Willamette Week | By Lucas Manfield | May 3, 2023
Sometimes, Portland apartment complexes become such dumps that the city has no choice but to intervene. Such was the case last year at the cluster of single-story duplexes on the banks of Johnson Creek in the Lents neighborhood in Southeast Portland.
After two years of neglect, the property’s septic system backed up, flooding the surrounding property and—a lawsuit alleges—soiling the neighboring watershed with sewage.
“I couldn’t even open my windows in the summer months,” says former tenant Jessica Schlesinger. “It was horrific.”
She and the remaining fellow tenants became so frustrated with the stink they filed a complaint with the city. After inspectors released dye into the septic system and photographed pink plumes in the surrounding grass in 2021, the city ordered the apartments vacated a year later.
Now, the access road is closed too. The only way to get to the property, sandwiched between a nature preserve, the Springwater Corridor, and an industrial yard, is on foot or by bicycle.
When WW visited last weekend, a man was scavenging for cans in the mounds of trash spilling out of apartment doorways. The windows and doors of the seven units had been crudely boarded up, but squatters moved in anyway. A filthy mattress was visible through one of the partially boarded windows.
Unwanted tenants had been living at the complex until police showed up to clear the property last month, an unhoused man living nearby tells WW. An affidavit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court says a sheriff’s deputy arrested a man and a woman for trespassing at the address on April 7. The deputy said he was acting on the authority of the buildings’ owners.
Squatters have been removed and the access road is now closed.
The property was purchased in 2020 by a Washington LLC for $700,000. The LLC is controlled by two people, Christopher Baird and Eric Matson. According to legal filings, Matson lives in Washington state and Baird lives in Bradenton, Fla.
The LLC’s attorney declined to comment.
According to a website for Chris Baird Consulting, Baird obtained a business degree from Western Oregon University before embarking on a career as a real estate investor. Since then, he “has traveled the country to meet with, and learn strategy from, prominent leaders such as Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump, Robert Shemin, Colin Powell, Zig Ziglar, Rudy Giuliani, and John Maxwell” and is “actively investing” in Portland, Sacramento and Birmingham. He says he “partners and coaches entrepreneurs” who “can earn 20%+ cash on cash returns annually.”
A lien was filed against the property last year after the LLC’s representative failed to pay a contractor’s bill for $2,000. And now, Baird and Matson are being accused in federal court of sacrificing the environment in the quest for profit.
A city hearings officer determined that raw sewage had leaked into Johnson Creek, and she declared it an “imminent danger to the health and safety of the public” in October. The “violation was intentional,” hearings officer Marisha Childs noted.
“I’m surprised the findings by the city don’t warrant some sort of criminal investigation,” remarks Michael Fuller, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Schlesinger, the former tenant.
She moved into one of the complex’s one-bedroom units in 2021 and has watched it deteriorate since. Her apartment was repeatedly vandalized and burglarized. Once, she was assaulted by someone looking for a neighbor. “It was the Wild West at this place,” she says.
The landlords eventually refunded her deposit. She’s now asking for up to $2.5 million in damages.
