Baltimore City filed a lawsuit Monday against brothers Benjamin, Isaac and Ruben Ouazana, accusing the trio behind WAZ Management of renting out unlicensed apartments plagued by rodents, insects, leaks and mold while illegally evicting tenants who refused to pay rent the city says was never legally owed. The complaint names Kernan Gardens Apartments, the largest apartment complex the brothers operate in the city, as a central target of the action.
The lawsuit, filed by the City of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Council, alleges the Ouazana brothers, also known as the WAZ brothers, engaged in deceptive, unfair and abusive housing practices. According to WMAR-2 News, the city says it has repeatedly cited the defendants for violations of local housing laws, and that units they rented lacked working electricity, heat, hot water and even toilets. The City of Baltimore says the complaint goes further than habitability complaints, alleging the brothers used violent intimidation and harassment against tenants who refused to pay rent that was not owed, and pursued illegal evictions against them.
Mayor Brandon Scott said the landlords knowingly put their tenants in harm's way, according to the City of Baltimore news release. “Every person in our city deserves a safe, healthy place to call home,” Scott said, adding that the city will continue holding bad actors accountable for preying on at-risk residents. City Solicitor Ebony Thompson said the city plans to end the defendants' unlawful actions, and said the defendants did the minimum after being cited for violations, per the same account.
A Law Built for Cases Like This
The lawsuit leans heavily on Baltimore's Strengthening Renters' Safety Act, a municipal enforcement law the Baltimore City Council passed in October 2024 that took effect January 1, 2026, according to WMAR 2 News. Kernan Gardens was identified as a high-violation property under the act, which targets multi-family buildings with recurring safety violations. Under the law, buildings designated as priority dwellings over unresolved safety issues face mandatory biannual inspections, required oversight meetings, and civil citations reaching up to $1,000 per day, per Ben Frederick Realty, with noncompliance capable of triggering license revocation.
City licensing rules also give Baltimore significant leverage in the case. Under the city's rental licensing ordinance, expanded in 2018, landlords operating non-owner-occupied residential units without a valid license forfeit the legal right to collect rent or pursue eviction actions in court, according to The Maryland People's Law Library. That provision underpins the city's argument that the rent the Ouazana brothers collected from tenants in unlicensed units was not lawfully owed in the first place. Separately, when a rental property fails safety checks and becomes uninhabitable through no fault of the tenant, landlords are legally required to cover relocation costs, which the city can record as a lien against the property if left unpaid, according to Property Inspection Pros.
A History of Legal Trouble for WAZ Management
Monday's lawsuit is not the first time the Ouazana brothers and their business have faced serious legal accusations. In February 2020, foreign real estate investors filed a federal racketeering and fraud lawsuit against Isaac and Benjamin Ouazana and WAZ Management, alleging a multi-million-dollar scheme built on falsified rent rolls and unperformed property renovations, according to Courthouse News Service. That federal case remains active: a late-2025 jury trial ended in a mistrial, and a federal judge denied a renewed motion for judgment in January, according to CaseMine.
Tenants have also gone after the company directly. In August 2020, law firm Whitney LLP secured a $100,000 settlement against WAZ Management after the company knowingly leased a Baltimore rowhome containing an active bed bug infestation and then illegally evicted the tenant, a single mother whose personal property was discarded, according to Whitney, LLP. Municipal financial records published in March 2023 also show WAZ-Brothers LLC accumulated delinquent local tax debt, including a $14,664 tax lien listed on Baltimore City's 2023 tax sale property list, per The Daily Record.
Part of a Broader Enforcement Push
The city says it is making historic investments to expand affordable housing options even as it pursues this case, framing the WAZ lawsuit as part of a wider effort to hold chronic violators accountable. It echoes other recent tenant-rights fights in the Baltimore region: Hoodline has previously reported on tenants who torched a landlord in court over fire safety hazards in Towson, and on a Baltimore County legal challenge over eviction property rules that left tenants' belongings labeled abandoned.
For now, the case against the Ouazana brothers heads to Circuit Court, where the city will argue that the family's licensing failures, code violations and alleged intimidation tactics add up to a pattern of abusive housing practices rather than isolated incidents. Whether the years of federal litigation, tenant settlements and tax delinquency documented against WAZ Management will factor into the city's case remains to be seen as the lawsuit proceeds.
