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Stuart Emmons, who announced earlier this week he's challenging Portland Commissioner Steve Novick for a seat on the City Council, nearly lost his home to foreclosure twice in recent years and in 2012 declared bankruptcy.
Emmons, an architect, has made affordable housing a central focus of his campaign. He says his financial troubles, which cascaded amid the Great Recession, have given him a new level of compassion for disadvantaged Portlanders.
If elected, Emmons would help oversee a city budget with revenues approaching $2 billion, and voters will have to decide how Emmons' past misfortune colors their view of him.
"Does this disqualify me?" he asks. "I actually think it makes me more qualified."
Len Bergstein, a veteran City Hall lobbyist, found that assertion "weird." But he added that the 2016 elections were already shaping up to be pretty atypical.
"Normally, an attempt to spin this around in this way would stand out as a particularly outrageous statement," he says. "I don't think it will in this cycle."
Multnomah County records show Bank of America filed a foreclosure notice on Emmons for the first time in 2010. At the time, Emmons owned a condo in Southwest Portland's Goose Hollow neighborhood. He had purchased the unit in 2005 for about $260,000.
Records show Emmons held off the foreclosure, but the bank again declared its intention to auction off the property in 2012. He also filed for bankruptcy that year, listing assets of $262,000, primarily his condo, and debts of $586,000 to a variety of creditors.
In 2013, the homeowner's association at Emmons' condo slapped a $15,000 lien on him for failing to pay association dues.
It wasn't until 2014, when Emmons sold the condo for $363,500, that he got out from under the mess, records show. He says he walked away with little to show for it, because of the debt he had accumulated.
"I got $8,000 out of the whole deal," he says.
Emmons traces the problems to the 2008 recession, which hit the architectural firm he'd run successfully for 10 years hard. "I'd been through dips before but it was like 1929 for architects," he says. "It wasn't just bad luck. It was forces that were totally related to the recession."
Willamette Week
