Residents of the Stewart Apartments can stay put.
For weeks, 66 tenants of the decrepit, ultra-low-income apartments above Mary’s Club have been wondering if they’d be tossed out on the streets, as an agreement between the building’s owners and their longtime apartment management company ticked toward expiration. But that didn’t happen.
The building’s part owner, Leon Drennan, tells the Mercury he’s reached an agreement with the management company to stay on for another three months.
“Best of all, no one gets displaced!” Drennan said today in an e-mail. “I plan to celebrate with the residents.”
As we reported last month, buildings like the Stewart are a fast-diminishing resource in Portland: run-down, single-room-occupancy apartments where people of extremely limited means can afford monthly rent.
The conditions of the buildings are typically objectionable—city code enforcers in recent weeks have cited the Stewart with a litany of violations, including a roach infestation, fire hazards, and inadequate ventilation. But in a city where rents are rising by the day, places like the Stewart are sometimes the only thing preventing people from being homeless.
The fate of the Stewart’s residents came into question when their longtime apartment manager, Mike Narver, passed away in late May. Drennan told the Mercury last month he’d already decided not to renew Narver’s lease, saying the building had been seriously neglected. But in the face of potentially displacing 66 people—and possibly having to pay thousands of dollars in relocation payments under a new city law—Drennan offered a three-month extension to Narver’s family, which he says has been accepted.
What happens after that three months isn’t clear. As officials scrambled to find a resolution at the Stewart in recent weeks, local housing provider Central City Concern interviewed tenants and toured the building. Sean Huber, CCC’s chief housing and employment officer, told the Mercury last week the agency was ” reaching out to Central City Concern clients who may reside in the Stewart apartments building, as well as looking into what we might do to help prevent abrupt resident displacement.” It’s unclear if the organization will take a role in the building.
Drennan, meanwhile, says the tour offered his first glimpse into the buildings conditions in years. “I can’t adequately describe the squalid, third-world conditions forced upon these people,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Will they be requiring the leaseholder to take on adequate insurance to protect the businesses below when another one of these folks sets fire to the building or causes another flood?
Who is going to pay for the repairs? They can’t raise the rents thanks to Eudaly and co. I doubt the owners have the requisite cash on hand (and why would they pour money into a building when they can’t recoup it with increased rents?). Witness the inevitable result of rent control – dilapidated housing stock with no way to fix it. Great job, Portland!
Flapio — San Francisco has had rent control for decades and does not have dilapidated housing stock. And I guess you just don’t have a problem with adding more bodies to the homeless population.
LOL Berny5, San Francisco does indeed have dilapidated housing stock. You can find that out both through general city housing reports as well as folks who actually live there. There are shiny parts of SF, just like there are shiny parts of Portland, and then there are tons of dumpy housing units. Owners in SF will sometimes even keep their units vacant for a year or two while rents go up rather than being stuck renting to a lifetime tenant at a lower rate in order to get a higher return on their investment. Find me a housing study or even an economist who thinks rent control is a good idea. Gonna be tough, because the consensus on that issue is about the same level of consensus among scientists on man made climate change – upwards of 90%.