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ADDRESS: 4404 SE 99th Ave.
YEAR BUILT: 1950
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 3,862
MARKET VALUE: $206,730
OWNER: Dani Gobana
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Around 2 years
WHY IT’S EMPTY: All the usual reasons
Portland’s cheap housing is disappearing. Case in point: the 14 units on a busy street just off Interstate 205 in the Southeast Portland neighborhood of Lents.
For decades, the apartments and single room occupancy units, spread across three buildings on a corner lot, were owned by a landlord named Oskar Hess, who catered to the “down and out,” according to a 2008 WW cover story. Hess was the sort of landlord who went door to door collecting rent—and who’d personally take tenants to court who couldn’t pony up.
The buildings at the corner of Southeast 99th Avenue and Holgate Street weren’t in the best of shape. In 2017, police found a man stabbed to death on a second-floor balcony. City inspectors declared the property uninhabitable later that year, according to a tenant lawsuit.
But that hadn’t stopped Hess from continuing to rent out the units. Facing health issues, he did so until 2020, when his family took over the business and sold them off. The buyer, a developer, eventually got rid of the tenants, boarded up the buildings, and sold the property off. (Two evicted tenants briefly pursued a lawsuit arguing a violation of the pandemic moratorium on evictions.)
Dani Gobana, a Northeast Portland pharmacist, purchased the property in the summer of 2022: a house, a triplex and a two-story apartment building for $800,000.
He then ran into a different set of issues. That December, the city received a complaint about “unpermitted construction.” He says he didn’t have money to make improvements anyway—the buildings were in such bad shape his bank wouldn’t give him a loan.
The county assessor wrote off nearly all the buildings’ value last year, dropping the property’s valuation to a quarter of what Gobana paid for it. No one’s paid the property tax bill since 2021.
Squatters have moved in. The chain-link fence surrounding the property has been tipped over. A WW reporter watched a pair of men walk into one of the upper-floor apartments. Thieves have stripped the electric wiring from inside the walls.
On Sunday, a grizzled man with a headlamp was repairing the electric meter at the duplex next door, another former part of Hess’ empire that has since gone vacant. The handyman, Bob, said the new owner was fixing the place up in the hope of flipping it. But, he said, gesturing at the graffiti next door, “Who wants to buy this place, with that looking like that?”
Gobana says he plans to begin remodeling in earnest in the next few months, renovating one building at a time and using the rental income to finance further repairs. “I’m not someone that would give up,” he says.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.