Last summer, when the elevators in her downtown Oakland apartment building, La Peralta, were out of service for 52 consecutive days, 68-year-old Kathy Vaquilar had to climb four flights of stairs to enter or leave her apartment, a roughly 10-minute trip marked by stops to rest and breathe. Later, when her husband, Richard Johnson, 81, fell in their apartment and she couldn’t help him up, EMTs had to carry him down those four flights of stairs.
“The whole experience was like a bad dream,” said Vaquilar.
Now, the city of Oakland and tenants are suing La Peralta’s landlord, Mosser Living, over the unusable elevators — the first lawsuit stemming from an Oakland ordinance passed in 2024 that allows landlords to be held accountable for elevators out of service for more than 24 hours…