For 52 straight days last summer, both elevators in a six-story downtown Oakland building full of elderly and disabled tenants sat dead — and now the city is using that outage to test a housing law it has never enforced before.

Oakland City Attorney Ryan Richardson sued Mosser Companies on Tuesday over conditions at La Peralta, a roughly 100-unit affordable building at 184 13th Street where both elevators failed for 52 consecutive days in 2025. The City Attorney's Office says it is the first time the city has moved to enforce its 2024 elevator ordinance, which requires landlords to notify tenants of outages longer than 24 hours and provide accommodations. The case matters beyond one building: Mosser runs more than 3,000 rental units across Northern California, and a separate lawsuit from seven tenants alleges the outages traced not to bad luck but to a landlord that stopped paying its repair contractors.

Inside, the residents — many of them elderly, disabled, or managing serious health conditions — were left to negotiate the stairwells or stay put. For some, a trip to the pharmacy or hauling a bag of trash to the curb became a planned expedition; for others, leaving the apartment stopped being an option at all.

On Tuesday, the City of Oakland made that outage the basis of a lawsuit against the building's owner, Mosser Companies, in Alameda County Superior Court. Richardson's office says the failures violate Oakland's municipal code, including a 2024 ordinance that requires landlords to warn tenants of any elevator outage lasting more than 24 hours and to arrange accommodations, such as temporary relocation. According to the office, this is the first time it has sued to enforce that ordinance.

"It is simply unacceptable to leave tenants trapped in their apartments for weeks at a time," Richardson said in a statement from his office. He framed the case as a deterrent: "Part of what we're trying to do here is for the handful of landlords out there that would be tempted to cut corners in this way, is to make sure they think twice," he told KTVU.

The human cost, drawn from the city's complaint and tenant accounts, is stark. Oakland firefighters had to free residents trapped in the building's malfunctioning elevators more than a dozen times between 2024 and 2025, according to the City Attorney's Office. KTVU reported that the fire department responded to La Peralta 75 times for various incidents since the start of 2025.

Tenant Kathy Vaquilar, one of seven residents in a separate lawsuit against Mosser, was caring for her husband, Rich, during the outage. She told KTVU that emergency crews carried him down four flights of stairs on a tarp after he fell three times while the elevators were out. He died in April. "It's a life and death issue really, and I think it's about time," she said.

"I had to plan every trip up and down the stairs, which, at my age, would take about 10 minutes every time," Vaquilar said in the City Attorney's press release, adding that even taking out the trash became an ordeal. Another tenant, April Dawn, said a bad knee left her housebound during the outage.

The most damaging allegation isn't neglect by accident but by arithmetic. The tenants' suit claims Mosser had fallen behind on payments to its maintenance and repair contractors, and that service was halted as a result, according to KTVU. One plaintiff says they had already fled a different Mosser building in San Francisco over broken elevators, only to hit the same failure in Oakland. The city's complaint also cites unaddressed pest infestations, structural damage and security problems.

Mosser Companies, which the city describes as one of Northern California's largest housing providers with more than 3,000 units, did not respond to requests for comment from either SFGATE or KTVU.

The city is seeking restitution for affected tenants and a court order forcing La Peralta into compliance. For renters watching, the more consequential question is whether Oakland's untested 2024 ordinance has teeth — and whether a first enforcement action against a 3,000-unit operator sets a floor other landlords will feel. "Hopefully it will cause them to fix things a little quicker next time," tenant Steve Wilt told KTVU.