Snap's Venice Beach office building almost burned to the ground. Now the landlord wants the company
- A Snapchat office building in LA's Venice Beach neighborhood almost burned down earlier this year.
- Snap left the property in 2018 for Santa Monica, but it holds the lease into 2022, a lawsuit says.
- The suit, filed recently by the building owner, seeks millions of dollars in damages.
A fire in Venice Beach that nearly burned down a vacant office building early this year should cost Snap Inc. several million dollars, a new lawsuit says.
The building, on Ocean Front Walk in Los Angeles' Venice neighborhood, caught fire in January and nearly burned to the ground. Firefighters said no one was hurt, as the building was vacant. It's been that way since 2018, when Snap moved out of Venice to Santa Monica. But the suit filed by the owner of the building, Benjamin Schonbrun, says Snap retained responsibility for the space.
"In September 2018, Snap vacated the premises and ceased maintaining the premises, as it was obligated to do under the lease agreement, thus abandoning both the premises and their legal duties and responsibilities under the terms of the lease contract," the lawsuit says.
Schonbrun said Snap signed a lease for the premises through March 2022 that made the company responsible for its upkeep and security, adding that it failed to maintain both since moving. A Snap spokesperson declined to comment. After the company left Venice, an encampment of people without homes formed around the building, tying up tents to the property's barred windows.
Snap's relationship with Venice Beach had grown increasingly fraught from the time cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel got the company's first office space there in 2012. As the company expanded, it was accused of accelerating gentrification and pushing out small businesses and youth shelters in an offbeat community that is now one of the most expensive housing areas in LA. Finally, in 2018, the company effectively threw up its hands and moved to a more traditional large office park in Santa Monica, a town where Spiegel grew up.
The encampment was said at the time of the fire to be its cause. The Los Angeles Fire Department didn't respond to a request for an update on the investigation.
The building is now unusable and needs to be rebuilt, with Schonbrun receiving a cost estimate of at least $2.5 million, he said. The $8 million he's seeking in overall damages includes "trebling," a legal statute that allows for three times damages, and recompense for other allegations, like fraud, breach of contract, and bad-faith insurance.
The lawsuit includes Snap's insurers, alleging they knowingly maintained a policy of less than what the building was worth. It also names as defendants Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Mike Bonin, the city-council member representing Venice Beach, alleging they had a role in allowing the encampment to remain. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Schonbrun's lawyer Stephen Yagman said he had yet to receive any communication from any of the defendants but was nonetheless "completely confident" in the case against them.
Yagman is a longtime civil-rights attorney who was disbarred in 2010 after being convicted of money laundering and tax and bankruptcy fraud. He was reinstated in May, and this is his second case against Garcetti. The first was filed in June and alleged parking restrictions in LA violated the civil rights of people who live in recreational vehicles and have nowhere else to reside.
Housing has been a major political issue for years in LA, but the pandemic threw this into sharper relief. Last year, more than 66,000 people in the county were reported to be experiencing homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a nearly 13% increase from the previous year.
Watch: How candy company Just Born makes 5.5 million Peeps a day for Easter
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufony0usCpZKytlZl6p7vRZqSipJyevK%2B%2FjJqdrZ2iYsOmusicnGaalZawqXnOn52im5Vir7a1y52gp59dl8KzutJmm6ivng%3D%3D