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Lu’kas Porter is willing to bet anyone that he lives in the worst apartment in Portland.
Not because it’s just west of the concrete wall along Interstate 205 off Southeast Division Street. Or because it’s small for two people, one large cat and a lot of stuffed animals. Or because there are people living in cars and RVs at the entrance to the parking lot. (They’re all really nice, Porter says.)
The problem is the apartment upstairs. Some nights, the bass from the music is so loud that it shakes the pictures off his walls. Once, someone blasted away at a car in the street with a shotgun. Very often, one of the people up there calls him a faggot. They’re squatters, Porter says, and there are new ones every few months.
The greatest hazard is that they keep flooding the upstairs apartment, which in turn soaks Porter’s ceiling. It’s fallen in five times, he says, once on his bed. The deluges are drug-related, Porter suspects. During a particularly bad flood last year, he went upstairs and a man said he had taken GHB and passed out after trying to fix the water heater. GHB, or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, is a party drug that can knock you out if you take too much, or if you combine it with alcohol.
“He offered me some,” Porter says.
WW knocked on the door to the apartment upstairs from Porter last week to ask about the situation, but no one answered.
“Before the floods, it was drugs, guns and music.” Porter, 37, says. “After that, it was drugs, guns, music and water. Lots of water.”
So why does he stay? Because the rent is $1,200, and he splits it with his roommate, Katie Pranger, 45. He doesn’t think he could find anything near that price in a normal place. Even one-bedroom apartments in his ratty complex go for $1,600. Porter works as the birthday party manager at the KingPins bowling alley on Southeast 92nd Avenue, a job he loves but that doesn’t pay as much as he’d like.
Porter’s experience shows that for people working marginal jobs in high-rent, low-vacancy Portland, the line between being housed and being homeless is thin. Although there are plenty of tents on city streets, situations like Porter’s are less obvious downtown because few people living in Pearl District condos are likely to miss a rent payment and end up outside.
But in Porter’s neighborhood—Powellhurst-Gilbert—that line is bright. Porter’s been homeless before, just like the people outside his door, and he fears that he will be again if he doesn’t grit his teeth and make the best of it.
Porter says he’s called every city agency he can think of, to no avail. A tenant advocate says his experience may be extreme, but the lack of response is also typical of what others in Portland’s low-vacancy rental market face.
Kim McCarty, executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, says there is little Porter can do, beyond suing the landlord, which is expensive.
“In some jurisdictions, the health department can intervene with fines for failure to make repairs,” McCarty says. “The fines can be an incentive for the landlord to take their landlord obligations seriously. Unfortunately, there is not one regulatory agency to enforce landlord-tenant law.”
The squatters live in unit 404 of the four-building, 35-unit complex at 9257 SE Clinton St. Porter and his roommate live in unit 402, just below. Ownership of unit 404 is traceable back to 2005, when TSPN LLC, controlled by a Happy Valley man named Tanveer Ahmad and his family, owned the complex. Alton Maddox, a current owner and head of the homeowners association, says Ahmad was part of the group that developed the property. Ahmad and his family didn’t return multiple calls or emails.
In March 2007, according to The Oregonian, a man by the name of Tanveer Ahmad pleaded guilty to traveling to Libya without U.S. government authorization. The trip was a felony violation of U.S. sanctions. Ahmad agreed to settle the charges by paying back $275,000 he had earned while working in Tripoli.
A month after that, Ahmad borrowed $126,750 from Washington Mutual Bank to refinance unit 404, according to court filings. Ahmad gifted the apartment to Sonia Ahmad later that year, the last of several transactions among his family. In 2011, Ahmad filed the first of at least five bankruptcies, according to court filings. Property records show numerous transactions occurred across the complex, with units changing hands between the Ahmad family, banks, and other buyers.
Right now, Multnomah County property records show Sonia Ahmad as the owner of unit 404. (Sonia is Tanveer Ahmad’s daughter, Porter says.)
Porter became involved with the Ahmads in 2018, when he rented unit 404 from them. They got into a dispute over repairs (the toilet was filled with cat litter when he moved in), and Porter says he stopped paying rent. Ahmad won a judgment after Porter missed a court date.
Porter moved downstairs to unit 402 in March 2020 and rented from another owner, Maryika Gibson. Beyond the banging music and the gunshots, things were tolerable until January 2022, when water began trickling into his bedroom. After 18 hours, he called Portland Fire & Rescue. Porter says firefighters broke down the door to 404 and discovered that the water heater was leaking. Porter had to sleep in the living room for two months until contractors fixed his ceiling.
The GHB episode happened a month later, and water has been dripping from different parts of his ceiling like Oregon rain ever since. In mid-October, the paint on his kitchen ceiling bubbled. Contractors arrived and found the drywall soaked. They removed it and covered the 8-by-10-foot hole with plastic sheeting. A jury-rigged funnel directs water into a trash can.
Porter says he has tried everything to improve his situation. He’s called the Portland police, the fire bureau, and the Bureau of Development Services’ property compliance helpline. He’s pleaded with the homeowners association and with the Ahmads, to no avail. He even called the FBI because the squatters seemed to be operating a bootleg appliance store. Washers, dryers and refrigerators come and go regularly, Porter says, often blocking the walkway to his apartment.
The cops, he says, told him they couldn’t enter the unit without a warrant. The fire bureau said not to call again unless his life was in danger. The Portland Police Bureau did not return an email seeking comment. The fire bureau didn’t return a phone message. BDS acknowledged it had received complaints about unit 404.
Maddox, the head of the homeowners association, says there’s nothing he can do because the unit’s owner has ghosted. Case in point: Ahmad owes $100,000 in delinquent HOA dues.
“He’s the worst of the worst,” Maddox says.
Beyond the guns, drugs and noise, the problem for Porter is that there is no way to turn off the water to Ahmad’s apartment. The whole complex is on the same account, Maddox says.
“Everyone is on the same system for water and sewer,” he says. “It’s the worst design in the world. I don’t know how the city let this through.”
Porter says he’s become attuned to the sound of dripping water and that he wakes up every morning expecting to hear it. But there may be relief in sight. Though property records don’t reflect it, Maddox says unit 404 is actually owned by the bank now, and auction.com shows that unit 404 is scheduled to go on the block March 14 at 1 pm.
With more responsible owners might come less indoor rain. Lu’kas Porter can only dream.