Field Report from RAN

Through the wide variety of organizing we’ve done at RAN and through the reviews
we’ve received on RateYourLandlordPDX.com, we’ve seen and heard about tenant exploitation by
landlords large and small, living in a wide variety of conditions. Regardless of laws, commonsense and
respect, landlords operate on maximizing profit by ignoring maintenance requests, allowing units to go
into disarray especially from tenants that can’t afford to leave, and stealing more rent than agreed upon.
Many use property management companies to ignore maintenance requests in a systematized way, and
standardize communication with tenants to lower costs.

Small landlords get away with certain egregious acts like violating tenants’ privacy, renting out spaces
that aren’t up-to-code, and ignoring tenant laws as most tenants don’t know the law and don’t have the
funds, time or energy to sue. In some cases the entire building isn’t up-to-code with collapsing
structural components and no recourse from tenants except to file permit violations that take a long
time to get processed and almost never get addressed. Small landlords exist in a gray area where,
without property managers to standardize the collection of rent and maintenance, and no body that
registers or checks on conditions at buildings accountability is left to the tenants and their will to
organize. When organizing at Annapurna Ecovillage in South East Portland, we were faced with a
landlord attempting (and failing) to build community between his Spanish and English speaking
tenants. Unfortunately the communities were segregated among class and racial lines leading to wide
disparities in their outdoor space, mold treatment and overall experiences. Many of the white tenants
there felt ambivalent towards the landlord, feeling that the relationship was equal whereas the non-
English speaking tenants felt ignored.

On the flip-side, large landlords get away with more systematized abuse. At the Wimbledon Square &
Gardens, the property manager selectively addressed maintenance concerns based on whether a tenant relied on vouchers. Tenants who can’t easily move to a new place are easier to ignore. This led to severely disparate conditions with some tenants living in moldy, dysfunctional units and others in
updated units in good condition making it challenging to organize across class-lines. Large landlords hide behind management companies, placing blame on the company when confronted and switching between them when put under fire as we’ve seen at 39th Townhomes. This relayed responsibility frequently results in tenants misplacing their anger on management companies who ultimately serve as middle-men.

Then there’s the non-profit landlords, one of which we’ve helped organize a tenant union against:
NAYA. Native American Youth and Family Center, a non-profit landlord that owns apartments around
Portland with the stated goal of helping native people, ultimately exploits their need for housing and
acts as an extension of the state in it’s surveillance and “security measures”. NAYA is notorious for
evicting native elders over discrepancies in its own books. It has been challenged legally but has not
been held responsible. NAYA also aggressively issues lease violations for any form of organizing at
their buildings, worried that tenants could become less controllable.

With property-managers and without, at “luxury” apartments and in dilapidated buildings, what unites
all tenants in their struggles is that landlords fundamentally don’t have the same interests as them, front
skirting safety, to increasing rent, the relationship is fundamentally unfair and exploitative. We at RAN
aim to abolish the landlordism through organizing towards revolution. Join us in our fight!