Lisa Brayman testified last week to a jury of 14 peers about her apartment on 1827 W 9th Avenue in Spokane.
She said she often had black water coming up her shower drain. She said plugging in a microwave and a space heater at the same time tripped the breaker. She said the dumpster out back was always overflowing. She said other tenants were using drugs and sometimes the whole residence would smell like fentanyl.
She said she stopped paying rent in 2021 because the 10x15 foot apartment where she had been living since 2018 was uninhabitable.
When she finished, Judge Annette Plese asked the jury if they had any questions. One juror handed a piece of paper down the row so it ended up in the hands of the judge.
Judge Plese read the question to the witness: why hadn’t Brayman found another place to live?
Two days later, the jury sided with the plaintiff to evict Brayman.
Spokane's first eviction case gone to jury trial
Landlord Arlin Jordin has tried to evict Brayman seven times. The first six times, a judge heard the case—per standard procedure—and each time, a judge denied the eviction.
On the sixth try, Judge Michelle Szambelan said that if Jordin tried again, the case would bypass typical procedure and go straight to trial.
Jordin did try again. It’s probably the first time an eviction case has ever gone to trial, says King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project Spokane attorney Hannah Swenson, who represented Brayman.
The jury case was a chance to get a pulse on how citizens, not the court, think about landlord-tenant disagreements. The outcome also exposes cracks in Spokane’s broader housing systems.
“A question I get often is, ‘Well, why didn't that person just move out if it was so bad?’ which is a natural question,” Swenson said. “But the reality is you can't snap your fingers and just move out because you're in a bad situation where it's hard to reach resources.”
Brayman, who's in her 50s, said she can’t afford rent. She will likely end up homeless, and the evictions brought against her will make it harder to be rehoused. Swenson says that every time an eviction case is brought forth, it puts a black mark on a tenant. Regardless of the outcome, it makes it harder for them to find a new home.
“A lot of people with evictions filed against them in Spokane County identify as disabled,” she said. “I think the natural assumption is that those people are already receiving the services that they deserve, and I find through our work that that's not true. It's not that people aren't trying, there's just a lot of gaps in the way that our support systems work in Spokane. And so when we look at the big picture, I think that's one of the biggest problems.”
Jordin was sued by the federal government for rental assistance fraud during COVID. He listed Brayman as one of his property managers during that time. During the eviction trial, Brayman said it was a mistake but it's making it harder for her to receive rental assistance.
As far as the neighborhood is concerned, Brayman’s eviction will have little impact on improving the residence. An infant was killed at the house a few years ago, and neighbors claimed the building was a safety risk. Fire trucks respond to calls there often—sometimes multiple times a week.
“Arlin Jordin is a well-known landlord in the category we call ‘slumlords’,” said Swenson, who has litigated against Jordin’s attorneys multiple times.
Jordin currently owns three properties in Spokane—the one on the lower South Hill, plus 1302 and 1308 W Boone Avenue—and carries out his landlord duties from prison.
He’s currently in prison for drugging and raping a potential tenant two decades ago.
But jurors in Jordin v. Brayman weren’t allowed to know why Jordin was attending court via Zoom. Instead, their focus was solely on whether the landlord or tenant had neglected their legal duties—reasonable property maintenance and rent, respectively.
Jordin’s attorney Brant Stevens says they made the right call.
“I think this decision says, ‘Look, landlord, you've got to do what you're supposed to do under the law. Tenant, you've got to do what you're supposed to do under the law,” he said. “This was kind of a unique case because Ms. Brayman hadn't paid rent for so long.”
Swenson said she’s disappointed the jury sided with Jordin, but wasn’t shocked.
“I wasn't surprised given Spokane and given how these cases normally go,” she said. “Spokane is pretty conservative when we look at landlord-tenant protections, as well as just the trends in our town. One thing about Spokane County is, as far as eviction cases, the courts move the quickest of all counties in the state.”
Still, she had hoped that this case might have upended the norm.
“I thought that it was pretty clear through the case that [the] plaintiff was not coming in good faith,” she said. “I wish that mattered more. Especially when we're talking about—and I tried to really impart that to the jury, and I think they heard me—that the outcome is someone becoming homeless.”
Does habitability matter?
But there was one outcome from the case that neither Stevens or Swenson expected.
“Both the amount of rent that the jury found was due and the offset in rent—I think both surprised me,” Stevens said.
The jury decided that Brayman’s total unpaid rent since 2021 was $36,855. That’s thousands less than Jordin and Stevens were asking for.
During the trial, multiple rent ledgers, rent increases, and eviction notices were admitted as evidence. They listed different amounts of monthly rent for Brayman’s unit. One listed $595, another $1045. The most common number was $945.
It appeared to both lawyers that the jury used $595 to calculate rent due.
But they also decided to subtract $21,262 dollars from that back rent because of habitability issues on the premises. That brings the amount owed down to around $15,500.
Swenson takes this as a really good sign.
“I'm hopeful that that sort of finding of fact will have some sort of positive impact, at least with showing that a community and a jury do care about habitability,” Swenson said.
Habitability is an issue that Jordin is still dealing with in court in a different case.
Jordin is currently trying to evict Richard Motelongo, a tenant on 1302 W Boone Avenue. Jordin says Motelongo owes him around $21,000.
Code enforcement gave a notice of substandard condition regarding the property in June 2024 for dilapidation, unsanitary conditions, inadequate weatherproofing and defects that increase fire risk. Emergency services have responded to calls on the property almost 500 times since 2013.
