When a ‘no cause’ eviction leads to a Winnebago instead of a two-bedroom
Call it a sign of the times. In May, three months after Portland passed a law requiring landlords to pay for relocation assistance for tenants receiving “no cause” notices, Debbie Saylor and her friend Steve received theirs.
But they chose not to use their $3,000 payday for the deposit, first and last months’ rent many landlords charge these days; there were too many “scammers” out there, Steve noted, and many wanted $4,500 move-in costs or more for a two-bedroom.
Instead, they bought a Winnebago.
The 1988 Superchief is too old for most trailer parks, but it’s no “zombie.” It has current tags, runs with a purr, and Steve — a retired union concrete finisher who declined to share his last name — used a level to park it near four others in Portland’s Lents neighborhood Sunday night.
The retired pair are as far as can be from the hopped-up, needle-strewing, chop-shopping neighborhood-terrors-in-an-RV that local TV news and social media have covered. They’re pulling in $1,500 a month and their income will double when Steve’s pension starts in several months.
But the former home owners certainly know hard times: he’s a widower, she a widow. They own two dogs, and one just had an expensive cancer operation, and the other is blind in one eye and crippled. Even their parking spot hasn’t been without its hazards: Steve says one of the drivers of expensive, late-model cars that zip by the remote urban hillside location threatened their dog.
“You can tell the locals don’t like [the RV cluster] — they honk, fly by here at 80, 90 miles per hour,” Steve said. One of them “flew by and almost hit the dog,” which Steve says walked out into the road because he’s blind in one eye, “and then when he came by [a second time] he stopped and said ‘if that dog’s out in the street again, I’ll kill it.’”
Five months into the city’s new Community Caretaking tow program, observers like Jennifer Young in Portland’s Lents neighborhood say the problem of derelict, hazardous RVs is improving. Recently, one of the most infamous individuals associated with RVs, John Mayer, was convicted on 35 criminal charges and violations.
But an unflagging local housing market continues to push even working-class people like Saylor and Steve into vehicles, adding to a houseless community that’s grown 10 percent in two years and shows no signs of abating. New clusters, like the one their Winnebago is in, keep popping up. A few problem RVs continue to inspire horror stories.
And the City of Portland seemingly continues to be of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, it’s reportedly giving tickets even to apparently law-abiding people living in RVs like Saylor and Steve: the day after my most recent story in Willamette Week was published, Saylor texted me to say she just got a new $155 ticket. (More on that below.)
On the other hand, Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly’s office successfully pushed for a deprioritization of code enforcement actions for RVs and tiny homes on private property.
Spokesman Dylan Rivera of the Portland Bureau of Transportation estimates there are 650 people living in RVs in the city of Portland. Not all, says the head of the Lents Neighborhood Association’s Liveability Committee, are as responsible as Saylor and Steve.
Two weeks ago, Jennifer Young says, an RV showed up near SE 83rd and Schiller — already tagged with a green sticker, a warning of a city tow.
“What it turned into was a bike chopping shop,” says Young, who lives nearby. “People were actually lining up at the door of the RV at 7:30 in the morning. … We could hear a lot of screaming.” Young says the RV’s occupants started dismantling a vehicle in the middle of the night, that “piles” of used syringes were left in the gutter next to the RV, some of which she cleaned.
Young contacted Sgt. Randy Teig at East Precinct, who coordinated with transportation officials, and the RV was towed. “The syringes made it immediately actionable,” Young said. “We’ve seen RV’s towed pretty quickly if they are creating hazards.” Young noted that she was speaking on her own behalf, not that of the Lents Neighborhood Association, which has been at the center of the metro area’s homelessness crisis.
Young says things have gotten better since May, but she keeps noticing new “pockets” of RVs popping up — including the one where Saylor’s RV was parked, on a hillside near Mt. Scott.
There there were two fires this summer, Young says.
Maher’s ill-fated RV scrap plan
Houseless people living along the “Strip” called police on John Maher in April when he started dumping derelict RVs there, mostly at night.
Evidentiary recordings provided by Assistant District Attorney Kevin Demer provide a unique window into a world where Portland’s deepening homeless crisis meets metal recyclers, scrappers and tow companies.
Earlier this month the city council extended the housing and homeless state of emergency, which provides flexibility for shelters, another 18 months.
Maher’s statements to an unnamed city official suggest he saw his actions as justified by the burgeoning market for dirt-cheap, near-death mobile homes.
“It was helping to solve a problem, and there was a little tiny, tiny bit of money to be made,” Maher says in the recordings.
In a phone call with an unnamed city official, Maher admits to dumping 11 RVs on the streets which he obtained from two tow companies, Speed’s and Retriever.
Vacillating between contrition and self-justification, Maher says he formed a plan to dismantle and scrap around 20 RVs at 6048 N Columbia Way on land he rented from property owner Ray Blackford, but when Blackford or others realized he didn’t have a dismantler’s license, he dragged the vehicles out onto North Portland streets.
Maher says the tow companies and Blackford had no knowledge of his plans.
“Retriever and Speed’s both volunteered to give me $300 [per RV] because that covers the garbage, that covers the dump bill, and then out of the scrap that’s left, there’s like $200 to $300 that’s left in scrap. I would pay Ray the $100 that he wanted, and there’d be $100, $150 left for me.”
Maher says he called the Abandoned Vehicle hotline and talked to police, but realized he couldn’t afford the cost or wait of getting a dismantler’s license, and left the RVs on the street intending to come back and move them.
Maher received at least 14 RVs, and gave one away, successfully dismantled and scrapped two of them, and ultimately left 11 on city streets.
“I just give it to them for free for no consideration, I just gave it to him,” Maher says about one RV. “He wanted a place [to live] and he said ‘Can I have it?’ I said ‘yes.’ I gave him the lien paper.”
Maher insists the RVs he left on city streets weren’t partially scrapped, saying opportunists saw their chance and stripped away the rest.
“I drove by during the day and I just thought, ‘My God, what have people done?’ Every single day there’s more stuff off, things pulled off, things drug out into the street, I’m like ‘God, they got one half-drug out into the street.’”
Multnomah County Assistant District Attorney Kevin Demer, who prosecuted Maher, says there’s nobody else out there doing anything like what Maher did.
“The impact on the community of abandoning 11 RVs was significant,” Demer said, noting that each abandoned RV became a new nexus for trash, debris and crime. “There’s a clustering effect.”
Maher is currently out on bail awaiting a December 1 sentencing.
The SE Knapp Cluster
Even though things have gotten better in Lents, Young says, there are still “pockets” of derelict RVs. Particularly during a season when the mercury’s dropping fast — and several houseless persons have been found deceased in the area, raising spectres of last year’s deadly snow storm — moving into a vehicle can be a logical choice for someone who can’t afford an apartment.
“We have pockets. Right now there’s 17 RVs and campers on 96th to 100th and Knapp, going up the hill. We get like hotspots. That’s a really challenging area. It’s along a hillside, and there were a couple fires there this summer.”
The situation in Lents and other neighborhoods throughout Portland — in St. Johns, for example, there are new reports of other pockets of RVs — puts an exclamation point on the scope of the problem: for houseless people, this is not a “recreational” experience any more than living in a tent is “camping” when one has no other place to go.
It can be tough to separate fact from fiction, but here are a few observations:
- In Portland, some are using a new law mandating that landlords pay “relocation assistance” to buy RVs. Debbie Saylor and Steve said they are among those who got this payment after a “no cause” eviction notice, her second, for a two-bedroom apartment on SE 82nd Avenue. (The specifics of the payment are unclear.) It’s unlikely city officials considered RVs when planning the ordinance.
- Like homelessness, this is a regional, disproportionately West Coast phenomenon. In Seattle, a group of disabled homeless veterans living in RVs near Veterans’ Hospital on Beacon Hill just protested a “sweep.” In San Diego, a group of disabled homeless people living in RVs is threatening a lawsuit against the city, saying they have no other place to go.
- A large percentage are not just homeless, they’re disabled. More than a few interviewees in RVs told me they’re getting SSI or SSDI payments, but those payments simply do not stretch far enough, especially with the red-hot costs of housing. The disability theme widens considerably if we look at not just those with physical “handicaps,” but add in those who are living with mental illness or drug/alcohol addiction.
- Some people are starting to use that disability as a defense against transportation or police officials who seek to ticket or move them. This appears to be true of the occupant of the sole remaining RV on the North Lombard Strip. Both here in Portland and in other cities, some disabled individuals living in RVs are invoking the Americans With Disabilities Act to fend off city officials.
- It’s easier for cities to ticket or tow vehicles than to help humans. There are hard questions that should be asked of the police, bureau of transportation and district attorney’s office here in Portland, and probably other cities. For me, the first one is: why did Debbie and Steve get a ticket the day after my WW story came out?
Here’s how Saylor described the scenario to me in a text message:
“unfortunately we along with the older couple (with health issues) behind us got ticketed and told to move $155.00 a ticket makes it even rougher for us retired who aren’t creating a mess or problems We r just trying to survive for now and they make it tough on us u can call me back I really hope I can help raise the perception that this isn’t easy and we mean no one any harm and I know there r jerks out there that ruin it for everyone”
Saylor didn’t return a phone call, but the timing of these tickets raises questions about Portland city officials’ reactivity and targeting. She also sent this follow-up text a day or two later:
“No one ever talked to me I saw him talking to the older couple behind us I went to get a coat on he was gone put a ticket and a green tow sticker I was in tears as we are trying to move today and had some trouble with it running plus I just lost a dear friend to cancer the elderly couple behind us said to him just tell us we will move no need for a ticket the officer said he’d note that then behind their back left them a ticket those people up the hill I’m sure aren’t part of the church as Jesus wouldn’t treat people like that puts as further behind trying to get out of Portland now ) $155.00 is a lot of $ for us and we haven’t done nothing to deserve this what we will do now I’m unsure but u r welcomed to call me”
Yes, there are people in RVs that, under the city’s new “Community Caretaking” tow program, pose an “imminent threat to public health or safety.” Young and other watchers in Lents have documented some of them.
Saylor and Steve totally get that.
“I understand that we need laws to prevent people pulling into a neighborhood and just trashing it,” Steve said.
These two are retirees, pensioners, who worked for many decades taking care of sick animals and doing union concrete work. They are sober, take care of two disabled dogs and live in a mobile home that’s well-kept and street legal.
City law says that RVs and other oversized vehicles are legal on city streets if they’re only parked there for eight hours at a time, and I witnessed the pair parking theirs Sunday night, suggesting they move it daily to comply with the law. The pair had legal license plates and tags, and the motor home appeared to be in good condition — its motor purred reassuringly.
Why’d they get the $155 ticket, a day after an article about them?
“It isn’t easy living in an RV,” Saylor said. “Some people make it bad for everybody.”
