On Monday, I went over to Portland’s courthouse for the latest chapter in a long odyssey: My landlord has been trying to evict me for the past four years: Not for nonpayment of rent, not for repeated violations of my lease, and not for any other good reason.
I’ll go back to the start.
The apartment building where I currently live is called the “Trelawny.” It was built in 1910 by Portland Mayor James Baxter, and originally housed mostly women-owned businesses including, by 1936, a dermatologist, osteopath, dressmaker, manicurist, music teacher, naturopath, nurse, beautician, chiropodist, chiropractor, and psychic.
I have lived here for eight years and about four years ago, just as COVID was taking over, I helped form what has become the Trelawny Tenants Union (TTU) with half a dozen of my neighbors.
This week, my landlord, Geoffrey Rice, is arguing in court to evict me. My strong belief is that his efforts to kick me out of the apartment are in retaliation for that work—and in an attempt to break the union. This is what the jury will decide.
The union formed in those early days of the pandemic as a mutual aid effort—neighbor helping neighbor. We wanted to make sure fellow tenants had masks. Food. Sanitizer. Fans in the heat. Someone close by to call if they felt sick and needed help.
There are over 100 families in our building. Some are on Section 8. Most live paycheck to paycheck. A few are elderly, a couple have disabilities. A couple right across the hall from me just had their first baby.
After some time spent organizing our neighbors, we reached out to our landlord. We hoped he would help with the financial strains of tenants who were losing their jobs and with the building improvements needed for us to work from homes that were less than ideal for remote working conditions.
For instance, many of us have windows that won’t open in the summer and are drafty in the winter. We’re not allowed window AC units (although our landlord does have them), and our apartments are poorly insulated so they’re hot in the summer and cold in the winter. And as the pandemic intensified, we needed to work together to improve things like the package delivery system.
We wanted to ask Mr. Rice to work with us to make everyone’s lives easier during this time of incredible uncertainty. First, we asked him to forgo rent increases in 2020, to temporarily reduce rent payments for tenants who had lost their jobs, to not evict anyone without cause, and to send a survey to tenants asking for feedback on maintenance issues in the building. He met with us twice by Zoom, agreed to all of our requests, and pledged to keep the meetings going.
Unfortunately, about a month into this dialogue, we realized that our landlord had not actually been doing what he pledged. We heard from tenants who were getting rent increases. We heard from others who had lost their jobs that Rice refused to help. He hadn’t sent out our survey. So we sent him an email asking about it.
The next day, he emailed us saying he was ending all communication with us.
In fact, the next time we heard from him in response to something we sent was a year later. TTU emailed him a letter signed by 47 tenants asking why no one in the building had received lease renewals for 2021.
His response to that letter was to call me to his lawyer’s office where he handed me a letter saying I had 35 days to get out.
Three years later, he is still pursuing this eviction. Asking why is a fair question. Even I am amazed at the lengths he is going, and the amount of money he is spending, to get rid of a tenant who pays his rent in full every month, and has only one minor violation of his lease in eight years (I opened a window on a warm April day to air out my apartment before the heating season was officially over).
But there is one very simple answer—it is because our landlord has systematically and repeatedly flouted Portland’s rent control law, attempting to charge tenants tens of thousands of dollars more than he is allowed, and the tenant union we formed four years ago has been leading the charge to get him to pay tenants back what he owes.
Due to the work of the union, Mr. Rice has been required by the city of Portland to reimburse over 100 tenants over $33,000 from rent increases and fees he illegally imposed in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. Tenants who live month-to-month, with barely any savings, just scrapping to get by.
Not only that, he has had to retract over $100,000 of attempted increases before they went into effect, he was exposed for trying to get his tenants to pay the personal tax bill on his 3,000-square-foot penthouse, and he was fined over $15,000 for these violations.
In fact, remember that couple I mentioned above who just had a baby? It turns out, Mr. Rice overcharged them $4,668! In fact, he was actually told by the city to roll back an increase and reimburse them in 2021. After he did so, as soon as the city wasn’t looking, he re-imposed the increase telling the tenants a mistake had been made and it was actually allowable. Thankfully, the union discovered what he was up to, and he was again ordered to pay them back and lower their rent.
Which brings us back to this week’s court proceeding and my future as a tenant of the Trelawny.
No doubt Mr. Rice believes that if he is able to get rid of one of the founders of the union, someone with a higher profile, that some in the union will get scared. That’s union busting 101.
Our union is strong, so I hope he is wrong about that. But the harder he fights, the more money he spends. The longer he drags this out, the more his motivation is clear: Break the union so he can get back to charging tenants what he wants, regardless of the law. Here’s hoping justice prevails.
