Bulletin E-Edition:
A cautionary tale on rural renting
By Jeff McDonald / The Bulletin
Published: February 14. 2009 4:00AM PST| order photo
Paul Lawrence, 35, and his wife, Lori, 47, are moving out today from their rented home in La Pine, where they have lived since May. They say the house has little working heat, and they have needed to bundle up all winter. “It would be warmer sleeping outside in a tent,” Paul Lawrence says.
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
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LA PINE — Nine months after moving into a rented two-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot manufactured home at the north end of La Pine, Paul and Lori Lawrence are moving out today.
They have not paid rent since a court judgment in December ordered their landlords to make needed repairs at the house, which the Lawrences say still have not been made.
“They haven’t fixed anything, and the house is cold,” said Paul Lawrence, 35, explaining why he and his wife are moving. “We can’t take it anymore. I’m sick and tired of sitting in my house freezing.”
Paul Lawrence has an online business where he collects, sells and ships pine cones. Lori Lawrence, 47, is a house cleaner.
For the Lawrences and other renters around rural parts of Central Oregon, tenant resources are more limited than they are in urban areas. While free legal representation is available in certain tenant-landlord disputes, the majority of cases that can’t be shown to impact health and safety are up to the renter or the good will of the landlord to address, according to local legal and county officials.
In the case of the Lawrences, the property owner and her property management company are thankful that a nine-month battle with a disgruntled tenant is finally ending.
“You should know that the property, as it sits today, is in much worse shape than when the Lawrences moved in back in May of 2008,” P.J. Richards, owner of the property, wrote in a letter dated Feb. 3 to The Bulletin. “We have a signed ‘intake form’ from the Lawrences showing that the property was in good condition when they moved in.”
About three weeks after moving into the La Pine home in May, the Lawrences submitted a walk-through checklist of the problems at the house to their landlord’s property management firm, Accord Property Management of La Pine.
“When was the last time the chimney was cleaned? Is it a working stove?” Lori Lawrence wrote on the walk-through sheet, dated June 4. Other items noted were a broken dishwasher, mold on the walls and a bedroom that did not get heat.
“He told us, don’t worry, we’ll get those things fixed,” she said of her conversation with Angelo Roes, principal broker for the property management firm, after submitting the list.
There also was a smell of a dead animal, which later turned out to be a dead cat, coming from under the house.
The Lawrences say the heat doesn’t get to the master bedroom, the middle living room and kitchen, and a portion of the front living room, and that about half the house’s insulation is missing. They also say the manufactured home is essentially coming apart.
Three months after moving in, the problems had not been fixed, Paul Lawrence said. That’s when the couple began withholding the $750 per month in rent. They wrote a letter to Accord Property Management saying they would not pay until the problems were fixed, he said.
“I did that off the advice I was getting off the Web sites online,” he said. “They advised me to withhold the rent and that will get your landlord to fix the problems.”
They called Bend-based Legal Aid Services of Oregon, a nonprofit law firm that provides free help on a gamut of civil legal issues for residents in Central Oregon.
“All they told us was pay your rent and deal with it,” Paul Lawrence said of Legal Aid’s response.
In the Lawrences’ case, Legal Aid dropped the ball, acknowledged Racheal Baker, a Legal Aid staff attorney.
‘Piecemeal advice’
“When the Lawrences called, there weren’t any staff attorneys,” she said, noting that both she and the other staff attorney were on maternity leave from August through November. “They got some piecemeal advice from a piecemeal office. Even our office doesn’t have all the resources to address all the claims we receive.”
Tenants and landlords in Central Oregon are bound by the state’s habitability laws. Modified in 2005, the laws require the landlord to maintain essential services of the home, including heat, and running hot and cold water, and to ensure the home is sealed against drafts through walls and around doors and windows, Baker said.
Legal Aid, which takes on cases related to evictions, utility shutoffs and discrimination in housing — as well as habitability cases — has seen increased numbers of people living in substandard housing, Baker said.
“With the state of the economy, more tenants are living in uninhabitable circumstances,” she said. “They will live without water. They will live without heat as long as they have shelter.”
The amount of time granted to respond to problems varies according to the urgency of the problem, Baker said.
“If there is any type of essential service missing, we advise people to write to their landlord,” Baker said. “They can withhold a portion of the rent equal to the service that they are missing, but they need to give the landlord appropriate time to fix what’s wrong before they withhold rent. It is always advisable to get the advice of an attorney before taking these steps.”
If there are health and safety concerns, such as no water or heat, the time frame becomes much shorter, she said.
When there are cases of mold and lead, the law is more difficult to enforce without documented case of injury resulting from it, Baker said.
“There are attorneys in the (Willamette) Valley who do take on those type of cases, but it is just not available here,” she said. “Legal Aid does not have the resources to take on those type of cases. West of the Cascades, they exist. East of the Cascades, they do not.”
Rural limitations
Central Oregon renters, in general, have fewer resources when compared with their more urban populations because there are fewer tenant resources, Baker said.
“It’s a real disadvantage in La Pine because of the nitrate problems,” she said. “There are lots of homes that get rented out where water smells funny, looks funny and makes people sick. (Government) health inspectors won’t go out there. You have to pay somebody to test the water.”
Private building inspectors, which were needed to assess the Lawrences’ property because Deschutes County does not provide such services, would have cost between $350 and $475, Paul Lawrence said.
“A good portion of this house has no insulation,” he said. “If I lived in Portland, I would call a (city) building inspector, and they would shut this place down. Out here, it’s going to cost you.”
In rural Deschutes County, getting a county building inspector to assess a home is nearly impossible unless there is “catastrophic damage” to the home that threatens residents’ basic safety, said Tom Anderson, the county’s community development director. Those inspections generally cost $50, Anderson said.
Like many other rural counties throughout the state, Deschutes County does not have housing codes regulating minimum health and safety standards for housing, Anderson said. There has been resistance from county commissioners in the past because setting up housing codes would create more government regulation, he said.
“We get very few calls on this — maybe three or four a year,” Anderson said. “It’s fairly typical in rural counties like ours not to have a housing code.”
The department does not deal with general wear and tear issues, Anderson said.
“If the foundation has cracks, or there are bare wires or problems with insulation — we would not typically do those kinds of inspections,” he said.
The city of Bend, which uses a uniform housing code that requires minimum conditions be met such as functioning hot and cold water, a house that can be heated to 68 degrees and sanitation, would typically send someone out for free to inspect a building when those conditions were not met, said Robert Mathias, building division manager for the city’s Community Development Department.
The city’s enforcement budget has decreased, but the city would send someone to inspect, with response time based on the urgency of the conditions of the home, Mathias said.
Legal proceedings
After seeking help from Legal Aid, the Lawrences in October hired attorney Kevin J. McCarty, of Bend, to handle their case.
They continued to withhold rent.
Accord Property Management and the owner of the house, Richards, say they did everything they were required to do to address the Lawrences’ claims before the Lawrences began to withhold rent in September.
“If they’re going to withhold rent, there has to be a habitability issue, and they have to give me notice,” said Roes, Accord’s property broker. “They never gave me notice.”
Paul Lawrence acknowledged he did not send an official letter until about a month after he began withholding rent, but he expressed his grievances to the property management company by phone.
After the Lawrences began withholding rent, Accord sent out heating repairmen on three separate occasions, beginning Oct. 7. The first repair job to fix the entire heating system cost $160, which Richards paid.
One of the repairmen, Joe Stone, went out to the Lawrences’ twice in October and December. Stone, owner of Cascade Air Heating & Cooling, of La Pine, said the heater should be working fine.
But none of the three visits did anything to fix the heat except make one of the spare bedrooms hotter, Paul Lawrence said. Oregon habitability laws require that the entire house is adequately heated, according to Legal Aid.
“The only way you’re going to stay warm in this house is if you bundle up like an Eskimo,” he said.
In November, Accord took the Lawrences to Deschutes County Circuit Court for eviction proceedings.
The Lawrences paid $2,250 into the court, essentially three months of back rent, which was held by the court pending the case’s outcome.
The judge ruled in favor of the renters, awarding them $900: $150 for a nonworking dishwasher, $300 for a dead animal under the dwelling, $50 for a lack of weather stripping, $100 for nonworking heating vents in certain rooms and $300 for an uncleaned chimney.
The rest of the money, $1,450, went to the property management firm as back rent, according to the court documents. As a supplemental award, the presiding judge, Thomas M. Spear Jr., ordered Accord to pay the Lawrences an additional $3,710 for attorney’s fees and a $550 prevailing party fee, plus 9 percent interest, according to the court documents. That has not been paid, and the attorney’s fees are mounting, Paul Lawrence said.
The attorney’s fees continue to accrue as the Lawrences attempt to collect their attorney’s fees and prevailing party fee, McCarty said.
Spear, a part-time attorney who works as a judge in Circuit Court hearings, also ordered Accord to clean the chimney immediately and asked the Lawrences to provide a new list of needed repairs.
The new list included mold throughout the house, carpet that is falling apart, a family room wall that needs paint and windows throughout the house that leak air from the outside.
Roes, of Accord Property Management, is on the hook for $4,260, plus interest, because when he submitted court documents, he said he neglected to put the landlord’s name on the filing.
“The landlord-tenant laws are fine,” Roes said. “I feel this was a breakdown in the legal system.”
Jeff McDonald can be reached at 541-383-0323 or at jmcdonald@bendbulletin.com.
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