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Thirty low-income seniors displaced from their North Portland apartment building after a 2021 outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that sickened 14 tenants and killed one are now suing the building manager and owner, alleging the companies failed to keep them safe from the waterborne bacteria.
Most of the plaintiffs who lived at Rosemont Court are asking a Multnomah County circuit judge to award them no more than $10,000 each in damages from the nonprofit Northwest Housing Alternatives and the firm Income Property Management. (One of the plaintiffs, who contracted Legionnaires’, is asking for $750,000.)
The plaintiffs, all represented by Portland attorney Kevin Cathcart, make up about one-third of the building’s total population. (Cathcart is getting legal assistance from two New Orleans lawyers who have litigated Legionnaires’ cases before.)
Tenants were shuffled into hotels in early January 2021 at the outset of the outbreak, then moved back to Rosemont, then urged to move out at the recommendation of the Multnomah County Health Department, and at last were told they must move in mid-2022—though each had few affordable housing options, which delayed the move-out date for many of them.
It wasn’t until Dec. 7 that the last tenant moved out, according to NHA spokeswoman Ariane Le Chevallier. That’s despite the fact health officials never identified the source of the outbreak.
The Plaintiffs
During much of 2021, tenants were fear-stricken of catching Legionnaires’ as their neighbors fell ill. Jane Foreman, 73, recalls the filters placed over every spigot in her apartment to prevent the Legionnaires’ from traveling through the air in droplets.
“It was like living with a time bomb in your apartment,” Foreman tells WW. “You didn’t know if it was going to go off in a day, a month, a year or never. It could be a little poof of air that was going to kill you.”
Jackie Varnadoe and Roy Story, married and both 75, lived at Rosemont for 10 years. Their family lived in the same neighborhood, only a couple of blocks away. But when Legionnaires’ broke out, they could find no affordable living arrangement. They called it quits in October 2021 and moved to Arizona.
“The lists were so long for affordable housing, and NHA wasn’t doing anything at that point to help,” Varnadoe says. “We just said, if we’re across town in Portland, we might as well be 100 miles away.”
Foreman and Varnadoe filed separate lawsuits in January.
The Recording
Former NHA resident services coordinator and senior housing specialist Sofia Polzoni has been an onlooker with a guilty conscience since she quit her job at the nonprofit in the spring of 2022. She felt her employer wasn’t being transparent with its Rosemont tenants, or offering them adequate relocation help.
“It was mass chaos,” Polzoni recalls. “It was part of my job to reassure people as they came back into the building that everything was safe, even as more people were getting sick.”
Polzoni’s account is supported by a recording, obtained by WW, of an internal meeting May 25 at which top NHA officials discussed how to brand the mandatory move-out, which they planned to announce June 1.
In that recording, chief operating officer and director of asset management for NHA Ray Hackworth muses: “[There are] two options: We officially say the building is unsafe. The other option we have is to say it’s interrelated to our redevelopment goals. We have to choose one or the other. My preference is to not say that the building is unsafe, but to stay with our bread and butter, and say we’re moving towards rehabilitation.”
Executive director Trell Anderson recommends that NHA “lay it at the feet of the health department.”
“We don’t want to say the building is not safe, because we believe it is. We don’t have the money in hand currently for the rehab,” Anderson says in the recording. “So for me, this is our ‘buy us as much time as we need to figure it out’ phrase.”
Le Chevallier says the tape demonstrates “just one of many scenario-planning conversations that took place over that time.…What’s most important is the final decisions that were made. [NHA has] gone to great lengths to prioritize the well-being of its residents at Rosemont Court.”
What Happens Next
The defendants have until Feb. 1 to furnish settlement offers to each of the plaintiffs. If they don’t, the two parties will enter into a discovery phase.
Last week, Foreman says she received a call from someone on behalf of Rosemont Court. They asked if she’d like to come back when the building reopens.
“I lost so much when I left Rosemont. I could list 50 things that I miss and don’t have here, number one being my community,” Foreman says. “But I don’t want to go back to Rosemont, because I wouldn’t trust going back to that building.”
Le Chevallier says the nonprofit is considering reopening Rosemont Court.
“NHA is considering options, including investing over $1 million to bring residents back to an improved building,” Le Chevallier says. “The water infrastructure is not being replaced…the Rosemont water system continues to be operated consistent with the water management plan prepared and administered by an expert consultant team.”