UNWARY LANDLORDS RUN RISK OF RUIN

Drug Operations Gravitate To Rentals, Wreaking Havoc And Inviting Crime And
Other Problems Into Neighborhoods

Landlord Judy Hankerson says she always did her best to find out what she
could about potential renters, verifying jobs and pay, calling previous
landlords to see if they were troublemakers, asking, point-blank, about
illegal drugs.

Then, a friend told her about a guy who needed a place to live, and, in a
hectic moment -- what some might call a moment of naivet -- she did what
experts say never to do: She rented him her two-story house on Southeast
Alder Street after a cursory background check. "I wasn't too involved with
this tenant," she admitted in hindsight, having delegated much of the
on-site management to a friend.

Today, the little house with white shutters stands in ruins, a reminder of
illegal drug activity, its unseemly effects on Portland neighborhoods and
its fierce attraction to rental properties, where police estimate at least
three-quarters of the action occurs.

On July 11, drug and vice officers seized evidence of a meth lab in the
house's basement, hand grenades and toxic chemicals in a van parked out
back. On July 19, a suspicious fire destroyed the garage, and the rest of
the house, which was insured, went up in flames in an Aug. 9 arson that
awakened neighbors at 4 a.m. Both fires are under investigation.

Hankerson, who in 20 years of property management occasionally had
suspected drug activity but never had it confirmed so dramatically, is
stunned and filing for bankruptcy because of the added financial strain.
And she thought she was savvy about that kind of thing.

"We talked to (him) about drugs; we were so strongly against them, I felt
(he) wouldn't do anything out of fear," she said of the tenant, who,
unbeknownst to her, had previous felony convictions, including one that was
drug-related. Later, when he called from jail, where he was being held on
new charges of possession, manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine,
"he denied any involvement," she said. "But I think he felt bad about it."

A Foot In The Door

Neighborhoods surrounding such properties suffer not only from the drug
activity itself, but from its byproducts: belligerent behavior, loud noise,
graffiti and other vandalism, stabbings and homicides. That's what John
Hutson discovered living across from Hankerson's rental. "Kids were coming
and going from there all night long," he said. "My daughter told us the
night the place was busted they were racing their motorcycles up and down
the street. It's been a real quiet neighborhood, except for that house."

While the criminals, who can cook as much as $15,000 worth of meth in 40
minutes, may care little about disrupting the peace, they care deeply about
not getting caught. Rentals offer less risk. And criminals know exactly
what they are looking for among the city's 89,000 rental units: Rundown
houses and apartments, near pay phones and bus stops, that lend a sense of
anonymity, with landlords who don't care enough, or simply don't know
enough, to keep them and their drugs out.

A criminal records check, which costs as little as $20 per prospective
tenant, would give many landlords all the information they need to keep bad
renters out, experts say. Yet only roughly one-quarter of all landlords
effectively screen potential tenants, according to John Campbell, a
nationally known rental consultant. And that's despite the demographic
reality that rentals tend to attract a younger, less established crowd that
just happens to commit a larger percentage of all crimes, said Campbell, a
Portland resident who battled a drug house on his own street.

"It's not an indictment of rentals," Campbell said. "It's just the way the
world works."

The net result -- especially during high vacancy periods like this one when
landlords feel they can't be choosy -- is that drug criminals get a foot in
the door, close it behind them and then privately go about the business of
making and dealing drugs.

When exposed, their handiwork can be shocking, especially to unwitting
property owners: Entire rooms, even entire rental homes, turned into
elaborate marijuana growing operations with hundreds of illegal plants,
glowing white walls and blazing lights.

Gaping holes cut into walls and attics to provide ventilation, and hardwood
floors rotting and buckling from drip-watering systems. Jury-rigged
electrical systems, to disguise the intense energy drain of grow lights.
Bedrooms and kitchens littered with the glassware and crystalline
substances of meth labs, and enough toxic chemicals splattered on floors,
carpets, walls and appliances to render properties unfit for habitation
without extensive rehabilitation.

Secret drug-making rooms in hollowed-out areas beneath foundations, or in
attics, and behind staircases. Floors strewn with the tin cans, cigarette
cartons and snack wrappers of a drug lifestyle.

The police don't pretend they know all the places where illegal drug
activity is occurring or that they can bust everyone involved. "We aren't
trying to evict every drug addict in the city of Portland," said Officer
James Harding, the Police Bureau's Drugs and Vice Division's drug-house
expert. "Some people would like us to, but we can't realistically do that."

Instead, they attack the problem where it becomes most obvious, such as at
the 95-unit El Moro apartment complex on Southeast 122nd Avenue, where
police say drug activity has been chronic. Earlier this year, the city sued
to close the complex under the city's decade-old chronic nuisance
ordinance, the first time the city had used the ordinance against an
apartment property.

Since then, some prosecutors have even advocated creating criminal
sanctions for the landlords of nuisance properties.

But, as the 18-month El Moro investigation showed, ridding rentals of drugs
can be a painfully slow process, especially for neighbors. It can take
months, even years, to detect and develop strong evidence of drug activity,
police say, especially because drug criminals are a moving target. When
police get too close, the drug criminals pick up and move on, often to
another rental.

A smattering of statistics suggest what police are up against:

- - The Drugs and Vice Division's hot line rings as many as 50 times a day
with tips from people who suspect their neighbors of dealing and
manufacturing narcotics. Some police officers can point to 20 addresses,
many of them rentals, that they personally are investigating for drug
activity.

- - Between July 1 and Sept. 30 this year, the Drugs and Vice Division
received drug-related complaints for 583 different addresses. Eighteen of
those addresses had six or more complaints. In August, police mailed
letters warning property owners of suspected drug activity 44 times, and
well more than half of those involved rentals.

- - Since January, Northeast Precinct has mailed 26 chronic nuisance letters
for suspected drug activity, including 10 involving problem landlords. Six
of the 10 went to one landlord, Sgt. Phil Barker said.

- - Of the 143 meth labs raided since 1990 in Portland, 43 were discovered in
the past year, suggesting an increase in that type of activity, according
to the city's Office of Planning and Development Review. Officials don't
track rentals specifically but say many contaminated sites -- flagged with
bright orange warning signs -- are rentals. So far, 18 of the 43 properties
have been rehabilitated, but the bureau is still working about 30 active
cases.

Getting Smart About Drugs

Authorities say that only a small percentage of money-hungry landlords
blatantly cater to the drug crowd and that most property managers want to
keep out crime. But, despite good intentions, many landlords are oblivious
to drug activity, they say, either because the criminals put up a good
front or because amateur property managers simply lack important training.

"The law is becoming more and more complicated, but a vast majority of
landlords don't have the necessary expertise," said Sharon Fleming-Barrett,
president of the Oregon Rental Housing Association Inc. She's referring to
the "mom-and-pop" type landlords who make up a big segment of Portland's
property managers, people who got into the rental business through
inheritance or by accident and who, increasingly, turn to Fleming-Barrett,
a management consultant, for help with drug-related evictions.

Five years ago, Fleming-Barrett might have served one 24-hour notice of
eviction for drugs each year and one 30-day notice, but now it's more like
two dozen a year total. In one case, she evicted the same woman three
different times from three different rentals for drug and gang activity; in
another, she helped landlords evict their own drug-dealing children from a
rental.

"Bad tenants with illegal intentions actually search out the least-informed
landlords," she said, and they often allow other troublemakers to crash at
the rental property with them. "It's easy for them to tell what class of
landlord they're dealing with."

Norma Scheurer, an 81-year-old Portland landlord, is a prime example. She
demolished one of her rental houses, at a cost of $12,000, after police
busted a meth lab there last year. Her tenant at the time was the son of
her former renters, and he, in turn, had rented out a bedroom to someone
involved with drugs, she said.

In hindsight, Scheurer realized why he always met her outside when she came
to ask him for late rent, she said. "I figured he was like one of my sons.
But there's no way he couldn't have known about it."

Police officers see the same kind of ignorance among landlords, especially
absentee owners, and say it makes their jobs that much harder. "I
understand that people rent to make money, but my concern starts when they
start running down livability in a neighborhood and when police have to go
there on a nightly basis," said Robert Slyter, a neighborhood response team
officer for East Precinct, where crime specialists say many large apartment
complexes are magnets for drug activity.

"Most of the people aren't slumlords," agreed Kevin Warren, a neighborhood
response team officer for Southeast Precinct. "They just don't have a clue.
They don't know what to look for, and they don't do their homework."

That may expose landlords to legal liability. Last year, a Portland
landlord settled a lawsuit for $250,000 after the family of a car-crash
victim accused him of negligence. The woman was killed by a suspect
speeding from the landlord's rental, a suspected drug house.

The family argued the landlord knew or should have known drugs were being
dealt there and could have prevented the crash by evicting the tenants,
who, according to court documents, had been evicted from a previous rental
for drug activity.

Some landlords, fearing such consequences, are getting educated. For about
a decade, the city has sponsored a low-cost landlord training seminar
developed by Campbell, the rental consultant. Hundreds of landlords,
including Hankerson, have participated, 800 in the past 1 1/2 years alone.

Slyter organizes a monthly meeting of landlords in East Portland, where,
for the past 14 months, about 40 people have regularly received education
regarding drug detection, tenant screening, evictions and the prevention of
crime through strict enforcement of even the most mundane tenant rules.

Drugs are typically the forum's hot topic, and last month a guest speaker
from the Drugs and Vice Division gave a kind of show-and-tell using a box
of illegal narcotics so that landlords could see what meth, cocaine, heroin
and marijuana look and smell like.

For some, it was their first close encounter with the substances, which
police say they need to be able to identify in case they find them in their
rentals.

"There's probably somebody here right now whose property is being used to
facilitate a drug transaction," said Officer Mike Krantz, looking out over
the audience. Landlords who don't get smart about drugs, he said, usually
find out the hard way, "in the middle of the night, when we come knocking
on your door."

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Landlords Learn

To find out more about keeping your properties crime-free:

- - The Portland Police Bureau's no-cost Landlord and Property Managers
Active Participation Forum meets the third Thursday of every month from 7
to 8:30 p.m. in Room 168 of David Douglas High School, 1001 S.E. 135th Ave.
Guest speakers include professional property managers, crime prevention
specialists, civil attorneys, police officers and deputy district
attorneys. For more information, call 503-823-4811.

- - City-sponsored landlord training seminars are given routinely to help
landlords prevent drugs and other crime problems. The city's Office of
Planning and Development Review (formerly the Bureau of Buildings) expects
to hold four seminars next spring. The training is free; training manuals
cost $10 each and are available through the agency. For more information,
call 503-823-7955.