By now, Marc Kurtzman and other neighbors on his upscale Northeast Portland block are resigned to the work they must do:

Mowing the yard of a house they don't own, cutting back the other weeds, checking the locks they've placed on the back gate and the boards they nailed over the garage door.

None of them lives in the house on Northeast Jarrett Street in Concordia. Nobody does. That's the problem.

Two months after they moved into their 1925 Craftsman, Kurtzman and his husband began hearing screams from the house next door. A homeless woman had broken into the garage and was, from what they could tell, living there. Police couldn't get her out. The owner of the home wanted nothing to do with it. The bank that's foreclosing would not tell them anything useful. The problems grew.

"We are stuck in this weird no man's land," said Kurtzman, a resident at Oregon Health & Sciences University. "There's nothing to do except take responsibility ourselves."

Prior owners had left furniture, boxes and stacks of papers, stuffed animals and old paperbacks, plus unpaid bills dating to 2009. Two squatters had taken over the master bedroom, though the house had no running water and had, according to the power company, lacked electricity since October 2011. All the wiring and metal had been stripped out. Even the rain gutters had been stolen, presumably sold off as scrap metal, though vandals left one small segment intact. A bucket beneath it collected rainwater, which squatters were using to flush the toilet. They'd set up a camp stove to prepare meals.

The two occupants told officers the person responsible for the home had allowed them to stay temporarily, because their presence helped keep drug users out.

Officers found heroin dust on several countertops, and the smell of mildew and rotten food was strong enough to make their eyes water. All things considered, however, the home was comparatively sanitary and appeared salvageable.

"It's not exactly clean, but on a scale of one to 10, this one is a three, " Lemons said. "Usually, when you've had people in a vacant home for this long, you're talking about razing it and starting over."

That's the fear driving Kurtzman and his neighbors.

The house next to Kurtzman's was part of a messy divorce several years ago and eventually ended up in foreclosure. It was empty when Kurtzman and his husband moved in two years ago. When a woman they didn't know began appearing in the backyard, they assumed it was the ex-wife. They said hello to her over the back fence. They tried being neighborly.

Other neighbors told them that the woman was homeless. Her behavior turned erratic.

"There was the screaming, like she was being murdered in the garage. She was would appear magically, sleeping on your front porch," Kurtzman said. "Finally, one day we saw her breaking into the garage over there. We called the police, and she locked the door and would not let them in."

Things got worse: Kurtzman's home was burglarized. He began smelling the smoke from a strong narcotic wafting in from the neighboring home's backyard. More people appeared to be using the garage as a resting spot.

Police boarded up a window that vagrants had been seen using to enter the garage, so squatters bent back the aluminum garage door. Neighbors covered the garage door with lumber, put a lock on one backyard gate and boards across another. They began mowing the grass, minding the weeds and doing everything they could to make the house seem lived-in.

They've talked to the owner, but he gave them the verbal version of a helpless shrug. The bank that owns the home – or will, once the foreclosure goes through – has been even harder to reach.

The house itself hasn't been broken into, and Kurtzman and his neighbors hope to ensure that doesn't happen. But they face a quandary in this up-and-coming neighborhood where homes routinely sell a day or two after hitting the market: They don't want the property to fall into such disrepair that the bank or other future owner decides the only option is to raze the house and start over, because infill could mean two houses replace one. They also don't want to scare off potential buyers or drive down their own property values by boarding up the entire home.

"What we've heard from everyone is, 'We can't do anything. It's not our problem,'" Kurtzman said. "Last spring a property appraiser came out, and we were like, 'Wow. Yes. Finally.' Then he said it could be another year or two before this gets resolved. Until then, it's apparently up to us."

-- Anna Griffin