Lindsey Smith was skeptical in early March when her friend in Spain warned her about coronavirus.
Parts of the European country were on lockdown and there were talks of a nationwide order. Smith, a preschool teacher who lives and works in Southeast Portland, couldn’t imagine something like that happening in Portland.
“She was telling me a few weeks ahead of time, ‘This is gonna get bad and you need to be ready,’” said Smith, 26. “And I said, ‘It’s not going to happen here. It’s not like we’re going to shut down everything and I’m going to lose my job.’”
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered schools statewide to close by March 16. Smith was laid off from her teaching job the next day. That same day Multnomah County and Portland officials announced a temporary suspension on landlords evicting tenants who couldn’t afford rent because they were impacted by COVID-19.
When rent was due April 1, Smith was one of those people. She rents a studio apartment in a three-story complex for around $1,000 a month, has student loan payments and other expenses. After taxes, she said she makes about $20,000 a year and supplements it with summer teaching work. She said she’s applied for unemployment benefits.
Smith was able to defer her rent payment for April by providing her building manager with a letter from her employer explaining she was laid off due to the coronavirus outbreak. The building manager sent her notices telling her to lay out a payment plan and guarantee she’ll honor it. She’s weighing if she should do it, but leaning toward not agreeing to anything.
“I don’t know when I’m going to be able to pay my rent again,” Smith said. “I couldn’t afford to pay double my rent even when I was working. To be in a situation now where I’m missing out on paychecks, rent fees are piling up and I’m expected to just find the money from somewhere, I’m very scared and I’m angry.”
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Renters like Smith as well as landlords across Oregon are worried how they’ll make rent and mortgage payments as the coronavirus pandemic has rocked the state. Over the past two weeks alone, more than 168,000 Oregonians have filed unemployment claims.
Renters are concerned that eviction moratoriums that local and state officials touted as measures to keep them in their homes will lead to them ultimately being forced out anyway if they can’t afford their deferred rental payments. Landlords, particularly those with few properties, are concerned about how they’ll make their living expenses or mortgage payments with up to six months of lost revenue and no moratoriums in sight to aid them.
“If the tenant doesn’t pay, we could be in trouble,” said Pak Ng, 80, of Beaverton. “We can’t go a month without the money.”
Ng and his wife have rented out a two-story house they own in Beaverton to a family for two years. He said he makes around $500 a month in social security, a portion of which goes to Medicare insurance. He gets $1,600 from rent and said about half of that goes to property tax and insurance payments.
The couple bought the house about three years ago for around $150,000, Ng said. He said he’s thankful they don’t have a mortgage to pay.
“It’s another worry for us,” Ng said. “We’re afraid to go out except for a walk around the neighborhood because of the virus and we don’t know what tomorrow brings.”
It’s unclear how many households have sought rent deferments in April and a clearer picture likely won’t emerge until after April 5, when the grace period for most rental payments end, said Monica Foucher, a spokesperson for Home Forward, the housing authority of Multnomah County and the state’s largest provider of low-income housing.
The agency operates more than 6,000 apartments, about a third of which are public housing units, and offers nearly 9,400 Section 8 rent assistance vouchers. Home Forward has instituted its own suspension of evicting COVID-19 impacted renters until at least May 31 and offering repayment plans of up to a year for accrued unpaid rent.
Foucher said the occupancy rate of their units is typically in the upper 90% range and they average three people per household. The agency is working with the Portland Housing Bureau to provide as much as $500 to around 2,000 low-income families and Foucher said Home Forward hopes they receive enough in local, state and federal relief funding to lengthen the period of time they could go without requiring rent payments.
“A lot of housing authorities and government agencies have all talked about how we don’t want people to have looming debts from this crisis and what we can do toward that is waiving rent,” Foucher said. “We just don’t know if we can yet.”
Local officials have also called for temporarily erasing rent obligations. The Portland City Council on Wednesday sent a letter to state and federal lawmakers calling on them to forgive all rent and mortgage payments for renters and businesses whose income or expenses have been heavily hit by coronavirus.
“While local and statewide moratoriums on residential and commercial evictions were a vital step to stabilize renters, we need further action at the state and federal levels to stem the tide of evictions, foreclosures and bankruptcies that will occur without further intervention,” the letter signed by Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioners Chloe Eudaly, Amanda Fritz and Jo Ann Hardesty. Half of Portland residents are renters and the average low-income household spends more than a third of their income on rent, they said.
In response, Gov. Kate Brown’s office said it’s still analyzing the possible impacts of the CARES Act, the federal coronavirus relief bill, while also mulling what other actions can be taken to help Oregon families and businesses.
“Governor Brown appreciates local officials bringing their perspectives to the table, and welcomes their input on how their ideas can be implemented,” said Charles Boyle, Brown’s press secretary.
Meanwhile, Multifamily NW, a rental industry group whose members include landlords and property managers, urged state and federal lawmakers to ignore Portland officials, referring to the city’s demands as “misguided,” “uninformed” and “dangerous.”
Deborah Imse, the organization’s executive director, wrote in a letter Thursday that the city’s call to waive rent and mortgage payments wasn’t a practical solution and “reveals a deep misunderstanding of how our housing and financial systems work.”
“If enacted,” Imse wrote, “the consequences would be dire.”
Imse laid out a scenario where the policy would force housing providers statewide to institute layoffs to cut expenses, including of leasing and resident services, security and maintenance workers. They wouldn’t be able to pay property taxes and utility bills, or maintain partnerships with social service agencies and nonprofits. She wrote that navigation services for members of immigrant and homeless communities as well as supports for domestic violence victims could go away. Housing would be more apt to falling into disrepair and new units would stop being offered for rent, she wrote.
“Most large multifamily developments are not financed through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac,” Imse wrote. “Rather, they are financed through a range of sources including investment banks, private individuals, private equity firms and public pension systems like PERS. Oregon government has neither the authority nor financial wherewithal to restructure or back these investments in the way that the city is proposing.”
Imse instead suggested the state temporarily expand its rental assistance vouchers program to the tune of around $350 million a month through the funds allocated through the CARES Act.
Mark Madden, chief executive officer of EkoLiving Apartments, a property management company with more than 600 Portland-area units, said he thought a rent forgiveness plan was “problematic.”
“It doesn’t really provide an economic outcome that would be beneficial to lenders or owners,” he said. His company announced March 17 that it would be dropping April and May rent prices by 25% for tenants impacted by coronavirus. He said they won’t be expected to pay back what was discounted. He said at least 100 residents are paying discounted rates.
Madden said about 95% of EkoLiving’s tenants have paid rent as of Thursday. He said he hoped other landlords would decrease rent costs to help their residents, but he wasn’t sure of how many actually have.
“People don’t want to not pay rent,” Madden said. “They don’t want to go in debt or have credit issues, so being able to give tenants help has been beneficial for everyone.”
He said the majority of his employees are working from home and they haven’t had to institute layoffs. He said they’ll make an evaluation near the end of May of whether they can continue to provide decreased rent costs if the statewide stay-at-home order persists and people continue to be out of work.
Kevin Mehrens, a Portland-based tenant attorney, said he believes the current climate will more heavily impact landlords who own one or a few rentals rather than large property management companies.
He said he’s seen a few cases of landlords who’ve allowed tenants to pay discounted rent or offered written agreements for payment plans. None of them mentioned that tenants may be allowed to defer payments for up to six months through local eviction moratoriums end like in Multnomah County, Gresham and Beaverton, Mehrens said.
He said he believed the agreements were enforceable if tenants sign them and that he didn’t believe there was anything in the eviction moratoriums mandating that landlords and property owners inform their tenants they exist the moratoriums exist.
Tenants may also not be entitled to the deferment if they don’t properly notify their landlords by April 1, Mehrens said. That could mean tenants could be charged late fees in addition to accrued rent and could be taken to court for not paying rent after the eviction moratorium lifts.
Robert Brown, who rents a unit in a low-income housing complex in East Portland, said April 1 meant he likely had to choose between paying rent and buying food.
He was furloughed from his job at Burgerville at the end of March where he earned about $1,000 a month. He applied for unemployment benefits after he lost his job, but after two weeks, still hasn’t heard any updates on whether he’ll receive any benefits.
Brown said he and his fellow tenants are sharing food to make sure those who are most at risk of contracting coronavirus can remain at home. He said he and about a quarter of his 40 neighbors decided against the deferment and instead are boycotting paying rent in April in the hopes that it will eventually be waived.
“I’m not going to give my landlord the little bit I have in savings with no income and no way of knowing how it’ll affect me next week or months from now,” said Brown, 25. “At this point, things are going to get worse before they get better.”
-- Everton Bailey Jr.
ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 |@EvertonBailey
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