PORTLAND, Ore., May 10 (UPI) — A Portland landlord was left to clean up 50,000 pounds of trash from a home he was renting after a former tenant abandoned the property.
Braheem Hazeem provided a tour of the home in a YouTube video, showing a seemingly endless stream of garbage and property damage including a caved in roof.
“The video shows basically the entire home…basically full of garbage,” he told KATU. “Full of old furniture, mattresses stacked up…four or five mattresses.”
Hazeem said he and his friends are still attempting to clean the property after two months of work.
“You could not even open the door,” he said of when he first discovered the mess. “One time I was cleaning garbage back there and the whole pile moved from some critter running in there. God knows [what it was].”
According to Hazeem, the tenant was a woman who lived in the home for 14 years with her disabled son and other family members.
She received housing subsidies as a part of the Section 8 program and Hazeem admitted that he stopped checking on the home after several years.
“The first seven or eight years she lived there, I came by the home a lot,” he said. “She was fine so then I kind of ignored the place thinking the inspections through Section 8 would be good. They weren’t, apparently.”
A Section 8 spokesman, Tim Collier, said that the program inspects recipients homes every two years.
“Our inspectors have a detailed housing quality standards checklist they must go through for every inspection and to complete that list they must enter the unit,” he said.
Hazeem said he could not believe that inspectors missed the mess, which ultimately resulted in $15,000 worth of damage.
A friend launched a GoFundMe page seeking to raise $10,000 toward paying the damages, but Hazeem said he just hopes others can learn from his experience.
“Do your own inspections,” he said. “Don’t trust people who say they’re inspecting it.”
