Every Christmas, the tenants of the Lincoln Hotel receive a tin of shortbread cookies, given to them by their longtime landlord.

They received the tin, as usual, this year.

They also got an eviction notice.

The 30 tenants of the Lincoln Hotel, a 30-unit single resident occupancy (SRO) hotel on Southwest Morrison Street and 10th Avenue received eviction notices on Dec. 21 because of the building owner’s decision to no longer operate the hotel.

The tenants, many of whom are elderly, must move out by March 31. The Lincoln’s impending closure is yet another full-building eviction taking place during a time in which the city’s shortage of affordable housing persists amid a seller’s real estate market.

It is the first time that the city’s relocation assistance ordinance, mandating that landlords pay the moving costs of tenants who receive no-cause evictions or steep rent increase, will be used for the eviction of an entire building. Thousands of dollars will be available to each tenant, which will make it easier for them to finance the move. But where they will move to, and whether they can afford it over the long-term, is far from certain.

•••

The Lincoln Hotel is located at Southwest 10th Avenue and Morrison Street – two stories of housing above the Thai Time Café and Morrison Nail Studio.

There are shared bathrooms on each floor, but no communal kitchen. Each room, instead, has a refrigerator and a microwave, and tenants are allowed to use small grills, hot plates and other small cooking devices, except for toaster ovens, which sometimes blow the circuit.

The Lincoln, though it is an SRO hotel, charges monthly rent – $440 to $550. The tenants are effectively on a month-to-month lease. The managers do not allow daily or weekly stays.

“This rent – you cannot come anywhere close to it in town,” said Bill Thornton, 69, a longtime resident.

Nor can you beat its location. The Blue and Red MAX lines run along Morrison Street, and a spot to catch the Portland Streetcar on Southwest 10th Avenue is blocks away. The Lincoln, a three-story, tan-colored brick building, is one block from the main branch of the Multnomah County Library. It is across the street from popular Italian, Lebanese and Indian restaurants.

Bill Thornton, a longtime resident of Portland's Lincoln Hotel, says he doesn't blame his landlords for the eviction notice he and the building's other tenants received just before Christmas. But he said he didn't know where he and his wife would go next. “This rent – you cannot come anywhere close to it in town,” he said. Photo by Amanda Waldroupe

Thornton, who is a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, can easily get to the Veterans Affairs hospital near Oregon Health & Science University.

Built in 1903, the Lincoln Hotel has operated as a hotel for as long as anyone can remember. But for the past 30 years, Bob Harr and Ron Sletta have leased the building from Goritsan Investment Properties LLC, a family-owned property investment firm owned by William Goritsan.

Harr and Sletta managed the Lincoln, along with Matthew Brown, who worked as Lincoln’s on-site manager.

Harr, Sletta and Brown are all in their 70s. Earlier this year, they notified Goritsan Investment Properties of their individual decisions to retire.

According to the eviction letter sent to tenants, Harr and Sletta wanted Goritsan Investment Properties to find new managers for the building, who would take over the lease and continue operating the Lincoln as it had for the past 30 years. But Goritsan Investment Properties, instead, according to the eviction letter sent to tenants, decided to sell the building.

No permits have been issued for renovation or demolition, according to a recent search of Bureau of Developmental Service’s permits.

Brown, the building’s longtime on-site manager, who is beloved by the Lincoln’s tenants, did not respond to a call for comment by press time. Neither did Harr or Sletta.

Dean T. Sandow, an attorney with Farleigh Wada Witt, which represents the Goritsan family and Goritsan Investment Properties, declined to comment.

The news of eviction came Dec. 21, the Friday before Christmas. And the eviction notice Harr and Sletta delivered to the tenants of the Lincoln might be the nicest eviction letter anyone has received.

“We have run the Lincoln Hotel for 31 years, and Matthew has been our manager for 20 of those,” the letter began. “As you are probably aware Matthew is wanting to retire and we ourselves to ‘slow down.’”

The letter explained Harr and Sletta’s attempts to negotiate with the building owners to find new managers and informed tenants that Goritsan Investment Properties “have plans for the structure that do not involve apartment rentals.

“We are providing legal notice as required by State law stating that your tenancy will end. The timing of this notification is regrettable coming as it is during the holidays and had we the choice it would have come sooner or later than this but the agreement reached with the building owners required that we give you notice now.”

The city of Portland requires at least 90 days' notice for a no-cause eviction.

Harr and Sletta assured the tenants that they would be given money to help pay for moving costs – including for the costs of physically moving, as well as the security deposit, first and last month’s rent – due to an ordinance passed by the Portland City Council earlier this year mandating that landlords who issue no-cause evictions or raise the rent by 10 percent or more in a year provide tenants with relocation assistance.

The Lincoln’s tenants will receive $2,900 for a single room and $3,300 if they live in a double room.

The letter ended with: “We have very much appreciated your tenancy at the Lincoln and are sorry for the emotional distress our action is likely to cause you.”

One Lincoln resident, who asked to be referred to by his middle name, Dickson, said no one was surprised.

“The writing was on the wall,” he said. “We knew our manager was retiring at the end of the year.”

One of the managers – Dickson would not say who – visited the Lincoln shortly afterward, offering any assistance he could give to tenants. He seemed almost apologetic, Dickson said.

“He just felt bad,” Dickson said. “You could tell.”

“I can’t be negative about this,” Dickson continued. “I mean, these people are in their 80s. They gave us cookies every Christmas.”

Dickson and Bill Thornton both say they can’t blame anyone for the situation.

“It’s just circumstance,” Thornton said.

The tenants can make some educated guesses about the fate of the building. Jackhammers reverberate at a construction site one block away. Construction has begun at Southwest 10th and Alder Street, the former site of one of Portland’s oldest food cart pods.

“This whole area is nothing but money sitting here,” Thornton said.

But for the tenants of the Lincoln, that hardly matters. What matters to them is that they are losing their home. In some cases, it is a longtime home. The Thorntons, Bill said, have lived there for 11 years. Another tenant has lived there for 31 years.

Bill and his wife spend much of their days sitting on two plastic folding chairs they set on the sidewalk, next to traffic passing them by. They’re not allowed to smoke in the building, so they come outside.

“This is our front porch,” Thornton said. “We know practically everybody on the street.”

Dickson, who has lived in the building for three years, said he is “dialed in” at the Lincoln. His room is small, but “so nice.”

“It’s just very comfortable,” he said.

Each time a MAX train passes by, the windows and walls rattle slightly. Dickson compares the noise to a scene in The Blues Brothers movie, when the title characters walk into a hotel room. As the walls shudder, one flops onto the bed.

“It ain’t much, but it’s home,” he said.

Dickson said it’s usually quiet inside the Lincoln, with “very little drama.” There has not been a lot of tenant turnover in the time he has lived there.

Dickson and Thornton speak volumes about Brown, the on-site manager.

“He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” Dickson said. “He’s always in a good mood. You got something you need done, you notice something, he takes care of it.”

What Dickson and Thornton speak most about, though, is the sense of community in the building. The hotel’s hallway is decorated with a Christmas tree and tinsel. There is a free table where tenants will often share cookies, baked goods or other food.

Every Christmas, in addition to the cookies and card they receive from their landlords, a tenant hosts a Christmas dinner potluck, where tenants are free to contribute money or bring a dish.

“There’s always a ton of food out on the table during Christmas,” Dickson said.

Losing that community is what is most painful.

“In six months, I’m never going to see these people again,” Dickson said. “It’s sad, in a way. I see them every day.”

•••

The eviction letter, after assuring the Lincoln’s tenants they would be given relocation assistance, also offered a word of caution: “Do not delay your search as reasonable rent units are not easy to find,” the letter stated.

Neither Thornton and his wife nor Dickson knew where they might go. They wouldn’t bother searching until the holidays were over.

They both hope to stay downtown.

“If we can’t – c’est la vie,” Thornton said.

The Thorntons and Dickson are on Social Security, a fixed income. Neither rely on any rental subsidies or other governmental assistance. Dickson said he pays $440 each month for his room at the Lincoln, which is nearly half his income from Social Security.

He hopes he can find a subsidized apartment with a Section 8 voucher, which would pay the rest of the monthly rent after he pays 30 percent from his personal income.

“If I can find something like that, that would be amazing,” he said.

Whatever the tenants find will likely “be way more expensive than the Lincoln was,” said Bobby Weinstock, housing advocate at Northwest Pilot Project, a social service agency that serves low-income seniors.

He said the tenants, in their new homes, will likely receive some sort of rental assistance or rent subsidy.

Weinstock said that Northwest Pilot Project became aware of the eviction when a client came to their offices, eviction notice in hand.

Northwest Pilot Project has reached out to Brown to get a full roster of the Lincoln’s tenants, to see who is over 55 and eligible for Northwest Pilot Project’s services, Weinstock said.

He worries that the help his agency may be able to give will be limited to ensuring the Lincoln’s tenants get on various waiting lists for housing and, by the time they must vacate the Lincoln, “hopefully move up.”

“The waiting lists are longer than three months,” Weinstock said.

FURTHER READING: Home, on hold: Long waitlists a symptom of Portland housing crisis

Both Thornton and Dickson say that receiving the relocation assistance will make moving easier, that knowing that money is there is “a lot of help,” Dickson said.

“It’s the right financial assistance, but you still need somewhere to move to,” Weinstock said. “It is helpful, but it doesn’t solve the whole problem that the tenants are faced with: Where do we find another place to live?”

•••

The Lincoln Hotel is one of very few remaining SRO hotels in downtown Portland. Decades ago, there was once a plethora of such hotels downtown. They were considered mainstays, an important part of the city’s housing stock, one that worked for people who didn’t need much and could afford little.

Starting in the 1990s, when downtown real estate got hot, hotel owners started evicting tenants and selling the buildings, which were converted into condominiums or higher-end apartments.

In 1994, there were 77 buildings with a total of 4,554 units affordable to low-income people, according to an inventory completed by Northwest Pilot Project. In 2015, the last year Northwest Pilot Project completed the inventory and the same year the Portland City Council declared a housing state of emergency, there were 44 buildings with a total of 3,140 units.

The fate of the Lincoln echoes the closing of The Joyce Hotel two years ago.

Located at Southwest 11th Avenue and Stark Street, The Joyce rented 69 rooms for $19 to $50 a night. It was the last downtown hotel that offered weekly stays. It was also a low-barrier hotel, meaning the managers accepted people who were intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.

That made The Joyce a refuge for people needing a place to stay on short notice with no money down, including homeless people who made enough money from panhandling, bottle deposits or day work to spend a night off the streets. Other people had lived at The Joyce for many years.

Tenants received a 90-day eviction notice on Dec. 31, 2015. The building’s owner, Dan Zilka, intended to sell the building.

News of the Joyce eviction, months after the Portland City Council declared a housing state of emergency and during a time when rents were rising without letup, made inaction unacceptable.

The owner of The Joyce turned down the first offer the Portland Housing Bureau to purchase the building but in June 2016 agreed to sell the Joyce to the Housing Bureau for $4.22 million. Central City Concern, one of the city’s largest social service providers, currently operates the hotel.

In a news release announcing the purchase, Kurt Creager, the director of the Housing Bureau at the time, described The Joyce as “a last resort for very vulnerable people with few other options.”

“The loss of such units during a housing and homelessness emergency would create a real humanitarian crisis,” Creager said.

The Housing Bureau has also used funds from the city’s $258.4 million housing bond, passed by voters in 2016, to purchase buildings to preserve as affordable housing or invest in renovations and capital improvements to turn the building into homeless shelters or affordable housing.

Weinstock said Northwest Pilot Project has notified the Portland Housing Bureau of news of the Lincoln’s impending closure, as well as the office of Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who has championed renter’s issues.

Neither the Housing Bureau nor Eudaly’s office responded to a request for comment before press time.

“The very best outcome would be if the owners would reconsider and keep this property operating as affordable housing,” Weinstock said, or if Goritsan Investment Properties sells the building to a social service agency that would continue operating the Lincoln essentially as is. “That would protect the tenants.”

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