The District of Columbia has banned a California-based hotel company from renting residential units in the city as part of a lawsuit settlement. Back in 2017, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine sued the company, Ginosi USA Corporation, for allegedly illegally converting apartments (many of them affordable or rent controlled) into short term rentals.

“Ginosi violated District law by unlawfully converting building units that were intended to be available for long-term renters into short-term hotel-like units,” Racine said in a statement about the settlement. “What’s more, the company failed to pay District sales taxes that they collected from guests. The District’s affordable housing crisis is squeezing our residents, and illegal schemes like Ginosi’s heighten the problem.”

Ginosi has been operating in the District since 2014, per the attorney general’s office.

As a part of the settlement announced on Friday, the company will have to halt all business “related to residential apartment units in the District,” according to the OAG. In addition, it will have to give the OAG 60-day advance notice before offering any goods or services to D.C. consumers for the next ten years; pay $682,961.99 in unpaid sales taxes and interest; and pay a $100,000 fine to the city.

Ginosi did not respond to a request for comment from DCist.

Over the last two years, Racine has resolved several lawsuits against the owner and management companies who operated the buildings where Ginosi was allegedly offering these rentals. In those settlements, the OAG secured hundreds of thousands of dollars for residents of the apartment buildings where Ginosi was operating.

The Ginosi settlement is part of a larger pattern from Racine, who has been cracking down on landlords breaking D.C. rental laws for years.

Earlier this week, Racine announced a new partnership with Apartments.com to begin automatically filtering out ads that explicitly refuse housing assistance vouchers, also known as Section 8 vouchers. He has filed several lawsuits against landlords illegally refusing such vouchers in the past.