ABC 7 News: SAN RAFAEL, Calif. (KGO) -- Watch the news video here.

A San Rafael man is free on bail Monday night after being charged in connection with offering sex in exchange for an apartment to rent -- which didn't exist.

The man who posted the flyer said he was a building manager and that if she had sex with him he would overlook a late payment or two.

"I think he's really counting on the vulnerability of a population that is concerned about coming forward with authorities because quite often they can only speak English," said fair housing advocate Caroline Peattie.

"He admitted during the interview that he was not an employee of any apartment complex or property management firm," said Lt. Alan Piombo of the San Rafael police.

Police were notified, a sting was set up and the man was arrested Friday.

NBC Bay Area News:

A man posing as a landlord in San Rafael was arrested Friday for offering housing in exchange for sex, police said.

Tifano Ariel Rodas Maldonado, 38, of San Rafael used a fake name when he posted advertisements about open housing in the city's Canal neighborhood, according to police. One victim approached Maldonaldo, who police say was specifically preying on the immigrant population, about the housing offer before learning that they would have to pay in both money and sexual acts.

After being tipped off about the behavior, police and the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California conducted an undercover sting operation. They called Maldonaldo about the housing offer. He responded by demanding $2,000 per month in rent and sex in order to live in one of his supposedly available apartments, police said.

​An undercover officer scheduled a meeting to finalize the housing deal, according to police. When Maldonaldo arrived, police arrested him. He confessed to not being in the real estate business and not having any rental properties in his possession. He also admitted to posting the advertisements.

Maldonaldo was arrested and booked into the Marin County Jail on felony fraud and prostitution charges.
Published at 5:41 PM PDT on May 6, 2017 | Updated at 9:43 AM PDT on May 7, 2017

By Aja Seldon, KRON and Ella Sogomonian

SAN RAFAEL (KRON)– San Rafael police arrested a 38-year-old man who is accused of posing as a landlord and demanding sex from his victims in exchange for housing.
Police said, Tifiano Ariel Rodas Maldonado, took advantage of immigrants desperate to find housing.
Maldonado posted ads along laundromats in the Canal Street area where many Mexicans and Guatemalans frequent, police said.
“Most of the communications were in Spanish,” said Sgt. Raul Aguilar of the San Rafael Police Department.”Targeted toward the Spanish-speaking community, and the locations he was placing his ads.”
One victim came forward to the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California and said Maldonado allegedly offered a key to an apartment for $2,000 a month and sex.
Detectives made a call to the ad and Maldonado answered using a fake name, Roberto Mendez.
He later met up with the undercover detective, police said.
Members of the community were shocked to hear that he could have abused their own people who are already in a stressful position being unable to find housing without a rental or credit history.
Maldonado was arrested for felony fraud and prostitution charges.
He has since posted bail and was released.

By Richard Halstead, Marin Independent Journal

A San Rafael nonprofit focused on ensuring equal opportunity to housing has joined with 20 other fair housing organizations across the nation in a housing discrimination lawsuit against Fannie Mae.
Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, is a publicly owned, government-sponsored enterprise created in 1938 to purchase mortgages from lenders and resell them to investors.
In their suit, Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California — formerly known as Fair Housing of Marin — the National Fair Housing Alliance and other fair housing organizations assert that Fannie Mae is doing a poorer job maintaining and marketing properties it forecloses on in middle- and working-class African-American and Latino neighborhoods compared with properties it forecloses on in white neighborhoods.
Fannie Mae, together with the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. known as Freddie Mac, insures $4.6 trillion in residential mortgages, or 45.9 percent of the market, according to Richard Bove, a Rafferty Capital Markets analyst writing on ValueWalk.com.According to the suit, Fannie Mae-owned properties in white working- and middle-class neighborhoods more often have their lawns mowed and edged periodically, invasive weeds and vines removed, windows and doors secured or repaired, litter and trash removed, leaves raked and graffiti erased from the property.
But in African-American and Latino neighborhoods, the suit alleges, Fannie Mae-owned properties are often subject to neglect with trash accumulating on the property, overgrown grass and invasive plants. The windows and doors are often unsecured, left wide open, or boarded.
The suit asserts that the run-down appearance of Fannie Mae-owned properties in these neighborhoods of color makes the homes less appealing to prospective buyers and invites vandalism. Furthermore, the suit states that the blight left unchecked by Fannie Mae leads to a decline in the home values of the predominantly African-American and Latino families who live nearby.

Katie Penote, a spokeswoman for Fannie Mae, said, “We have heard NFHA’s concerns, and strongly disagree with these allegations. Our REO maintenance standards are designed to ensure that all properties are tended to and treated equally.”
Foreclosed properties are also known as real estate owned, or REO, properties.
Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, said the National Fair Housing Alliance to which her organization belongs has notified Fannie Mae of this inequity many times since the onset of the major recession and filed a complaint with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, but received no response from Fannie Mae.
Peattie said that in 2009 the alliance surveyed properties Fannie Mae had foreclosed on in four metropolitan areas, shared the results with Fannie Mae, and still nothing changed. She said at that time “there was a huge number of foreclosures happening that had adversely impacted communities of color.”
Peattie said subsequently the investigation was expanded to include Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California and 17 additional fair housing organizations.
“We entered the picture in 2013,” Peattie said. “We hired an investigator who went out and looked at all of these various properties.”

Peattie said her organization investigated 88 properties Fannie Mae had foreclosed on in the Oakland/Richmond area and 68 properties in the Vallejo vicinity.
In total, the lawsuit includes data gathered from 212 cities in 38 metropolitan areas spanning 2,300 foreclosures owned and maintained by Fannie Mae.
Peattie said she did not investigate properties Fannie Mae foreclosed on in Marin because there were few properties owned by people of color and fewer foreclosures overall in Marin.
She said, “In Marin County, it is extremely white so you are not likely to find those comparisons.”

By Zachary Jonathan Jacobson
President-elect Donald J. Trump has nominated Steven Mnuchin, his national campaign finance chair, as Treasury Secretary. In turn reporters have focused on Mnuchin’s long biography, his time as a Yale undergraduate, his father’s partnership at Goldman Sachs, his own time as a partner at Goldman Sachs, his miraculous turn-around of the failing bank IndyMac, his work through 2015 at OneWest bank, now a subsidiary of CIT group Inc., and, with relatively little fanfare (his producing of the movies X-Men and Avatar has drawn more excitement), these same reporters quietly accuse Mnuchin of redlining while heading OneWest. Only a handful of news outlets have run stories on the issue.
But if it is indeed proven that Mnuchin sanctioned redlining, a euphemism for forced racial housing segregation, he MUST be rejected by the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate body assigned to evaluate his confirmation as Treasury Secretary. Forty-eight years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, a clear signal must be sent that such racist practices will not be tolerated. It is of both symbolic and concrete concern. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and New York Magazine’s DW Gibson have outlined, “racism is still rampant in real estate.”[1]If Mnuchin is found to have sanctioned the racist practices of redlining, he CANNOT be entrusted to serve as the cabinet member in charge of the nation’s monetary regulations. An immediate Congressional investigation is required.
Redlining is the banking scheme of not lending mortgages to minorities in majority white neighborhoods. During the heyday of segregation, northern lenders aggressively employed the informal practice of segregation in lieu of the unabashed, violent methods of segregation carried out in the South. The idea was that an all-white neighborhood would yield higher rents than a mixed or minority neighborhood. The idea was that by redlining, landlords could keep their properties “clean” of the taint of minorities.
In the late 1960s, the Northwestern University sociologist John McKnight first used the term redlining to describe how the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), an offspring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, had drawn maps to differentiate between the most desirable neighborhoods for lending and those in disrepair. They ranged from “Type A,” the best neighborhoods reserved for affluent whites and outlined in green to “Type B” for “less desirable whites” (Jews, Irish, and Italians) outlined in blue to yellow-outlined “Type C” communities for working-class whites to, finally, “Type D” housing blocks circled with a red line and filled with African Americans and Latinos, those deemed riskiest for mortgage lending.
Banks used the maps drawn by the HOLC to discriminate, giving loans in the wealthiest neighborhoods to whites while reserving the poorest neighborhoods for minorities. Lenders expanded the exercise by drawing maps of their own in order to create segregated communities. The practice was especially rampant in McKnight’s nearly segregated Chicago.
Redlining was first banned with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In 1975 the law was strengthened by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requires banks to share their lending data with the public in order to help community groups fight discrimination. To combat on-going redlining, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977. Although illegal and deemed culturally unacceptable in the mainstream, the practice endures discreetly today.[2] This informal mode of segregation in housing has led to poor access to good schools, jobs and stores (especially supermarkets) for minorities.
Mnuchin, it is alleged, continued the tradition of redlining while heading OneWest. Across a tract of land in Southern California where 52 branches of OneWest are located, the bank doled out only two mortgages to African American borrowers in 2014 and 2015.[3] Out of its 74 Southern California branches, none are located in majority African American neighborhoods. Only eleven are located in Latino neighborhoods while Asian neighborhoods house one. These figures are drawn from a study by a pair of fair housing advocacy groups. These groups, the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) and the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC), lodged a grievance with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in mid-November.
Mnuchin denies the charge. Former CEO Joseph Otting claims that “OneWest Bank worked hard to focus on building an easily accessible platform serving all clients and all communities across its physical network of branches.” Otting added that “while new mortgage originations were minimal in 2014 and 2015, OneWest remained committed to fair lending.”
The data tells a different story. In 2015 Latinos made up 43.3% of Los Angeles residents. While the industry average of mortgages loaned to Latinos was 22.4%, only a paltry 8.4% of OneWest’s loans were given to Latinos. “Almost all of OneWest’s REO [Real estate owned] homes in white communities were well-maintained, had manicured lawns, and were clearly marketed as ‘for sale,’” noted Caroline Peattie, executive director of FHANC.[4] The majority of homes in “communities of color looked abandoned, had trash strewn about the yard and boarded-up doors and windows[,]…overgrown grass, shrubbery, and weeds[,],..damaged fences[s,]…damaged siding[,]...and weren’t clearly marketed as ‘for sale.’”  What is more, two-thirds of OneWest’s 25,000 foreclosures between 2009-2015 were handed out to minorities.
House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi has slammed Mnuchin for his dealings during the 2008 financial crisis. Pelosi protests that in his cabinet nominees, Trump has “hand[ed] over the keys to the same players who drove our economy into a ditch.”[5] Likewise, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sent out a joint press release for Trump’s reneging on his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” by nominating in Mnuchin another “Wall Street insider” who “pocketed billions in taxpayer dollars from the bailout” while “mak[ing] a fortune…[by] aggressively foreclose[ing] on families still reeling from the crisis.” In these complaints, these lawmakers have overlooked Mnuchin’s central crime. Mnuchin must be held to account for redlining while heading OneWest bank, for his racist violation of the Fair Housing Act.
With his election, Trump’s racist language, threats and practices during the presidential campaign have been seemingly excused. Yet from his heading of the “birther movement” to his proposal of a Muslim ban, in the swell of making nice, Trump’s consistent return to bigotry must not be forgotten. Indeed in 1973 Trump had lodged against him a housing discrimination suit all his own. The Justice Department alleged that, as Hillary Clinton put it during the presidential campaign, Trump “would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy.” Trump settled the matter.
Mnuchin and OneWest’s home loans to borrowers in minority neighborhoods lagged far behind its local competitors. Exacerbating the issue, OneWest aggressively foreclosed in struggling minority communities even as the bank maintained a practice of keeping those minorities out of thriving white neighborhoods. Mnuchin’s racist practices while at OneWest cannot be overlooked. He has disqualified himself as a candidate for the Treasury Secretary post and cannot be trusted with the regulation of the American economy.

- Zachary Jonathan Jacobson, PhD
the-watch.blog

RICHMOND — A coalition of fair housing groups has sued Fannie Mae, the government-backed housing lender, for failure to maintain and market its foreclosed properties in predominately African-American and Latino neighborhoods in four metropolitan areas, including Oakland and Richmond.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal district court in San Francisco, alleges that Fannie Mae engaged in a pattern of discrimination by allowing foreclosed properties to languish without upkeep that kept the homes unpurchased, attracted vandalism and crime and kept property values lower than they otherwise would be.

In comparison, foreclosed properties in predominately white neighborhoods were more carefully tended, with garbage thrown out, landscaping trimmed and homes properly secured, according to the suit.

“This is one more step in the pattern that we’ve seen where lenders divest communities of color of equity — first by denying loans to people of color, then targeting them for unaffordable loans, then foreclosing on them and finally failing to maintain and market those homes,” said Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, the lead plaintiff of the lawsuit, in a statement.

Twenty other housing organizations around the country joined the lawsuit, the result of a multi-year investigation that focused on 38 metro areas.

A Fannie Mae spokeswoman disputed the allegations in a statement, saying the agency aims to ensure that all properties are maintained and treated equally regardless of location. She also said that Fannie Mae has continuously improved its maintenance practices for foreclosed properties in recent years, “including the use of clear boarding nationally, adoption of technology to enhance the property inspection process, enhanced guidance to field service vendors of our expectations, and enhanced staffing in the field. Through these actions we have demonstrated our continued dedication to providing quality care to all communities.”

In Richmond and Oakland, the housing groups’ investigation found that about a fifth of foreclosed properties owned by Fannie Mae located in communities of color had 10 or more maintenance or marketing deficiencies while those in predominately white neighborhoods had fewer than 10 such issues. The group focused on 88 foreclosed properties in the two cities.

Foreclosed properties in predominately black or Latino neighborhoods were more likely to have debris on the premises, have broken, boarded or unsecured windows, and had holes in the structure, the investigation found. Both Oakland and Richmond were hard hit in the mortgage crisis, with approximately 19 percent of homes in Oakland falling into foreclosure between 2008 and 2012, according to the U.S. Census.
​
“The foreclosure crisis disproportionately affected non-white communities, and Fannie Mae’s failure to maintain and market those foreclosed homes harms these communities further,” Peattie said. “In the Bay Area alone, we investigated over 150 Fannie Mae-owned properties, and this pattern of neglecting properties in communities of color mirrors what other fair housing groups across the country have uncovered in their investigations of Fannie Mae properties.”