best.”

The Humboldt Tenants Union is attempting to rouse residents to form their own, building-specific union, and recently went door-to-door around the complex. A spokesperson for the union sent an email to the Outpost, declaring their opposition to the new property managers. “No one deserves to work hard, and pay their bills on-time, just to end up without a home,” they wrote. 

The entire country is submerged in a housing crisis, and Arcata’s is especially acute. In a recent city-sponsored survey, 77% of Arcata-based respondents said that housing there is unaffordable. The residents the Outpost spoke to can’t stomach the idea of big Bay Area finance firms swallowing up property in a bucolic college town and doing some haphazard renovations to justify raising prices. 

“This repositioning plan will increase rents,” RCI’s page on Woodridge once read (before it was deleted). The tenants feel like RCI is taking advantage of them, they said — $1,600 per month, plus utilities? 

“I just love when people like 200 miles away with no care for my situation decide they’re gonna, just, up the rent,” the recently engaged resident said. “It feels like a certain amount of autonomy has been taken away from me.” 

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he continued. “I always pay my rent on time. We’re quiet people. We don’t have parties. We generally don’t even have people over. We’re quiet. We pay our rent on time. We don’t just randomly break shit, and we don’t break our lease. Like, we’re perfectly good tenants, and then we’re just being punished, because some other company came in and wants to charge us more. They’re just being greedy.”

Asset Living did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Ridge Capital Investors. Steve Strombeck, the owner of Strombeck Properties, was out of town and could not be reached, an office manager told the Outpost.