News
Page 4
Street Roots • August 5-11,2016
Shut out
Rental assistance is a proven tool
for ending and preventing
homelessness. Too bad Portland’s
housing market isn’t cooperating.
BY AMANDA
WALDROUPE
STAFF WRITER
ulius Brown and his fiancée, Denise
William, thought they had found
the perfect home after moving into
a iwo-bedroom apartment in April 2015.
The couple had already lived in the
68-unit complex — the Mitchell Court
Apartments at Southeast 72nd Avenue and
Foster Road — for five years. They moved
from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-
bedroom unit in the same complex.
“After five years, you get settled,” Brown
said. “We thought we were there for
permanent. We thought... we were home.”
Then they got evicted.
On July 1, 2015, three months after they
moved into the two-bedroom unit, a 30-day
no-cause eviction notice was posted on their
door. The notice was posted on all their
neighbors’ doors, too. The entire building
was being evicted.
The Mitchell Court Apartments had been
sold to a California-based investment firm
the previous month. The property, which
Eastwood Partners LLC had bought for
$3.25 million in 2008, sold for $5.3 million.
During the transaction, the Portland
Business Journal reported, a perk marketed
to the potential buyers was the complex’s
potential for “positive rent growth.”
A steep rent increase quickly followed the
sale and eviction. When Brown and William
lived in a one-bedroom apartment at
Mitchell Court, they paid a little over $600 a
month. The rent rose to a little over $1,000
a month.
If they were to stay in their two-bedroom
apartment, their rent would have nearly
doubled, from $875 to $1,500 a month.
J
Brown and
William couldn’t afford
it. Brown, 56, and William, 60,
do not work. They receive $1,700 a
month from Social Security Disability and
Supplemental Security Income.
“When you’re on SSI and SSD, you can’t
save any money,” Brown said. ‘-‘When we got
evicted, we had no time to save any money
(for the security deposit).”
The couple “didn’t know what to do,”
Brown said. “The thing that scared us the
most was that we would be going back on
the street”
Seven years ago, Brown and William were
homeless. Brown had experienced
homelessness for eight years, before
outreach workers with JOIN, a social service
agency, helped the couple move into
housing.
“We had been inside for about seven
years,” Brown said. “To be forced out back
onto the streets really freaked us out.”
They called Quinn Colling, their outreach
worker at JOIN. Colling has stayed in touch
with the couple since he first helped them
find housing in 2008. Colling started calling
management companies and helping Brown
and William fill out rental applications. They
thought about moving in with family on
Portland’s west side.
They ended up working with the
management company that ran Mitchell
Court prior to the sale. Brown and William
strong rental
history and a good
relationship with the
company, which quickly
processed their rental application for
a two-bedroom apartment in a complex on
Southeast 244th Avenue in Gresham.
“Because of the stress, they took the first
apartment they could,” Colling'said.
It was the only apartment they
considered that they could actually afford,
Brown said. Even so, they could not have
afforded the up-front move-in costs — the
first and last month’s rent — if not for the
rental assistance funds.
Rental assistance is money that social
service agencies use to help homeless
people move into housing or to prevent low-
income people from being evicted into
instability or homelessness. The money is
used to pay security deposits and other
up-front move-in costs, in addition to all or a
part of monthly rent payments. Sometimes
people receive assistance for a month or
two, until a tenant gets a job or their
finances stabilize. People can receive rental
assistance for longer, depending on the
circumstances.
For nearly a decade,
rental assistance has been
one of the strongest tools at the
city and county’s disposal for ending or
preventing homelessness. In the Portland
metro area, 6,700 households received
rental assistance between 2006 and 2010,
according to Home Forward, the region’s
housing authority.
Prior to 2009, rental assistance funding
was around $1.8 million. The federal
government’s American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA) pumped more
money into the program, bringing funding
levels to $3.5 million. In response to the
escalating housing crisis, the City of
Portland and Multnomah County have
drastically increased the amount of money
for rental assistance.
In fiscal year 2015-2016, $49.9 million in
federal and local funds was spent on rental
and eviction assistance.
In the 2016-2017 year, funding is expected
See SHUT OUT, page 5