Settlement reached in Iowa City Apartments Downtown class action suit

IOWA CITY - A settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit that pitted about 14,000 former tenants against Iowa City's largest landlord company.

District Court Judge Chad Kepros earlier this month ordered the settlement in the five-year-old class-action lawsuit.

With the settlement, tenants who rented with Apartments Downtown and Apartments Near Campus - which are operated by the same company - from 2010 through 2014 will receive a $65 payment for each year of their tenancy.

The dollar figure is tied directly to a mandatory carpet-cleaning charge that was present in the company's lease for all tenants. Such a mandatory charge was deemed illegal.

Christopher Warnock, lawyer with the Iowa Tenants Project, estimated the class-action case will amount to more than $1 million.

Warnock said the deadline to submit claims in the class action suit is November 15.

Warnock said the settlement includes a court order so an Iowa Tenants Project lawyer would handle any future tenant complaints against Apartments Downtown.

That lawyer would represent the tenants to ensure fairness while providing more accountability from the landlord, he said.

'While the class action settlement is great, I am even more excited about the complaint process,” Warnock said in a Monday news release. 'We see this as a new partnership between landlords and tenants.”

The Iowa Tenant Project first began its case against Apartments Downtown about five years ago, with a few former tenants alleging that leases they signed with the rental provider contained prohibited provisions, carpet-cleaning fees, responsibility for repairs and maintenance and liquidated damages - all of which violated the Iowa Uniform Residential Landlord Tenant Act, according to court documents.

Last summer, a Johnson County District Judge ruled that Apartments Downtown had violated Iowa Code. Apartments Downtown appealed the ruling last August.