A 22-year-old woman is suing her landlord for $396,000 after she says she fell on a broken stair tread and fractured her spine at the house she rented with roommates in the hip Alberta Arts District.
Although the three-bedroom, 1,700-square-foot home rented for $2,500 a month in Portland’s hot housing market, it had a list of problems that the landlord was slow to fix or didn’t fix at all, according to Courtney Honigsberg’s lawsuit.
In addition to the broken stair, the light at the top of the stairway wouldn’t illuminate, electrical outlets in the home sparked and didn’t function, the front porch railing was unstable, the kitchen faucet was broken, locks were broken, the basement leaked and smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors were missing, says the suit, filed last week.
The suit lists Patrick M. Kile, the home’s owner, as the sole defendant. Kile, who lists a home address in San Francisco, couldn’t be reached for comment. Property records show the home rocketed in value from the mid-1990s, when it was sold for $59,000, to the time Kile bought it with some improvements in June 2015 for $511,000.
Four months later, Kile rented it to Honigsberg and three roommates. The home is just a few houses down from the heart of Alberta Street’s popular business district — and a minute or two walk to Pine State Biscuits, Salt & Straw ice cream or Little Big Burger.
Honigsberg was a recent college graduate from Colorado and had gotten a job in the interior design department of a Portland architectural firm. Her lawsuit states that Honigsberg and her roommates asked Kile on “multiple occasions” to repair the broken stair and other problems on the property.
In late January 2016, the stair was still unfixed, the suit says. Honigsberg was descending the staircase, stepped on the broken stair and ended up falling down, the suit says. She suffered compression fractures to three vertebra, as well as sprains and strains and other injuries, according to the suit.
Her Portland attorney, Robert Kline, said Honigsberg missed three weeks of work, then returned only part time for several months as she continued to recover.
Kline said Honigsberg moved out of the rental home in March 2016, about two months after her fall.
Although the lawsuit claims that Kile knew about the broken stair and light above it because his tenants asked him to get it fixed, a pair of Oregon Supreme Court cases say that landlords don’t need to actually be aware of a problem to be held liable for it. The high court made that finding in two 1998 cases.
In the first case, the court allowed a lawsuit to go forward against a landlord after heat transmitted through the bricks in a chimney set the house on fire, destroying it and the tenant’s possessions. In the second case, the court said a Southeast Portland apartment complex owner could be held liable after a railing on a second-floor deck came loose and tenant tumbled down to the ground.
In both cases, neither the tenants or the landlords knew of the problems beforehand.
Honisberg’s lawsuit was filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
Read the suit here.
— Aimee Green
agreen@oregonian.com
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