For a year and a half now, the city of St. Louis has been targeting the real estate empire of accused slumlord Dara Daugherty, seeking to have her properties declared nuisances. Just this week, Daugherty filed for bankruptcy.
Daugherty first came to the attention of the public in January 2024, when the city’s affirmative litigation unit filed a 57-page lawsuit against her and her associates, detailing what they called a predatory business that recruited “vulnerable and indigent” tenants from soup kitchens and homeless shelters to whom Daugherty and others rented rooms in houses that were not fit for human occupancy. The operation detailed in the lawsuit included 39 properties across a wide swath of South City, frustrating neighbors as they collectively received hundreds of ordinance violations and generated “an unreasonably high” number of calls to police.
Daugherty’s bankruptcy filing lists her as having a little less than $750,000 in assets, including a home in Brentwood, an LLC which owns some of the properties listed in the city’s lawsuit, as well as a company called K & D Home Repair LLC, which she co-owns with the father of her children. He owes her $400,000, the filing says…