State Neglect Results in Mass Evictions
From The Portland Tribune (Oregon) we find a story maddening in the details.
A real estate developer buys a large apartment complex, begins to renovate the units which are affordable housing, a community of a low income tenants are evicted.
Rose City Village apartments — a mammoth 18-building complex that was home to hundreds of low-income Latino and Southeast Asian immigrant families — had become a ghost town practically overnight.Research by the Portland Tribune found that most of the inhabitants had left to avoid months of dislocation due to renovation by new ownership, as well as rents that were swelling by $200 to $300 a month.
Neighbors and residents told of families and friends being scattered around the city, of tenants crying as they packed their bags to go.
. . . “It feels wrong,” she wrote in an e-mail to the Portland Tribune, recalling the day she asked the property manager what was happening. “On the way to the office we passed a Spanish-speaking family having a garage sale on their front lawn. In another apartment we could hear a large group singing hymns in Vietnamese and holding a small church service. … Our next-door neighbors are refugees from Laos and have lived in their small apartment for 10 years.”
An investigation reveals that the development had originally been subsidized by the state and local government back in the early 90's. That created a set of responibilities to maintain affordable housing, give tenants ample notice of changes and to give the city an option to buy the units under certain conditions.
Another person who took note of the project was Micky Ryan, a crusading lawyer for the Oregon Law Center, which advocates for low-income people. She began amassing documents in order to figure out what happened and who was responsible.She found evidence that the complex was not, as city officials initially thought, merely private property whose owners could do with it as they wished. Rather, documents and interviews show, in 1991 the apartment complex was funded with state low-income-housing tax credits of at least $2.3 million.
The Portland Development Commission, meanwhile, provided a $1 million rehabilitation loan as well as $7 million in bond financing.
The original owner bought the property for about $4 million in 1989. In May 2003, he sold it to Steve Rose, a Portland developer, and a limited-liability corporation called Dylan/Bristol, for $11 million. In June 2006, Rose sold it to Brenneke of Guardian Management LLC, which was partners with a California investment company, for $16.5 million.
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