For the past two years, Tyrone Poole has repeated a promise to investors across the country.



"We can house any family regardless of rental barriers in 24 hours," he told a Washington D.C. crowd in June.



Every Section 8 voucher holder. Every domestic violence victim. Every person with bad credit, an eviction or a criminal background.



The solution, Poole said, lies in overhauling the application process. His NoAppFee.com screens potential renters against every vacancy in a market, eliminating the need for multiple, costly applications.



His promise is aspirational, but NoAppFee.com has attracted support from some of Portland's most influential figures. Mayor Charlie Hales mentioned Poole in his final state of the city speech. Mayor-elect Ted Wheeler lists Poole on his website as the kind of problem-solver Portland needs. The former head of Portland's urban renewal agency, Patrick Quinton, even spends his free time volunteering for Poole.



They all say the 33-year-old has an edge few startup founders do: He has lived the problem he is trying to fix.



Ten years ago, Poole was sleeping on a broken cot in a homeless shelter. Friday, he will launch a Beaverton-based company that investors, Portland officials and others believe will change the way all renters find homes.



Poole is part of a new crop of black entrepreneurs, reared in Northeast Portland but finding opportunities across the Metro area now that gentrification has reshaped the inner-city. The Oregonian/OregonLive is telling Poole's story as part of a series of reports on how the black community in America's whitest big city is finding new ways to thrive.



"The entrepreneur bug comes out of necessity for most black people," Poole said. "Either you can't get employed or can't get meaningful income, so you start your own hustle, which we call start your own business. For me, it was just that."



After gentrification: America's whitest big city? Sure, but a thriving black community, too.



****



Poole grew up in inner Northeast Portland when its neighborhood high school was churning through principals and teachers. In 2000, the year before he graduated, Jefferson High was deemed the sole "unacceptable" school in the Portland area.



But Poole had a spark, remembers his longtime mentor Mark Jackson.



"He had that level of regard for human life, a charisma and the innate ability to engage any type of person," said Jackson, a nonprofit leader who has mentored young African Americans for more than two decades. "There was no doubt he would do something significant with his life."



After graduation, Poole trained at Portland Community College to become a firefighter. The workouts left him "looking like an action figure," he recalled. By 2005, he had earned his fire science degree and emergency medical technician credentials.



Then, that December, he fell during a training. He tore a muscle and destroyed the lymph node in his left leg. The injury ended his firefighting career.



Without a paycheck, he couldn't afford rent. After nine months of hospital visits, he had lots of debt, nowhere to live and a leg that had to be elevated most of the day.



He couch-surfed for a while. But his friends grew tired of taking care of him. One night, around 10 p.m., a friend told Poole he could no longer stay.



"I grabbed all my stuff and left,'" Poole said. "I was carrying my entire life with me on crutches."



He hobbled a few miles toward a MAX station, each step like walking on glass. By the time he arrived, he could barely stand. He laid down and vomited.



A police officer found him, Poole said, and assumed he'd been drinking. Poole explained his injury, and the cop offered him a ride.



"He would have taken me anywhere," Poole said. "But there were no more places."



The officer drove Poole to the YWCA close to midnight. Poole said the workers weren't happy -- there's a shelter protocol, and everyone else was asleep -- but they pulled out a semi-broken cot and set it up in the gym.



"It was the lowest moment of my entire life," Poole said. "Even the homeless shelter is telling me I shouldn't be there."



The next morning, he limped out of the shelter. A worker stopped him and offered a voucher for a year of paid rent, wherever he could find a place. Poole agreed to stay and volunteer at the shelter while he searched for an apartment.



"I looked for four months," he said. "Denied. Denied. Denied."



Poole tried to tell managers he had a year of guaranteed rent. But they saw his drawbacks: Poole had been evicted while in the hospital. His car and his storage unit had been repossessed. His credit was bad. And because his doctors had yet to clear him for work, he had no income.



Poole knew some property managers take chances, but there was no way to find out who would accept him without applying. Each application cost about $20.



"I just had to come up with the money, pay and cross my fingers," he said.



Poole found a place. But back at the YWCA, others were still searching in vain.



Some had federal rent vouchers but couldn't find a landlord to take them. Others had Veterans Affairs vouchers that paid for rent and security deposits. Something in their background always gave property managers pause.



"If you have an eviction, derogatory accounts or a criminal background, you could be looking at qualifying for 1 percent of properties," Poole said. "Do you know much money and time you're going to need to find that needle in the haystack?"



Tenants needed a way, he thought, to weed out landlords who wouldn't give them a shot.



Poole began calling landlords and writing down those who were willing to work with people in the shelter. One landlord agreed to take people with evictions. Another said he would rent to someone with a criminal background.



He spent two months calling landlords, then compiled his research into a book.



But by the time he'd collected the names, the book was outdated.



"Property switches hands, but the book was static," he said. "As fast as I was putting stuff in, it was changing. I'd call a place that took evictions, and they'd say they didn't take evictions anymore."



What Poole needed was technology that could continuously update.



***





Poole, in orange, won the 2015 "Pitch Black" contest.

Property rentals have long depended on physical interaction. Tenants search for a place to live. A landlord meets them at the home. Employees at background-check companies then determine that would-be renter's viability.



Poole imagined something automated, a program that could pull a renter's background once -- and then screen it against new rentals as they become available.



He didn't have the money or credit to start a business. He wasn't a coder. He didn't have a business degree that taught him how to succeed.



That didn't matter. Everyone he told about his idea wanted to help him.



"He had it," said Stephen Green, a former Albina Bank executive who met Poole when the bank turned him down for a loan. "Thirty seconds into meeting him, it didn't matter the type of business he was working on, whether he had money or not, I just knew he was going to make it and be great."



Green introduced Poole to the Portland Development Commission, the city's economic development agency, which was shifting its focus toward supporting minority entrepreneurs.

Portland Development Commission provides money, mentoring to help minority entrepreneurs succeed



Poole had plenty of ingredients for success, said Quinton, the commission's former director: Drive, vision and a powerful story.



"It would be easy to hear his story and simply feel bad for what he and his family went through. But that's not how Tyrone tells the story," Quinton said. "He uses his story to highlight the fundamental flaw in the rental market that his company is trying to fill. An effective salesperson -- and that's what most entrepreneurs are -- uses stories to sell their business, product or service."



Other entrepreneurs weren't going to create NoAppFee.com, Quinton said, because they hadn't lived it. Most have focused on the upper end of the rental market, Quinton said.



"Typical founders can't relate to the needs of large swaths of the population," Quinton said. "The demographics of the rental market suggest that much of the market is actually at the lower end. You actually have to experience the process of trying to find an affordable unit in order to understand how poorly served people are by current services."



Poole won a spot in the development commission's 2014 start-up incubator. Agency leaders gave him free rent and paid for lawyers to set up his business. They introduced him to investors and city bigwigs. Poole hired coders to build his platform.





NoAppFee Launch

When: Aug. 26, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Where: Self-Enhancement, Inc. 3920 North Kerby Avenue

Cost: Free

"We pull all your life data," Poole said. "We plugged into all of the courthouses. We plugged into TransUnion. We wrote algorithms to read the documents and extract the information we need."



Poole's team has spent the past year signing up Portland property management companies that own a combined 4,000 apartments and homes. They're also launching Friday in Atlanta with 10,000 units.



When users log in, they will see every vacant property, along with an icon that notes whether they qualify. If they don't, the website explains why. For instance, if a manager requires three times the rent in monthly income -- say $4,000 -- and an applicant's household earns $3,000 a month, the website will tell the tenant they are $1,000 a month short.



Applicants initially pay $35 to use NoAppFee.com. Landlords -- grateful to be spared the hassle of meeting people who don't qualify, Poole said -- then take $35 off the tenants' move-in fees.



Poole believes NoAppFee.com will change the way people rent homes. Though he built it to help poor families, anyone can use the website. That can be especially useful in Portland, which has the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country.



Still, he thinks about the people he met at the YWCA before he talks to investors. In June, when he beat out 600 entrepreneurs for a spot in the global finals of a startup competition, Poole closed his eyes and reimagined the past 10 years.



"I just took all the stress I went through, and I re-lived it," he said. "I imagined all the families still dealing with it."



-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271

cparks@oregonian.com; @caseyparks

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