Colored homeowners bear the brunt of the Portland program of enforcing the rules for property maintenance

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A Portland homeowner raised $ 30,000 in liens after a neighbor reported to city regulators that paint was peeling on the outside of her home. A blind veteran ran into $ 88,000 in debt over a complaint about unruly weed and unsightly vehicles outside his home. A senior with a serious brain injury had his house almost cordoned off after a neighbor reported vehicles in his garden and an unfinished renovation project.

A damning report from the city ombudsman’s office on Wednesday revealed how Portland is enforcing its long list of property maintenance rules. The report found that the city’s system regularly allows minor eyesores to shoot into financial ruin for homeowners. Those who live in the city’s gentrification areas are hardest hit.

Like most cities, Portland has property maintenance rules that cover everything from the height of a homeowner’s fence to the condition of their lawn. The system for enforcing these rules is determined solely by complaints from neighbors and passers-by. According to the bureau’s review of over 15,000 complaints filed between 2013 and 2018, the complaints were concentrated in neighborhoods that resolve quickly and have a higher percentage of colored people than the city as a whole.

The numbers suggest a worrying trend: affluent, white residents moving to racially diverse neighborhoods are using the city’s complaint system to change the aesthetics of the area. In doing so, they force long-time colored people into debt.

“This is an incredibly harmful system,” said the city auditor, Mary Hull Caballero, who oversees the Ombudsman’s office.

The ombudsman acts as a watchdog in the town hall and receives complaints from people who claim to have been harmed by city politics. Hull Caballero said no other program has received more complaints than the city’s system of property maintenance rules enforcement.

Hull Caballero said one of the major flaws in the program was that it was based entirely on complaints. City inspectors from the Bureau of Development Services do not themselves monitor houses for rule violations. Instead, they rely on Portlanders to file confidential complaints. The inspectors investigate complaints and, if necessary, notify property owners of any violations. If the homeowner fails to fix an issue, the office will issue a fine and place a lien on the property that will allow the city to collect the fee when the property is sold.

It doesn’t take long for those fines to skyrocket. According to the ombudsman’s report, a homeowner has up to four weeks to fix a violation, such as a loose gutter. If they don’t, the city charges them $ 299 a month. After three months, the fines double.

The auditors found that due to the complaint-driven nature of the enforcement, the inspectors did not necessarily focus on the neighborhoods with the most violations. Instead, they likely focused on areas where Portlanders were most sensitive to the condition of their neighbors’ homes.

$ 120,000 in fines

Bruce Cushman, a longtime resident of the King’s neighborhood in northeast Portland, has been fined twice: once in 2008 for a broken window and missing trim paint and siding, and again in 2010 for unauthorized renovations, the accountants said. Cushman’s fines eventually totaled $ 120,000, a priceless debt for the 69-year-old, who said his only source of income was a monthly social security payment of less than $ 1,000.

“It’s all linked to gentrification,” Cushman said, noting that the complaints started when house prices started to rise. You haven’t stopped. In 1987 he bought his home for $ 13,500. The house to his left recently sold for $ 350,000. The right one sold for $ 450,000.

“It’s not a neighborhood decline,” he said of his home. “I couldn’t understand why the city was always after me.”

After the city ombudsman was involved in the Cushman case, he said the fine was reduced to about $ 6,000.

According to the Ombudsman’s analysis, there are around 15 complaints per 100 households in Cushman’s King neighborhood. Woodland Park in northeast Portland had the highest rate with about 29 complaints per 100 households, followed by Mount-Scott Arleta in southeast Portland with 24 complaints. The Pearl District, one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, had no complaints, as did the Lloyd neighborhood and Old Town Chinatown. (These are also areas with significantly fewer single-family homes, which could contribute to the low level of complaints.)

A system rooted in racism?

In their report, examiners argue that the unfair results of the city’s complaint-based system can be traced back to the overtly racist era in which it was created.

The city began relying on complaints to enforce property maintenance in 1914, a time when lawmakers actively sought to ban Black Oregonians from owning property. Five years after the Code Enforcement Program was launched, real estate agents in Oregon were banned from selling homes to people “whose race, in public opinion, would severely devalue surrounding property values.” Two years later, the Portland Mayor and Police Chief met with the Ku Klux Klan “to publicly demonstrate the clan’s close relationship with policy makers.”

In a letter to the council that responded to the report, Dr. Markisha Webster, director of the city’s Justice and Human Rights Bureau, sees the injustices identified therein as “one facet of a systemically suppressed structure related to home ownership”.

“For longer than our history has properly documented, blacks, indigenous peoples, and color communities have experienced varying effects from racial policies and practices that threaten their safety and well-being,” she wrote. “Home ownership for color communities is fraught with oppressive barriers; This dream is then often fulfilled with additional complexity. “

One possible reason the city program has stayed the same for so long: The program does not take money from the city’s general fund and relies on the fines to cover the cost of running the program. If the bureau cut the fines, the program might have to shrink.

Rebecca Esau, director of the Bureau of Development Services, and Commissioner Dan Ryan, who oversees the office, wrote in a joint response that they overwhelmingly agree with the report’s findings. Esau and Ryan wrote that they are investigating how to move away from a complaint-fueled system that can no longer rely on fees and liens to pay for the program.

“BDS is aware of the inequalities and barriers that enforcement fees and liens create for marginalized members of our community, and we agree with the Ombudsman’s recommendation for change in this area,” the letter reads.

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