In January of 2025, recalling the eviction that had made him homeless, Diron Kelly told me his corporate landlord had left him living through “a nightmare.”
He said American Landmark, owner of his Charlotte, North Carolina, apartment and some 30,000 others, had a “bully” business model—from raising his rent by some $400 while forcing him to pay fees for frivolous amenities to jumping at the chance to take him to court once his pockets ran dry. “They really messed everything up,” he said.
But starting last week, it’s now Kelly taking the real estate giant to court. On October 20, he filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in an attempt to prove that not only does its model—first revealed by The Nation and Type Investigations in a piece last year—violate North Carolina law, but that it has left thousands of similar “nightmares” in its wake.
At stake are the likely millions of dollars that the suit alleges American Landmark illegally coerced out of current and former tenants like Kelly.
The lawsuit, filed by Halperin Petersen & Mikkilineni LLP, the North Carolina Justice Center, and Kelly Guzzo, PLC in the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, focuses on a state that has been an epicenter in American Landmark’s network of mega-complexes throughout the South. When I traveled to Charlotte last year, I learned that American Landmark had filed evictions against at least 450 residents over a six-month period, and my interviews with dozens of American Landmark tenants revealed how the company had engineered a system to price Kelly and his neighbors out.
Even American Landmark CEO Joseph Lubeck admitted when I spoke to him that the company’s “modeling” assumes that 45 percent of existing tenants will “move out” after American Landmark takes over: “a number of people are not going to be able to afford what we do.”
Kelly’s case, which is seeking additional plaintiffs, asks for restitution for any tenant who has lived in one of American Landmark’s roughly 3,000 apartments in the state since October 20, 2022. “During their tenancies,” the complaint reads, “Defendants have charged Plaintiffs thousands of dollars in unlawful, deceptive, and unfair fees.”
When reached by e-mail, Lubeck wrote, “American Landmark strongly denies all of the specious claims in the suit, which is clearly an attempt to extort money and rooted in antisemitism, like your previous coverage.”
According to the complaint, American Landmark weaponized mandatory “junk” fees to arbitrarily raise its tenants’ monthly costs by upwards of $100 per month. Kelly’s attorneys claim that American Landmark universally implements these fees—described as a “profit center”—in its North Carolina homes.
In 2025, 18 American Landmark tenants told me their first bill from the company surpassed what they believed they should have owed—thanks to the mandatory fees. Though Lubeck acknowledged at the time that he was “sure there are cases where people don’t know what they sign,” he told me that the fees were “disclosed up front and in writing.” In his e-mailed comment on the lawsuit, he again emphasized that “we provide full and fair value for all our residents and for all services, all of which are clearly spelled out and explained in their contracts and welcome packages.”
These underhanded fee structures are an epidemic for modern renters. As private-equity firms and large conglomerates take over more and more US real estate, tenants are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in junk fees every year, according to the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC). These fees, especially in cities like Charlotte, disproportionately burden Black and brown tenants. But a 2025 NCLC report found that states have begun pushing back, with at least 20 adopting laws restricting junk fees in some form. In Minnesota, for example, landlords must include mandatory fees in the publicly advertised cost of their apartments.
In December 2025, the country’s largest property manager, Greystar, agreed to refund tenants $23 million after the Federal Trade Commission sued the company for advertising rentals at “deceptive prices” that “excluded several fixed, mandatory monthly fees.” Kelly’s class-action hopes to build on that national precedent.
“In Mecklenburg County alone, more than 50,000 families faced eviction last year,” Peter Gilbert, director of litigation at North Carolina Justice Center, said in a press release. “These deceptive and unlawful fees are one of the primary drivers of evictions as landlords squeeze tenants past their breaking point.”
Specifically, the complaint alleges that the fees violate North Carolina’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. After American Landmark took over, Kelly and his neighbors soon received an approximately $100 monthly fee for cable and Internet. Though Kelly’s lease, the complaint alleges, describes this package as “additional rent,” the details are buried in one of many lease addendums, and the nonnegotiable cost far exceeds what tenants could find on the open market.
What’s more, American Landmark disconnects the service when tenants fall behind on payments and “continue to charge the Technology Fee even though the tenant is not receiving the service,” the complaint reads. Then, American Landmark “impose[s] a $75 or more fee to “reconnect” the services that they have disconnected.”
“In at least one month, Mr. Kelly was charged over $160 in Technology Fees and Reconnect Fees when his service was not connected,” the complaint reads.
The Nation and Type Investigation’s 2025 investigation found that the technology package was a pariah among American Landmark tenants. For that piece, I spoke to Stephen Tuju, one of Kelly’s former neighbors, who e-mailed complaints about the surprise $75 reconnection fee to his property managers. The company inexplicably responded that it would “adjust” the fee to $25.
In my conversation with Lubeck last year, he confirmed that the company disconnects the technology package when tenants pay late. In Tuju’s case, “it’s possible someone made a mistake,” Lubeck said, but “everything is established and fair across the board.” But the new lawsuit alleges that not only does Kelly’s lease authorize only a $25 reconnection fee, but that the company nonetheless habitually demands tenants pay $75 or more for it, as it did to Tuju.
Once Kelly fell behind on payments, he allegedly encountered a “cascade” of additional fees American Landmark contrives from the eviction filing process. Under North Carolina law, landlords can charge tenants for court filing and processing fees, as well as up to 15 percent of a tenant’s overdue balance to help cover the cost of eviction attorneys. But Kelly was allegedly once charged “approximately $1,000 in Attorney or Legal Fees on a balance of less than $2,000,” according to the complaint.
Twice in 2023, per the complaint, American Landmark pressured Kelly to pay legal fees associated with evictions the company had never even filed in court. Less than a year later, Kelly became homeless.
Kelly’s attorneys analyzed thousands of North Carolina court records and found that over 40 percent of the tenants American Landmark files evictions against will incur another eviction attempt in the future. Each new case brings new fees. “In 2025 alone,” the complaint alleges, “over fifty tenants went through this cycle four or more times.”
“That’s why I’m still trying to play catch-up,” said Christopher Dawkins, a tenant I met in Charlotte in 2025, of these legal fees. He told me American Landmark charged him around $300 for each of his four eviction cases. “I got kids, too. When you got a lot going on, every dollar counts.”
Not content to have just kicked Kelly out, American Landmark, the complaint alleges, is also violating the state’s Debt Collection Act: Kelly “continues to receive collections notices from a third-party debt collector acting on behalf of [American] Landmark attempting to collect all illegally charged fees.”
Most of Kelly’s supposed debt, the complaint reads, comes from an “early termination” fee. After the company evicted him, American Landmark charged Kelly nearly $3,000 as a penalty for leaving the company unable to collect rent from Kelly through the rest of his now-voided lease agreement.
The complaint alleges that American Landmark tenants “are given no notice” of this “immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous” fee “prior to their eviction.”
“I feel like they’re predatory,” Jeff Schuman, a tenant who was evicted in March 2025 from an American Landmark property in Jacksonville and was similarly hounded by a collections agency, told me last year. “They can put a person out on the street with no recourse. I was like, ‘I don’t have anywhere to go and have a small child.’ It was one of the worst experiences I’ve had in my life.”
The scale of the American Landmark eviction machine that chews up tenants like Kelly and Schuman far outpaces state and national norms. As The Nation and Type Investigations reported last year, in one six-month period, the company filed 82 evictions for every 100 units at one Charlotte complex, and after American Landmark bought Kelly’s building in 2022, the company began filing evictions four times more often than the previous owner.
Kelly’s attorneys found a similar pattern: Though landlords statewide filed 12 evictions per 100 units during the 2025–26 fiscal year, American Landmark on average filed 50.
“Red states are very landlordist,” Gil Rushinek, board chair of American Landmark’s parent company, said in a 2024 podcast. In addition to North Carolina, the company owns buildings in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have Republican-controlled legislatures. “In free-market capitalism, there are few protections for the tenant. If you want to evict a tenant in New York, you will have a lot more of a challenge than evicting a tenant in Florida,” Rushinek continued. But North Carolina is the only American Landmark locale with a Democratic governor and attorney general, and the chief justice of the lawsuit’s district court was appointed by President Barack Obama.
The case now enters an uncertain period of months, if not years, of litigation. In addition to millions in damages, Kelly’s attorneys are asking for certification of each of their proposed classes of exploited tenants and a jury trial.
Were the lawsuit to yield a substantial payout, the impact could also reverberate internationally, because, as the Nation/Type Investigations 2025 investigation revealed, American Landmark is wholly owned by the Electra Group, an Israeli conglomerate with extensive ties to both illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Since these ties were first reported, the Electra Group has remained on the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights database of over 200 companies that do business in the illegal settlements. Electra’s business is centered on making it easier for Israelis to commute to and from the settlements by constructing tunnels and roads and operating bus lines on stolen Palestinian land.
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Meanwhile, “the IDF is a major client,” the CEO of another Electra subsidiary said on a 2024 earnings call, after the IDF had already killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with them in facing challenges and fulfilling missions. We are likely the only supplier that can say we’ve expanded our areas of deployment.… This is a great source of pride for us.” In a podcast appearance the same year, Rushinek described American Landmark as a “big winning card” for the conglomerate.
The class action lawsuit, should it eventually force American Landmark into a settlement, could therefore result in a payout to tenants like Kelly of revenue that may otherwise have been funneled into the Electra operation which is playing an active role in the displacement and genocide of Palestinians.
But in the meantime, as of the filing of the complaint, Kelly still does not have a place of his own. American Landmark continues to haunt his life—through a belligerent collection agency and the eviction staining his record—despite them throwing him out of his apartment some 29 months ago.
It’s a vision of what may someday befall Paula Hindman, the case’s other named plaintiff.
She retired from decades of program directing at Piedmont Community College in 2022, just three months before American Landmark bought her building in Hillsborough. Eventually, “the fees at my apartment became so expensive that I went back to work part-time,” she said in a press release. She joined the ranks of the tenants I met over and over again when I travelled to Charlotte last year who were on the brink of being priced out for good. Most of them have since been evicted.
So it’s with Hindman and all of American Landmark’s current and future tenants in mind that the complaint is also seeking “injunctive relief,” a court order that would require American Landmark to permanently change its practices in the state. That means no more mysterious charges. No more collection agency calls.
No more North Carolina tenants wrung out to their last dollar.
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