OSTA: Empowering Park & Marina Residents

Inside OSTA-Meet the Board. Part One with Attorney Matthew Johnson

• Bill Bateman • Season 1 • Episode 2

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What happens when the fight for tenants' rights crosses international borders? Join us as we uncover the fascinating journey of Matthew Johnson, a dedicated attorney and board member of the Oregon State Tenants Association (OSTA). From his early days navigating the legal landscape at Legal Aid in Lane County, Oregon, to practicing law in Micronesia, Matthew's path is nothing short of inspiring. Listen in as he shares his transformation into a key advocate for urgent tenant cases, his specialization in park law for manufactured home communities, and his commitment to representing unions, all while being deeply involved with OSTA since the late '90s.

Discover the pressing challenges mobile home park residents and apartment dwellers face in today's volatile rental market. We dive deep into critical issues such as rent increases, rent control, and the shift in park ownership to large investment companies. Matthew sheds light on how these changes affect maintenance, infrastructure, and living conditions, particularly for low-income residents. Learn about the legal intricacies involved in managing community issues, from illegal activities to the often ineffective legal procedures that result in minimal penalties. Stay tuned to find out how you can get involved with OSTA and keep informed through their newsletter.

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Bill Bateman:

Well, hi everybody. I'm Bill Bateman, part of the team here at OSTA. We are the Oregon State Tenants Association and we're supporting manufactured and floating home communities. In this broadcast, we're going to begin a new series called Inside OSTA, where you get an opportunity to meet the people behind the scenes. Don't know if you're aware of it, but we are an all-volunteer organization who donates our time and energy to making things just a little bit better for all tenants, including people in the manufactured and floating home communities. So come on in and let's get started.

Bill Bateman:

Well, welcome in. I have two sections for you, so two more episodes coming up. Our guest today is Matthew Johnson. He is an attorney and he is a member of our board member of our board. Now, I've got two episodes because we went long and had some good information and I wanted to make sure we had time to discuss things in detail. Now, let's make sure we're not confusing anybody here. Matthew is a member of our board, he is not our attorney and he does not represent the board or our membership. I just want to be clear. So, without too much more explanation, let's use a music bumper and be transported to our interview. Well, okay, we are back, and right now. I have a special guest today, one of my team members at OSTA. He is on the board with me and this is Matthew Johnson, and he is an attorney at law. Welcome, thank you for coming on today.

Matthew Johnson:

Thank you, Bill.

Bill Bateman:

Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background in law and some of the things you deal with on a day-to-day basis?

Matthew Johnson:

Sure, I graduated from law school in 96. I was an older student, I think I was 40 at the time. I've been practicing law since then, here in Eugene mostly. I spent a couple of years abroad practicing law in Micronesia.

Bill Bateman:

Wow.

Matthew Johnson:

During law school I worked at Legal Aid the first year. They don't let you work at all. But as soon as I finished my first year of law school I worked that summer at Legal Aid here in Lane County, oregon. When school started again, I of course only worked part-time because I was going to school. I did that all through school, my third year. We have in Oregon what's called a third-year certified law student, which means that I was able to practice with close supervision of an attorney.

Matthew Johnson:

Mostly what I did at my time at Legal Aid was landlord-tenant issues and they of course represent tenants. When I graduated from law school I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was married to a woman who was a partner at a big corporate firm here in town. I knew I didn't want to do that, so initially I just volunteered at Legal Aid, continued doing landlord-tenant stuff. Eventually I opened my own practice. I got an office, bought some office equipment, a telephone and basically I was an adjunct to legal aid. I knew all the attorneys there. I knew the guy who sort of referred out stuff.

Matthew Johnson:

Back then if you went to legal aid, you would call up, you'd make an appointment. You'd get an appointment two weeks later, 10 days, two weeks later, and a lot of people would come into legal aid and they had gotten an eviction notice and they had a hearing coming up in a couple of days and legal aid would say well, you know, we can make an appointment for you in two weeks. And so I became the go-to guy. When they would get something like that, they'd say well, here, call Matthew, he'll be ready to go to trial in a day and a half. And so that was the beginning of my practice. It was almost exclusively short-term referrals from legal aid, people that needed an attorney because they had a trial coming up in a couple of days. And so that's what I did. I sort of built up from that. I did some other other stuff.

Matthew Johnson:

I had a background as a union organizer. I wanted to represent unions, but most of the unions here in Eugene go to the big firms in Portland. I did represent the stagehands union at the performing arts center here in Eugene for a number of years, but it just you know, my bread and butter became landlord tenant. In the late nineties I encountered Osta. Back then it was Fred and Pat Schwach were Osta.

Matthew Johnson:

They were tenants in a park, they had an RV. They traveled around the state and just visited parks the two of them and recruited members, and when they weren't doing that, when the legislature was in session, they lived in Salem. They were very effective lobbyists. They sort of hired me on a retainer. I think they paid me $250 a month and I was their reference person. Back then. There were a lot of hosted chapters around the state and part of the deal was that any chapter president that had a question could just call me up and I would answer their questions. I did that for a number of years. Like I said, I left the country in 2002, practiced law in the Republic of Palau, which is in Micronesia. It's a tropical island.

Matthew Johnson:

I still miss it. The air temperature day and night was 85 degrees. The water temperature was about 82 degrees. It was a very nice place to live.

Matthew Johnson:

I practiced sort of I represented an agency of the national government for land tenure issues, so it was related to landlord-tenant but different. Anyway, I came back in 05, reopened my practice. I sort of gave up the idea that I was going to be a union lawyer and I have done a little bit of employment stuff, discrimination, housing discrimination as well, but basically my bread and butter is landlord-tenant. My experience back in the late 90s with Osta and Pat and Fred, I sort of got to be an expert on park law. It's a little different, not a lot, but there are some differences between just regular apartment housing tenants who don't own the home and people who live in parks who generally own their homes Right. So you know there's not a major difference but there are some differences. And so shortly after I reopened my practice in 05, I was recruited by someone on the board of OSTA to join the board. So I've been on the OSTA board since I don't know, maybe 06. I really don't remember.

Bill Bateman:

Well, you are well qualified to speak on the subject, sir. That's great.

Matthew Johnson:

Yeah, well qualified to speak on the subject, sir, that's great. Yeah, so so anyway, that's why I I used to um do a lot more litigation than I do now. I I tried cases in washington county and deschutes county in, uh, douglas county. I even did a remote hearing once in I think it was umatilla county it was a.

Matthew Johnson:

There was a park, little park, in umatilla, and out in the boondocks there. Sometimes it's more like the 60s when it comes to landlord tenant law, which in the 60s there was no landlord tenant law and and sort of the attitude was you know, it's my park, I can do whatever. Whatever I want, I have the power. So anyway, yeah, I have a lot of experience with parks. That is not where most of my clients come from. Most of my clients are, again, just tenants in apartment buildings, homes.

Bill Bateman:

What are some of the big issues that we're seeing? What are the problems? Because I know there's been a change in the last few years and I'm hearing more and more about problems in mobile home or manufactured home parks, as far as rents, as far as people losing their equity, as far as trying to form associations and getting retaliated against.

Matthew Johnson:

Well, there's a couple of issues. The big one, of course, is rents and rent increases. It was only a few years ago and it was credit the landlords in Portland for creating the crisis and rent increases, and they were just screwing over renters in the Portland area and people got pretty upset. The result was probably I believe Oregon is still the only state with rent control Some people refer to it as a rent cap. There are some problems with it that weren't initially addressed, one being, you know, back then, when the inflation rate was one or two percent, three percent, you put a cap of 77, I believe it was plus, whatever the inflation rate was. You know, when the inflation rate is really low, it's reasonable. But what happened is we had then, right after that, we had a couple of years of just outrageous inflation, and so that allowed them to go to the max. So that's one issue. The other issue that's particular in well, it's not particular just to parks, but it maybe has more impact and that's the rent reset issue. And that is when a tenant moves moves from a park, moves from an apartment building the landlords can. They're not constrained by the rent cap. They can increase the rents as much as they want. What that means is that people get captured. I mean not that people in parks are already sort of captured, because the landlords control who you sell it to. But what happens is that someone wants to move out of a park, sell their home Nobody wants to buy it when there's going to be a 25% rent increase. That certainly impacts the resale value of the home and anybody's equity in their home. Because, again, who's going to want to buy a home when the rent is about to go up by 25, 30%? People lose equity in their homes that way because it just doesn't keep the value when the rents go up like that. It is also a problem if you're an apartment dweller, because when you move out of your apartment, that apartment the rent's going to go way up and some people say, well, gee, you're moving out. What do you care? What the renter in an apartment cares is that when they go to find another apartment somebody else has just moved out of and their rent's going to double, and so that makes a renter in an apartment not want to leave. They're stuck there because if I try to go somewhere else, there's no limit on the rent increase I'm going to be facing. It's a really critical issue, both for people in parks because it affects their equity in their homes, but it's also an issue for people who just rent apartments or homes. They got to go somewhere else and they're going to be facing that unlimited rent increase in their new rental. I think it's a problem. I think it's hopefully will be addressed in the coming legislative session. I know there are legislators that are aware of this issue and are going to deal with it. So that brings me to another part of your question about what has changed over the years.

Matthew Johnson:

When I started dealing with parks in the 90s, a lot of the parks certainly around Eugene and I know a lot of the state were owned and operated by, if I can say this, old white men who had basically built these parks in the 60s and 70s themselves. They bought a piece of land just outside of the city limits of Springfield and they put in all the utilities and did all that. They lived in the park, they did all the maintenance in the park, they took care of the trees. Nobody had to sue them. There wasn't any law that said they had to maintain a hazardous tree. They did it. They took care of the carports, everything. If you were an elder person, the owner would come and and the owners lived in the parks. They knew everybody that lived there. Everybody knew the owner. If you had a problem you could call the owner up. The owner would come down and take care of the problem. And that was sort of the situation in the 90s.

Matthew Johnson:

In the 90s, and what happened Is that these old white guys Got even older and decided they wanted to retire and sell. And there was suddenly these Investment companies Most of them not from Oregon, coming in, in fact, most of them from California Coming in and offering these guys Just you know, incredible amounts of money to buy these parks. And these investors saw the parks as just a gold mine that they could just keep taking money out of. They didn't have to put any money into it. And so what has happened over the years since the turn of the century, is that more and more of these parks have been bought up by large corporations or investment groups or whatever, and the owner doesn't live in the park anymore. Owners don't care about the park. They don't care about the people that live there. It's just an income stream. That's all it is to them.

Matthew Johnson:

And another issue is that a lot of these parks again were built in the 60s and 70s and now they are 30, 40, 50 years old and you know the reason or care to invest their incredible windfall profits into fixing up these parks and repairing the infrastructure. And what they have found is that they can get away with it, that most of their tenants are not wealthy people. They are people on fixed income, poor people. You know this is a low cost alternative to home ownership and so this is not the wealthy part of our society. These are the poor people and these are people who can't afford attorneys, who can't drag these landlord corporations into court and say you know, you have an obligation to repair the infrastructure.

Matthew Johnson:

You know the sidewalks are crumbling. You need to fix that. You know the recreation building that's, you know, got a leaky roof. You can't just tear it down. You can't just close it down. You can't just fill in the swimming pool with dirt because it's got a leak and needs to be fixed. You have to repair these things. You know there's no enforcement. You know we've got these great well, semi-great laws, landlord-tenant laws but the only way to enforce those laws is by private action, by hiring an attorney and going through the long, expensive process of suing them, and, in the end, if a judge who is more likely to be a landlord than a tenant decides that you lose, you can end up paying tens of thousands of dollars to the landlord's attorneys, and so it's very intimidating to try and take on these large corporations and force them to do what the law requires them to do. And it's getting worse and worse as fewer and fewer of the parks in this state are owned by people who give a hoot about the tenants or about maintaining the property.

Bill Bateman:

It's kind of a bad situation if you're looking at the parks and you're looking at what we're seeing today. We had a problem on our park. The swimming pool turned lime green. It was awful. It had dead rats, it had maggots, mosquito, larvae in it and this is the third year in a row it's happened. Now we've had a rent increase every year but we haven't seen any new maintenance. So this is a familiar story, I think, all over the state. Is that a fair statement?

Matthew Johnson:

That is exactly what I'm talking about, bill.

Matthew Johnson:

Again, there are these laws that say that the landlords are supposed to maintain these facilities but there's no enforcement, there's no way to force them to do that, unless you go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire an attorney and initiate a lawsuit.

Matthew Johnson:

That will, you know, minimum between, for instance, here in lane county, you file a lawsuit on january 1st and if you have a trial before, you know, de December 31st, you're lucky. So it's not only expensive but it's time consuming and there needs to be some sort of enforcement. And again, you know some of the penalties and particularly, it's interesting the section of the Oregon Landlord and Tenant laws that deals just with parks came into existence I don't know 15, 20 years after the first Landlord-Tenant Act and the penalties are so much less in that section. And you know, clearly, park lobbyists got in there, were able to limit some of the damages. So you know, even if you can prove that the landlord has failed to do their duty, you know it's a $300 fee. You know that's for some of these it's a $300 fee. You know that's for some of these large corporations, you know they spend 10 times that just to.

Bill Bateman:

It's a lunch order.

Matthew Johnson:

Right for lunch for their corporate meetings. So it's just, I mean sure I know what the solution is that we somehow authorize the Attorney General's Office to enforce these laws and to bring these lawsuits against these deadbeat landlords. You know, put some teeth into these consequences and make them disgorge some of these. Just incredible. I mean these parks are absolute gold mines. I mean these parks are absolute gold mines. They are just taking money out of these parks, hand over fist and putting very minimal, minimal about. I mean, oftentimes anymore there's not even a manager in a park. There'll be one manager for three or four parks and so that just, just again limits their, their cost. They're just, they're just taking all that money from all those people in the park and they are just and spreading it to their shareholders you know, share dividends, and they're not even paying somebody to be in the park to sort of care.

Bill Bateman:

You want to add to that? We've had reports of threats and intimidation. One person was told they were going to be evicted if they complained, which I believe is illegal.

Matthew Johnson:

Oh yeah, it's absolutely illegal.

Bill Bateman:

If we don't like the swimming pool, they're just going to fill it in. And if we keep complaining about the air conditioning in the clubhouse. They're going to tear it down. That is all illegal, and what can we do? So there's Exactly.

Matthew Johnson:

You know what can you do? Well, you can hire an attorney and you can file a lawsuit and go through that expense and that year long process and you know, and what do you get in a $300 fine for? You know, go through that expense and that year long process and you know, and what do you get in a $300 fine for you, know, and so something needs to.

Bill Bateman:

Something needs to change. I believe Something needs to change indeed. Well, this looks like a good point to step away. We'll be back with another episode very soon and pick things up from this point with a look at some of the problems happening right now in your community, with our special guest, Matthew Johnson. Board member of OSTA. We have some links in the front section If you'd like more information about OSTA, if you'd like to join, we'd love to have you, and if you'd like to subscribe and make sure you're getting all the information, we'll have information on how to get our newsletter as well. That's it for this week. Be safe, Stay cool.

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