On a gray December morning last year, a group of neighbors made their way through downtown Portland, headed for the office of the city’s Housing Bureau. Their goal was to deliver a demand letter asking the Bureau to intervene on behalf of the newly created tenant union at the Everett Station Lofts.
The letter laid out issues tenants experienced while living at the loft complex at Northwest Everett Street and 6th Avenue. Tenants believed they were being overcharged on rent, in violation of local housing law.
For years, possibly even decades, the building’s owners had been calculating rent prices for designated “affordable” units using square footage rather than number of bedrooms, allowing them to charge higher prices on par with two and three-bedroom apartments for larger lofts. The tenant association believed the practice defied the building’s regulatory agreement with the city, and asked the Portland Housing Bureau (PHB) to review the agreement.
It seemed, at first, that PHB agreed with the tenants’ allegations of inflated rents. The bureau sent building owners a regulatory compliance letter stating as much in July 2024. But on Friday, January 17, PHB delivered unwelcome news to tenants, calling the city’s regulatory agreement with the Lofts “ambiguous.”
“PHB believes the evidence provided… demonstrates that Allowable Rents should be calculated based on unit square footage,” a letter to tenants from PHB Director Helmi Hisserich reads.
The building owners declined to comment on the Housing Bureau’s decision.
The reversal dealt a blow to the tenants, especially Miranda Krone, who for almost two years, has fought to improve conditions and decrease rents at Everett Station Lofts. Prior to the PHB’s determination, Krone and the tenants association continued to advocate for their position, convening with newly elected City Councilor Mitch Green, who promised to “use [his] office to advance the cause for the Everett Station Lofts Association.”
For Krone, the PHB decision sends a message that “the letter of the law doesn’t matter.”
“I feel very small right now,” she said. “It’s exhausting and of course, it’s demoralizing. I don’t matter, none of us matter to them.”
“I totally understand where the tenants are coming from,” Hisserich told the Mercury, but “it wasn't like [PHB was] trying to make it work for the landlord or trying to make it work for the tenants. …We were just trying to make sure that we were regulating according to the agreement.”
Whether or not PHB has the final say is unclear. Last year, Krone and other tenants filed a class action lawsuit against Everett Station Lofts owners, alleging illegal price gouging on rental units that were supposed to be kept affordable.
Krone pays $2,125 per month for her loft. The tenants’ attorney initially asserted that Krone’s rent should be capped at $1,580 per month, based on prior documentation for the Everett Station property. The Housing Bureau’s latest decision could throw a wrench in the legal claim.
A “cultural hub” in decline
The Everett Station Lofts complex sits in the heart of Old Town/Chinatown. It was first developed as artist lofts in 1989. In 1998, the original developers sold the building to Artspace Properties, a national nonprofit real estate developer that specializes in creating affordable housing for artists.
Before the purchase, Artspace entered into a regulatory agreement with the city in exchange for a roughly $500,000 loan. The agreement stipulated that 30 of the Lofts’ 47 units would be affordable housing, with 25 units set aside for renters making less than 80 percent of the area's median income and five units designated for renters making less than 60 percent. The agreement was binding for a period of 30 years.
Over the next decade, the Everett Station Lofts became something of a hot spot for the burgeoning arts scene in downtown Portland. When Lea Peace, a longtime resident of the Lofts who moved out in 2023, arrived in 2010, it was “a thriving community, a very thriving arts space.” Peace recalled a waitlist for units and an application process that involved submitting a portfolio of your work for review.
Tenants, especially those in the ground floor “gallery” units, would open their homes on the first Thursday of the month throughout the year, allowing people to come and view the art they had created or collected. Peace recalled that thousands of people would visit the building on those first Thursdays.
“It was really a cultural hub,” Peace said.
Within a decade, tenants said the property fell into disrepair.
When Piers Rippey moved into the building in 2018, the units were still specifically meant for artists, though the application process was “more casual” than it had been before. Maintenance standards, which had never been particularly high at the property, began to slip. “It was a mess,” Rippey recalled. There were “holes in the floor and it was missing part of the kitchen counter,” but Rippey didn’t mind, appreciating the “cheap” rent.
By the end of 2020, however, the situation at Everett Station Lofts began to deteriorate. David Haygood, who had lived at the Lofts and managed the building for nearly two decades, moved away. After his departure, the longtime property management company, Quantum Residential, seemed to have difficulty finding a replacement.
“Over the span of maybe six months, I think we had like 10 different people who said they were the [new] managers,” recalled Cinda Thomas, a resident who lived at the Lofts from 2018 to 2023. The tenants' relationship with Quantum soured, especially as building managers failed to address maintenance requests and building code violations.
Tenants at Everett Station, including Rippey and Peace, attempted to organize a union to force management to address their concerns, but their efforts faltered due to intrapersonal issues, and Artspace ended up selling the building in late 2021.
TGR Development, a real estate development firm based in Minnesota and Colorado, bought the property. Coincidentally, TGR’s founder, Tom Nordyke, was a co-founder of Artspace, but left the company to start his own firm in 2003, according to TGR’s website. The development firm says it specializes in “creating added value to existing underperforming assets.” It used a shell company, Everett Station Owner LLC, to purchase the Lofts in December 2021 for $8.5 million, according to property records.
“How are you determining this?”
Tenants at Everett Station Lofts quickly noticed a marked difference in rent increases under the new ownership. Rent had gone up under the previous owners, but “it was like 20 or 30 bucks each year,” Rippey recalled. Now, it seemed to Rippey that ownership was raising his rent as much as possible every year.
By 2022, building management was still failing to address maintenance concerns. Bianca Riggs and Faye Wing, a couple who arrived at the Lofts in 2021, started speaking with other tenants who were experiencing flooding and other livability issues.
The couple reached out to Don’t Evict PDX, a local tenant collective that helped them form a tenants union and connect with the city’s Bureau of Development Services (now Portland Permitting & Development), about building code violations. Inspectors found several “critical violations” including “damaged, deteriorated, missing and not structurally sound” flooring and a lack of “required code-approved heating facilities” in multiple units. Inspectors sent a violation report to building ownership threatening fees if the issues weren’t addressed.
Despite progress on building code enforcement, the newly formed tenants association began to falter. Some residents wanted to pursue a class action lawsuit against the property owner, while others hoped to pursue individual settlements with ownership. At least one tenant reached a monetary settlement with ownership in exchange for forgoing further legal action.
It was through this organizing effort, however, that tenants began to discuss their rents, leading some to suspect that they were being overcharged. It became clear that many tenants were being charged for two-, three- or four- bedroom units, despite all of the units consisting of loft studios of varying size.
Thomas, the resident who lived at the Lofts from 2018 to 2023, reached out to the Housing Bureau, wondering why she was being charged for a three-bedroom unit. “I’m like, I don't have any bedrooms,” she said, “how are you determining this?”
A risk and compliance manager at the Housing Bureau assured her that the square-footage rent calculations were part of the building’s regulatory agreement with the city. When Thomas read the text of the agreement, she found no reference to the calculation method.
Additional issues surfaced in January of 2023, when Riggs and Wing received a request for two years of income certification from building management, citing “a requirement for affordable units to update the city with their annual income.”
But neither Riggs nor Wing knew they were in an affordable unit. When they signed their rental agreement in 2021, they weren’t told their unit was designated as affordable, nor were they asked to fill out any income verification paperwork.
They were told by PHB that the message was likely sent in error. Just over a month later, however, the couple was stunned after receiving another letter telling them that “management was terminating [their] tenancy” because they had “failed to comply with management’s request for income certification.”
Management insisted that the couple had filled out income certifications upon their arrival at the Lofts. “That’s when they provided the documents that do not have our actual signatures on them,” Riggs said.
The couple was not alone. Thomas also received a request for certifications followed by an eviction threat. According to reporting documents submitted by Everett Station Lofts management to PHB, it appears the building failed to collect or submit income certifications for several years, starting in 2020. A February 2023 email from Quantum Residential to the PHB said Quantum was “working on collecting data retroactively” from tenants in affordable units.
Riggs and Wing, despite believing their signatures had been forged, decided to provide their incomes for fear of losing their home. Thomas refused to share her income, eventually getting Gena Scott, the risk and compliance manager at PHB, to send Quantum a letter informing them that Thomas had never been in an affordable unit.
When Thomas again asked PHB for documentation connecting the regulatory agreement with square footage rental calculations, Scott sent Thomas a single page document, a copy of a fax from 2003.
The fax, covered in hand-written notes, is a rent schedule for Everett Station Lofts that denotes how an affordable unit’s square footage translates to bedroom size. Anything below 800 square feet is a one-bedroom unit, between 800 and 1,200 square feet is a two bedroom, and so on.
The original regulatory agreement stipulates that “in no event shall rent exceed HUD [The US Department of Housing and Urban Development] maximum rent.” HUD calculates these annual maximum rents based on an area's median income. The larger the housing unit, measured by the amount of bedrooms, the higher the maximum rent.
The fax does not bear any sort of official city or PHB marking, nor is there any indication that this information was officially added to the regulatory agreement for Everett Station Lofts. One of the hand-written notes on the margins of the fax reads “Are there 4 br [bedroom] units?” to which someone else has written the response “no— all are lofts.”

“That was what started this whole stink”
In the summer of 2023 Krone was stuck, literally. She broke her ankle in a work accident, putting her in a wheelchair for several months. She lived on the second floor, with “three or four” stairs between her unit and the elevator, meaning Krone was essentially trapped in her apartment. “The only way I could get my mail and my food brought up to me was if my daughter or someone else came over and got them for me,” Krone said.
Krone began to wonder what sort of rights she had as a tenant in affordable housing, and whether she could switch units. Scott, the Housing Bureau risk and compliance manager, told Krone the lofts were not in any specific affordable program, and instead had a unique agreement with the city. “That was what started this whole stink,” Krone recalled.
She spent the next year emailing PHB, combing through public records, and talking with fellow tenants. Among the various documents, Krone found what appeared to be a rent schedule attached to the property’s original agreement with the city. The document designated all 30 of the affordable units as “loft units,” each with an identical fair market rent value of $523.00. This value matches the HUD fair market rent value for a one-bedroom apartment in the Portland area in 1999, according to publicly available HUD records.
Last May, Krone presented her research to PHB, concluding that the square footage rent calculations were never stipulated in the original agreement. She expressed concern that Scott was “apparently unfamiliar with the terms of the regulatory agreement” and had provided misleading information to her and her fellow tenants.
Scott agreed that equating square footage with bedroom size wasn’t well-documented, and said something needed to change. In a letter to the property’s owners, Scott noted the original rent schedule “listed all loft units as equivalent unit types” with a fair market rent evaluation equivalent to a one-bedroom apartment.
The letter concluded that “extensive research and review by PHB’s Risk Analysis & Compliance team” indicated all units should be charged as one bedrooms, and “effective immediately” all rents needed to be lowered to the appropriate levels.
After a month, however, Krone hadn’t heard anything from the property manager, and her rent hadn’t gone down. In August 2024, Krone spoke to Hisserich, the Housing Bureau director, who said the property owner refuted Scott’s analysis. Hisserich said she had asked the city attorney to review the agreement.
Over the next several months Krone continued to advocate for her fellow tenants. In October 2024 OPB reported the unique nature of Everett Station Lofts’ agreement with the city, as well as Krone’s class action lawsuit against the building owners.
PHB said its recent determination was based on new evidence provided by building ownership, as well as “physical records… which were contained in the city’s archives.” The Bureau conceded that the absence of the final, completed rent schedule from the original agreement prevented them from issuing a more definitive determination.
Hisserich admitted that other PHB properties “don’t usually calculate rents this way,” but maintains the property owners aren’t violating any agreements. Krone says PHB’s decision is putting the wants of property owners over the needs of tenants.
Old records show conflicting regulations
As for the document Krone stumbled on that references 30 affordable units? PHB argues it was “largely incomplete,” and neither the city nor the developer intended to charge rents in line with one-bedroom units. PHB also points to a loan commitment letter to the Lofts from the Portland Development Commission that refers to a “debt service cover ratio of 1:15.” This means that, as part of the deal, Everett Station Lofts would have to collect enough rent to cover both their expenses as well as the debt payments they owed the city.
John Miller, the executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon (FHCO), agreed with PHB's determination, noting the situation was “not a fair housing issue.” Miller said FHCO, at the behest of the Housing Bureau, has plans to meet with tenants at the Lofts to discuss any possible housing discrimination issues.
Michael Fuller, the lawyer representing the tenants in their class action lawsuit, says the city is being duped by the Everett Station owners. “When you have God money, and a whole team of lawyers, you can make very persuasive arguments,” Fuller said, “and apparently, that’s what the developer has done.”
Councilor Green, after meeting with the tenants association earlier this month, put it even more simply: “If the City of Portland has an affordable housing mandate, and it has an affordable housing project… and [the tenants] are facing rent increases that are really similar to market rate, then we've lost our way.”
Priced out of affordable housing
The Housing Bureau’s decision comes as many tenants in affordable units at Everett Station are feeling squeezed by their rising housing cost burden. Some tenants have already had to leave.
Rippey, who left the Lofts in late 2023 after living there for five years, said rent prices played a central role in his departure. He said building management had raised his rent every year for his last few years. Rippey also felt at odds with the new ownership, saying they were “not at all invested in the arts mission” and “just purely trying to extract as much profit out of it.”
Riggs and Wing also left in 2023, noting the monthly rent on their roughly 900-square-foot loft went from $1,550 to an “untenable” $1,895 in less than three years.
Krone fears PHB’s decision means she will soon lose her housing. She's been “panic packing, trying to figure out how I can potentially afford to move, what I’m going to do, how much it’s going to cost,” she said. “I am terrified.”
“This is hard stuff,” said Hisserich, “for tenants who feel stressed about their housing, it’s very personal.”
“I think why people are fighting so hard in this particular case is because they are rent burdened,” Hisserich said, noting the Everett Station Lofts deal with the city likely wouldn’t pass muster today.
“I would not have executed the agreement the way it was done,” she said, “but … it’s not my job to execute that agreement, my job is to regulate what was done back then in a way that is fair and consistent.”