The following is the first in a series of articles from The Demand Letter exposing the slumlords who run NAYA
The essential contradiction between landlord and tenant exists no matter who the landlord is. Tenants need a safe and dependable place to live, and landlords exploit this to maximize revenue by any means necessary – regardless of what mission or values they may claim for themselves.
For the last several years, vulnerable indigenous tenants in Portland have been neglected, abandoned, harassed, and forcibly evicted by the native organizations that they believed they could trust.
The Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) is a non-profit that co-owns 6 housing complexes supposedly intended to create and sustain affordable housing, particularly for indigenous tenants facing homelessness. The story in each complex is the same: unhealthy and unsafe living conditions, ignored maintenance, hostility and retaliation from management, suppressed cultural practices, lack of promised services, unaddressed violence, grossly inaccurate ledgers, and aggressive evictions.
Since 2017, there have been at least than 76 evictions filed against tenants at NAYA’s properties, with 54 of them filed just since the start of 2024. With only 205 units in total, this represents about a quarter of all their households. When Underscore News, a native news publication, recently covered a portion of the tenants’ stories – NAYA CEO, Oscar Arana, took the opportunity to deflect blame by stating that the tenants themselves were at fault.
Among other malicious statements, Oscar said “…a lot of the residents may not necessarily have the experience or the skills of knowing how to maintain or upkeep an apartment, so cleanliness might be an issue, right?” He continued, “This is a challenge that every single affordable housing provider is facing right now, issues of not clean units, issues of hoarding, issues of bed bugs.” What Oscar intended to deflect from was the fact that the unhealthy living conditions have been created by management and owner neglect: burst pipes, leaks, water damage, mold, broken appliances, pests, collapsed walls, and structural failings – all of which have been reported by tenants and more often than not ignored.
After realizing they were being exposed for years of neglectful treatment of their own clients and tenants, NAYA decided to do further damage control by publishing a response on their blog full of outright demonstrable lies and misdirection.
To start, they say: “Several residents in NAYA housing have recently received non-payment notices, but most of these notices are resolved without renters having to leave.”
Every non-payment eviction is preceded by the mentioned termination notice, meaning “several” numbers more than 50. This is an under-count, because not every termination notice becomes a court-filed eviction – sometimes the resident moves out on their own once they learn their tenancy is being terminated. In every single building we’ve heard the same complaints: ledgers are incorrect, serious habitability violations have been ignored, and management continues to intimidate and harass tenants. A number of residents have received or been threatened with eviction when refusing to sign backdated income recertifications – a practice FPI Management has employed liberally in order to cover up years of missing or lost recertifications.
NAYA continued in their post: “In 2024 there were four actual evictions out of 165 units in our Cully properties.”
This statement intentionally obscures two things: First, NAYA owns two additional properties outside of the Cully neighborhood – one of which, Generations, executed 4 additional evictions in 2024. Second, an additional 10 evictions across all of their properties have been completed since the start of 2025. Fourteen more eviction cases are currently open and ongoing at the time of writing. None of these numbers capture the tenants that decided to move out after receiving a termination notice, under the threat of state violence through sheriff-assisted evictions that NAYA placed against their residents.
Tenants directly refute NAYA’s claim that they are willing to help their tenants facing financial challenges. Many of them were not made aware that they had a balance due until they received a termination notice with a vacate date. After pointing out flaws and missing payments on their ledgers, management has refused to correct them – forcing tenants to prove themselves in court by providing years of receipts. Other tenants have been refusing to pay rent in protest of unhealthy living conditions and neglect. NAYA has been more than happy to evict them without addressing the serious code and habitability violations they’d been forced to live with.
When tenants kicked off organizing tenant unions in each of their buildings over the past few weeks, property management cracked down. FPI Management and Guardian Management, employed by the building owners NAYA and Community Development Partners, have invented new rules to block access to community rooms for tenant meetings. They have routinely trespassed tenants and organizers for talking to other residents and knocking doors to invite their neighbors to the union meetings.
How come a non-profit landlord acts identically to the private slumlord we know to hate? How come they slash expenses, evict tenants, and repress anyone who stands up to them? Fundamentally the non-profit and the corporation under capitalism follow the same logic. Housing non-profits get their money from rents(money taken from our wages), government money(taken from our taxes), and donations(once more, from our wages). That money which comes from the rich donating or being taxed is also just the profits of our labor. So, the non-profit landlord subsists solely upon wealth taken from laboring people. Should they want to take this money and pay out their high salaries and advance their careers, the executives of the non-profit slash expenses and maximize profits, only now they rename profit to “executive compensation.”
We are not obliged to be grateful for the crumbs we paid for so many times over, even if it is framed as “charity”!
Down with Landlords!
Down with Housing as a Commodity!
All Power to the Working Class!