PREVIOUSLY

• A $1.3 Billion Bay Area Investment Firm Bought an Arcata Apartment Complex — And Hired Another Massive Company to Manage It

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The railings had been replaced, but they were no good. The old ones had been just fine — real wood, built to last. Time-tested and solid, could take a lean or a wayward bump. Now they were made from this pressurized crap that splintered when you put your hands on it. 

William didn’t know why they even bothered. Things had been fine at Woodridge Apartments before the new management took over, changing things, making everything new. They didn’t need everything to be new, he said; things had been just fine the way they were before. The cops hadn’t hassled any barbecues, things got fixed on time, leases were drawn up and delivered promptly. The maintenance guys didn’t break into people’s apartments at 3 in the morning. They had been fine beforehand, and he’d prefer it if things returned to the old status quo. 

Unlikely. The apartments were sold to Ridge Capital Investors, a Bay Area private equity firm worth $1.3 billion, in May, and the manager it hired showed few signs of regressing to the old mean. Asset Living manages over 440,000 units nationwide and is the second-largest property manager in the U.S., according to the National Multifamily Housing Council. (The largest is Greystar, which manages over a million.) 126 of those 440,000 units are in Arcata, at Woodridge Apartments, about half a mile from Cal Poly Humboldt near the north end of H Street.

When the Outpost last covered Woodridge’s sale, the tenants we spoke with were optimistic that many of the issues they were dealing with were temporary and would be fixed once the managers had been in control for a while. That hasn’t been the case, according to a half-dozen of them the Outpost interviewed, and many of them are less satisfied than they were two months ago. One of the residents we spoke with in July moved so he wouldn’t have to continue to deal with Asset Living’s “sloppy” handling, he said, and he’s glad he found a new place. Many of the ones left behind don’t have that option, either because they can’t find a new place or they don’t have enough money to cover the moving expenses, but months of increasingly absurd struggles have cemented their desire to flee. 

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William pointed out the railings as one item on a long list of gripes with Asset Living, an accent in a roll call stuffed with perceived slights. (He agreed to speak with the Outpost on the condition that we not publish his name, as did the other tenants in this story, because they’re afraid of potential retaliation. And, an additional disclosure: this reporter lived in the apartments for a short time before the sale.) He’s a Cal Poly Humboldt student in his early 20s who moved in in January 2025. He liked it fine at first. The previous owners, Strombeck Properties, weren’t perfect. Sometimes they shut off the water without much warning, and William wished that they did a better job of managing the tenants’ dogs. But the apartment was the best he’d ever lived in. It caught the sun’s light. He liked the high ceilings, which, mercifully, were a lot more solid than the ones he’d had in his last apartment, which caved in under the weight of his neighbor’s water heater. 

Everything was all good for the time he spent there until the May sale, when he noticed an immediate plunge in the quality of the management. William gets — or, at least, is supposed to get — a housing voucher from the Yurok Tribe, because he’s a tribal member and a student. Strombeck accepted them. William does some work online that helps with the rent, but it only brings him $500 a month. He needed Asset Living to accept the voucher — would it? He never got an answer. Emails sent to manager Midori Thompson went unreturned, and when he called the office on-site she was always busy. William called her every day for four straight months, he claimed, and she never assisted him. Contacting her higher-ups took him nowhere. 

There’s not much left in his savings after months of it steadily dwindling away. William grew up in Arcata, lived there his whole life; he’ll move if he has to, but it would sadden him and make his life harder. He doesn’t drive, and Arcata’s easy to get around even on foot; it’d be an exaggeration to claim that Cal Poly Humboldt is right across the street from him, but it wouldn’t be a big one.

William was contacted by members of the Humboldt Tenants Union, an advocacy group for beleaguered renters. A few of them were doing the rounds over the summer, knocking on doors around Woodridge, attempting to convince them to form a chapter. They’d provide resources, William said they told him, and show them how to force Asset Living to communicate with them. They didn’t press him to do anything drastic, William said, like quit paying his rent, but they emphasized that talking to his neighbors could provide some collective firepower. 

On July 26, about two dozen tenants met up for a barbeque at the apartments, hosted by three members of the tenant’s union, to talk about how the new management was affecting them. (The Outpost wasn’t in attendance. All of the details that follow are from interviews with eyewitnesses, a police spokesperson, a video and a police report.)

They had plenty to chat about. 

Many of them were finding it impossible to renew their leases, like the residents the Outpost interviewed earlier this year. Tyler, another Woodridge denizen, had lived in his apartment for about a year pre-Asset Living. He signed an eight month lease with Strombeck that expired in April, right before the management shuffle; he expected to sign another maybe in May. When we spoke with him earlier this month, he still hadn’t been given one. He was forced onto a month-to-month lease. In California, if a landlord wants to evict a tenant, they have to give them 60 days to clear out if they’ve lived there for a year or longer. Tenants with month-to-month leases, however, only get 30 days. (Same deal if anyone in a unit lived there for less than a year, even if their roommates have.) 

At the barbecue, huddled over hot dogs and ribs, Tyler learned that many of his neighbors were dealing with the same problem. Renewed long-term leases Asset Living was supposed to send them months ago never came, and pleading their cases — sending emails, calling, and even in-person visits to the manager, Thompson — didn’t do anything. Leases, signed with Strombeck before the sale, expired without a word. Tyler hated watching his stability slowly collapse. “It’s filling me with a lot of stress,” he told the Outpost. “I mean, a lot of things they’re doing is filling me with a lot of, like, just, really unreasonable stress.”

Even Tyler’s neighbors that did get a new lease weren’t pleased. Many of them found that the leases — which, when Strombeck was in charge, were about 10 pages long — were now closer to 60, packed with dense legalese none of them could understand and few had the time to parse through. They were also online, and to read through them, they had to click through it page-by-page and sign off on each one. They noticed errors, many of them serious: the addresses on some of them were wrong, and at least one group realized their rent went up $500 more than it should have been on the lease. They were confused and insulted; they claimed Thompson had informed them that their rent wouldn’t be increased at all. 

Asset Living also started charging for utilities when it took over, which displeased many of the old residents; Strombeck hadn’t. Sean and Maya, two roommates in their 20s, told us they were informed they wouldn’t have to pay for utilities, but when they were reading through their lease, they noticed that wasn’t true. The front office never picked up their phones, they said, and it’s hard to make time to go there in-person because they both work. Even when they did, there was often no one there who could help them. There was a month between the old lease expiring and the new one taking effect; nobody from the company has fixed it. Sean and Maya haven’t signed it yet.

They felt they had no way to fix the situation, a union representative told the Outpost, because Thompson had only told them they’d be grandfathered in to avoid paying utilities and an increased rent during an in-person conversation. Little of what Asset Living tells them is in writing, multiple residents said, and they feel like they have no way to prove anything. One of the union’s main goals, Tyler said, is to convince the company to put more of its promises in ink. 

They were more willing to cut Asset Living some slack when they first took over, he said, but it’s been months. They’re past the point of good-faith interpretations. The company, they think, is simply incompetent.

“At first, people weren’t, like, upset or anything,” Tyler said. “At first, when [Strombeck] got bought out, we were like, ‘OK, well, let’s just see how this goes,’ and then there would be some issues, and then we go, ‘Oh, well, they’re new, I’m sure these problems will be worked out,’ but then it just consistently keeps happening, and happening, and happening, over and over again, and it’s to the point where people are starting to be a little frustrated. Well, more than a little frustrated.”

The only noticeable improvements the company’s made since it took over has been a raft of landscaping improvements and renovations on old apartments, several tenants said. They noticed owner’s Ridge Capital Investors promise to “transform” Woodridge, beautifying the exterior and upgrading the amenities in all 126 units, which will allow them to raise rents. (The company had a webpage on Woodridge in its portfolio until early July, when it deleted it sometime after the Outpost reached out.) It bothered several of them that the company was willing to sink time into cosmetic projects while ignoring their complaints.

It felt fabulous to break bread with the neighbors, let some steam off and share their frustrations together, and they enjoyed themselves for about half an hour, until 2:44 p.m., when three cops showed up. They told the partygoers someone called the Arcata Police Department, complaining that there were people walking around, knocking on doors, asking if they wanted to join their barbecue and consider joining the tenants’ union, but the cops decided no one was breaking any laws, asked them to quit knocking on doors, and left. (APD lieutenant Luke Scown confirmed this account, as did a police report.) The report describes an “unauthorized” gathering of people “knocking and doors and BBQing,” and notes that the caller requested they be removed. 

Paul Trujillo talking with APD officers near the barbecue. Screenshot from video.

Attendees unanimously pointed the finger at a maintenance worker, Paul Trujillo, as of this week, still lives on-site. He’d asked them to quit making the rounds before he called the cops, several people said, but did it anyway even after they’d stopped. Trujillo told them he could have had them arrested, a few people claimed, even though that was clearly false. (Trujillo refused to comment.) A video taken by an attendee, reviewed by the Outpost, shows him telling the police he called them, and said he was “instructed” to “not even let the barbecue really happen,” but, he said, “I was like, it’s a barbecue, right?” (“Oh yeah, it’s a beautiful Sunday,” the officer replied.)

Union members believe it was an intimidation technique employed to convince them to stop talking, several of them said. “This sort of intimidation and harassment of tenants by representatives of the property owner is beyond inappropriate,” Drew David, one of the representatives of the main chapter of the Humboldt Tenants Union at the barbecue, told the Outpost in an email. “It is illegal, and will not be tolerated.” 

The attendees remained as calm as they could while the police were there, William said. “But then, after they left, you could tell people were like, ‘What was that? Like, why? Why would they be here?’” he said. “Several people who showed up to the meeting said, ‘I honestly didn’t even think that we needed a union. But then, the cops showed up, and I was like, ‘Oh, they don’t want us to be talking.’ So, ironically, them trying to silence voices ended up kind of radicalizing and making more of a reason for us to talk.”

“We kept on with our discussions and our cookout,” David wrote. “I won’t say it wasn’t unsettling though.”

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On August 25, Maya and Sean were spending some time together after Sean returned from working a graveyard shift. They heard some strange noises coming from outside their apartment. It was 2:45 in the morning. The door to a hallway they share with one other apartment was unlocked, and they heard someone come in. That was odd, they thought; their neighbors had recently moved out. No one was supposed to have access to that hallway. They heard someone open the front door to the hallway, walk in, open the apartment next door to them, and enter it. They waited. 

A few minutes later, the intruder left the other apartment and tried to enter theirs, violently twisting the handle on the locked door. Sean and Maya were terrified; they shut the lights off and went quiet. The person trying to enter quit messing with the handle and knocked on their door. They stayed still, and the person outside their door left the hall, walked down the stairs, and looked up at Sean, looking down at him. He was new there — it took Sean a second to recognize him — was that Trujillo, the maintenance supervisor who called the cops on the barbecue? 

“What do you want?” he called down. The man covered his face and left quickly. Sean went downstairs and locked the hall door. 

Sean and Maya could see the walkway to his apartment from theirs, they told us in an interview, and they watched him come and go all through the night. (They recorded several videos of him coming and going, and also shot a photo of a man they claim is him standing outside of their apartment.) The man came back another half a dozen times, trying to open that hall door, pacing outside “frantically” and talking gibberish to himself. They called the cops. They looked around for a while and didn’t arrest anyone. The incident report says they were unable to locate anyone trying to break into the apartments, though Maya said they spoke with an officer, pointed out where he lived, and told him that Trujillo looked exactly like the man they told the dispatcher was trying to break into their apartment. (The police report confirms that three officers showed up at 3:28 that morning to look around for a man trying to enter dwellings who matches that description: about five foot eight, “darker complected.”)

At one point, the officers shined their flashlights up at Trujillo’s balcony, and he spoke with them. “Were you guys looking for me?” Maya claimed he asked. They talked for a little while longer before an officer asked him if he’d been outside that night. “Yeah,” he replied. “I was trying not to run into you guys.” (We’re unable to verify that; APD denied our request for body camera footage. The officer in charge of the investigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

He may have also tried to break into other apartments as well. William heard him jiggling the door on his apartment at around 3 a.m., before going downstairs and trying theirs. He failed to gain entry to either. At a union meeting held later that week, several more residents told him that Trujillo had attempted to enter their apartments too.

All night, Sean and Maya were up, scared Trujillo would come back. He did, once, and again failed to open the door. 

“We just heard him muttering to himself,” Sean said, “And we heard the words very clearly, where he was like, ‘I guess I got lucky tonight.’” 

They couldn’t sleep. They were up past dawn.

They went to the manager’s office the next day. Trujillo was already there. Why, they asked, had he done that? He denied the claim, and Sean showed Thompson a video of him walking around outside, heading down towards one of the apartments the man had tried to enter. Trujillo watched it. 

That’s impossible, Maya claimed he said, because that’s me. 

“And at that point we backed up,” she said, “We got very tense, very quickly. Even the property manager — her mouth, like, dropped, like, ‘What do you mean that’s you?’ We kind of just all started berating him with questions, ‘Why were you there? Why are you entering people’s units? What is wrong with you?’ And as we asked him more questions, he got visibly nervous, very sweaty and frantic.” 

He stopped denying the claim and started offering excuses. A video, recorded by Sean, shows Trujillo saying he’d been trying to meet up with some girls and got lost. “I guess it was a prank,” he says. “There was supposed to be a christening.” (Several sources told the Outpost he mentioned being christened multiple times. They don’t know what he was talking about.)

“Future reference: don’t be meeting people in the middle of the night,” the manager, Midori Thompson, tells him. “That’s bad. That’s dangerous. Don’t do that.” 

Trujillo denied that he’d attempted to break into anyone’s apartment. We knocked on his place the week before last, and he emerged from a cave. Every light in his apartment was off; every blind was closed.

“I don’t know what that was,” he told us. “The people at the office told me, they’re like, ‘Hey, you were out at night, and then you were playing with the locks.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t remember any of that.’”

“Dude, I’m done with this place,” he added. “And I’m moving out pretty soon. So, I mean, I don’t know what happened. I was sick a few nights ago, like last week, but — yeah. So that’s what she told me at the office, and I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about it.’ So that’s all I have to say about that, dude.”

Tyler, William, and the rest of the couple hundred tenants at Woodridge found out about the incident piecemeal, by word-of-mouth. They’re on edge, several of them said. They heard nothing from the front office, nothing about whether Trujillo was still employed, whether he still lived near them, if there was going to be a police investigation, if anyone was going to be held accountable. (It’d be illegal for the company to disclose an employee’s address.) They’re scared something like that could happen again, they said, and they resent Asset Living for letting them stew in their fear. Sean and Maya want to move. It’ll be hard; they’d lived there since 2021, put down roots. But, for their safety, they feel it’s necessary. It bothers Sean to leave Maya for his graveyard shift, leave her alone until the early hours. They sleep and eat, but only poorly; they feel exhausted, disembodied. Maya said she feels like she has PTSD, like they’re living in a “literal nightmare,” a horror movie. And, even if Trujillo wasn’t the wannabe invader, he knows they think he did it. He lives 30 seconds away. 

“At this point, I feel like we moved on from being a little bit fearful, to being very frustrated and angry that our safety has been taken away from us like that,” Maya said. “And after seeing this place for so long as home, it doesn’t even feel like that anymore. It’s just — we don’t see it in that light anymore. It just feels like a really dangerous place to be, here.”

The incident encapsulated what renting there is like, Sean said: issues that might be worked out are instead ratcheted to the point of hair-tearing catastrophes. At least the landscaping out front has new bark chips.

Asset Living did not respond to multiple requests for comments. Midori Thompson declined an interview request.