Death of a slumlord
(from Honolulu Weekly, July 18-24, 2001 issue)

Edgar Lum, the Palolo man killed last month by a former tenant who had just been evicted, has been described in news reports as an apartment manager, a landlord, and an independent real estate investor.

Lum was actually a slumlord in a state where the word is rarely heard.

“A true slumlord,”a city attorney once called him.

People who knew Lum were “shocked, but not surprised” at his murder. He was a notorious character, best known for his string of run-down homes and apartments stretching from Waimanalo to Waianae, often divided into illegal units and offered at hefty rents to tenants with nowhere else to turn. City records and court documents tell of debris strewn yards, rotting piles of trash, illegal and dangerous wiring, substandard plumbing, leaking pipes, unlicensed repairs, rotten beams, termite damage, and, in one case, a 3-foot hole in a bathroom wall.

Tenants describe Lum as an unpleasant loner who drove junk cars, made his rounds in t-shirt, shorts and rubber slippers, and would go great lengths to avoid spending a buck despite owning property appraised for tax purposes at more than $4 million.

He was “a flagrant and repeated violator” of zoning and building codes who played a complex game of cat-and-mouse with city building inspectors for twenty years, records show.

“It is obvious that he is collecting substantial amounts of illegal rent from the illegal units,” city attorneys argued in one case. “Therefore, it is worth his while to violate, correct, pay the fines as a cost of doing business, then violate again.”

Lum evicted nearly 200 tenants and their families since 1993, an average of more than 20 each year. And when he didn’t get his way in court, Lum reportedly lodged complaints against judges, accusing them of misconduct.

Lum offered free or reduced rent to people who agreed to do maintenance work on his properties, but excessive demands led to complaints that he held these “employees” in virtual slavery, according to a tenant familiar with the arrangements.

The image of the slumlord meeting his end in a beating by a tenant he had first recruited, exploited, and then evicted, wielding a can of food as a weapon, has tragic operatic overtones.

Lum reportedly said he didn’t want his family to inherit anything when he died, and intended to leave his real estate empire to charity.

--Ian Lind