Portland’s landmark package of rental screening rules will go into effect as planned March 1, despite a last-minute effort by a coalition of landlords to block the regulations three days before they were slated to start.
The landlords had filed a federal lawsuit against the city last week, alleging the rules were poorly constructed, cumbersome and poised to make owning property in Portland nearly impossible. It was not an entirely unexpected legal action, as Multifamily NW, a trade group representing the region’s landlords and the main plaintiff in the suit, had been an outspoken critic of the rules, known as the FAIR ordinance, leading up to their passage last June.
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But the timing of the suit — and the fact that the landlords were asking for a temporary restraining order, which would block the rules just days before they were set to begin — turned some heads, including the judge’s.
“Everyone has known about these ordinances since June,” said U.S. District Judge Michael Simon Thursday at the initial court hearing on the lawsuit. “And yet just the week before they go into effect, I get a temporary restraining order motion?”
Simon appeared displeased that the rush had led to him receiving court filings at five minutes to midnight the night before. He noted such an ask was not a way to endear yourself to the court.
“I get when there are real emergencies … but on cases with this degree of complexity, it’ll take up to 90 days to write an opinion,” he said. “This just doesn't look to me that it represents the kind of urgency that requires a temporary restraining order.”
His ultimate decision to deny the landlords’ request to block the rules was cheered by members of Portland Tenants United, who had filled the benches in the federal courtroom.
Margot Black, the founder of the group, said there’d been extensive training and outreach since the rules were passed to try to make sure all the tenants understood their new rights before the ordinance took effect.
“It’s a game to them,” Black said. “For them a week before to try to kill [the rules] and then have us have to go out and now tell everybody just kidding ... That’s chaos.”
The new rules eliminate many of the criteria landlords could potentially use to discriminate against tenants, such as criminal records, income and credit scores. The rules were crafted by Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who said at the time of their passage that they were meant to address “the criteria that continue to be used in as a proxy for race.”
Jill Gibson, who’s representing the plaintiff for law firm Lynch Conger, argued these new rules are confusing to landlords with important phrases left undefined. As a result, she said, landlords could easily misstep and be left vulnerable to a lawsuit.
“We believe landlords will start being sued,” Gibson told the judge. “These lawsuits will start popping up and you’ll have juries and judges trying to interpret this very vague and complex ordinance.”
As for why they brought the lawsuit so near to its effective date, a spokesperson for Multifamily NW said they had been holding out hope until very recently that the ordinance would become less vague during the city’s rule making process. They said it only became clear recently that no clarification was coming, leading them to rush a suit.
Simon also questioned why the matter had ended up in federal court as, at its crux, it’s dealing with issues of state law.
“What are you doing in this court?” he questioned. “I don’t want to be the decider on very important — and I dare say some of them are difficult — issues of interpreting state law and the state constitution.”
Simon recommended both parties take some time to discuss whether they want the lawsuit to continue winding its way through the federal court system or whether the group of landlords would prefer to bring the suit in state court. City Attorney Tracy Reeve noted this decision would ultimately be up to the plaintiffs.
In a statement, Deborah Imse, the head of Multifamily NW, said while she was disappointed that the court declined to temporarily block the rules from going into effect, they were “looking forward to continuing the next steps of this case and getting relief from this unworkable ordinance.”