Mark Allison and his wife moved into the Stewart Hotel about six years ago.
It’s not a choice most people would have made, but then choice had little to do with it.
“It’s hard for us to get a place because of our criminal background, so every place we went to we were turned down,” Allison said. “Someone told us to come to the Stewart. No screening. Just give them the money.”
All he had to do was pay $600 for the first month’s rent and an $80 deposit and he and his wife had a room just big enough for a bed and a sink, with a bathroom and shower down the hall, and a laundry room off the stairwell.
There was more — black mold, faulty wiring, holes in walls, bedbugs and cockroaches. But it was better than the previous four years he spent homeless, Allison said.
As of February, neither Allison nor any of the remaining dozen tenants are paying rent anymore. They wouldn’t even know where to send the money if they did, Allison said. The managers left and never came back about two weeks ago, he said. It appears to be the final gasp for the violation-riddled Stewart, which has been teetering on closure for years.
On Tuesday, Feb. 11, Allison and six other tenants filed a complaint against the landlord for neglect of the building. The class-action lawsuit, filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, seeks $4.5 million in damages from a group of owners and managers who are alleged to have left the 100-year-old Stewart in a state of gross neglect.
“Truly shocking” is how the tenants’ attorney, Michael Fuller, described the Stewart’s living conditions.
“I saw blood on pillows from bedbug bites,” Fuller said. “I saw trash in sinks. I saw holes in walls. It’s just disgusting. So we’re going to sue them all.”
The “all” includes the owners, Drennan Properties LLC, created in 2018 by Leon Drennan, and his wife, Pamela. It also includes Penny Narver, the wife of the former Stewart landlord Mike Narver, and owner of Westwind Inc.
The lawsuit also names Income Property Management Corp., which manages the first-floor commercial property in the building, home to the famous Mary’s Club, reputed to be the oldest strip club in Portland.
By Fuller’s calculations, during the past two years, Westwind was collecting more than $16,000 a month in rent from tenants at the Stewart, most of it being federal benefits money. Stewart resident Eddie Grant, for example, pays $575 a month for a small room at the Stewart — roughly 10 by 12 feet — his home for the past 15 years. The rent consumes most his monthly Supplemental Security Income, which tops out at $783 for an individual.
Westwind paid Drennan Properties $3,850 a month to master lease the top two floors of the building, leaving Westwind to clear about $12,000 each. During that time, tenants experienced inhabitable conditions, including fire hazards, defective windows and doors, leaking ceilings, holes in walls, cockroach infestations, lack of heat, persistent and potentially dangerous mold, broken washers and dryers, inadequate plumbing and bed bugs, according to the complaint.
“We don’t even drink the water here,” Allison said.
“No landlord would let their property get in that condition,” said Fuller. “It’s outrageous. … I do believe they are intentionally neglecting these tenants. I don’t think that it’s an oversight by any means. They’re profiting every month.”
If successful, the lawsuit would net more than $635,000 for each of the seven tenant plaintiffs.
Westwind also owned its namesake, the Westwind Apartments at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Flanders Street. The Westwind, like the Stewart, was a low-barrier and low-cost housing option for people with little income. And like the Stewart, it had reached an extreme state of disrepair. The Portland Housing Bureau purchased the property from Mike and Penny Narver in 2018 for
$3 million. It plans to demolish the current structure and build a seven-story, 100-unit affordable housing structure in its place.
In 2017, Mike Narver passed away, raising questions as to the future management of the hotel, which by then had amassed a laundry list of health and safety code violations with the city. His obituary noted his passion for exotic birds, being the captain of a charter boat company in Washington state, designing and building nine homes in his spare time.
Jan. 29, Westwind Apartments filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Its Newberg phone number has been disconnected. The creditor hearing for the case is scheduled for Feb. 26.
“It truly is something that I think everyone in this city should go see, how these people are living,” Fuller said. “And that’s not even counting the fear that they have and the uncertainty they have of becoming homeless after living there for, in some cases, 25 years.”
Dean Alterman is the attorney for the Drennans, who he said want to take back possession of the Stewart from Westwind. The right of possession is given up when property is leased, and as the landlord for the property, Westwind was responsible for the care of the Stewart, not the Drennans, who didn’t collect any of the individual residents’ rent, Alterman said. The Drennans, he said, haven’t received rent from Westwind for months, and are as caught in the middle on this as the tenants.
“Their bankruptcy has left us in the lurch as well as the people who are living in the building,” Alterman said. “We’re trying to figure out how to get possession of the building, and that’s complicated by the fact that our tenant is in bankruptcy court.”
In the absence of a manager, the tenants of the Stewart have been doing what they can to keep the place functioning, according to Allison.
“We’ve been running the desk by ourselves to keep the place safe, so not just anybody can walk in,” Allison said, adding that they changed the front door lock to keep squatters out. “We’re not letting the place run wild,” he said. “That gets us in trouble and it’s unsafe, too.”
Fuller likens the building to a ghost ship, rudderless, with no captain and all its profits reaped. Of the hotel’s 55 rooms, only about a dozen residents remain, scattered over two floors.
Alterman said the trustee for Westwind has asked the bankruptcy court for permission to terminate all of its residential leases, which would leave the tenants at the Stewart no right to remain on the property.
“It’s just a very odd situation,” Alterman said. “I’ve run into it in shopping centers, but I’ve never run into where there are subtenants involved, where it’s not the property that went broke, it’s not the tenant that went broke, it’s the party in the middle that went broke. This is a very unusual situation.”
The Stewart, the Westwind and The Joyce before it are all relics of a downtown where people could rent rooms for extended periods on cash, for low cost and few questions asked. In 2015, Joyce residents were facing evictions and the sale of the building, located on prime downtown real estate at Southwest 11th Avenue and Stark Street. The Portland Housing Bureau bought the Joyce in 2016 for $4.2 million, with plans to restore the building and preserve it for low-cost, transitional housing in the downtown core.
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org; follow her on Twitter @jozuhl