This month’s dump squats on a stubby dead-end street by the interstate off-ramps blighting Portland’s Libbytown neighborhood. As eyesores go, the small white house with gray trim at 10 Huntress St. is relatively inoffensive. It shares a parcel of land with a carport and a leaning garage that may or may not topple during the next nor’easter. Someone carelessly splashed white paint on the base of the tree in the front yard. The front porch steps look rickety and the railing is busted.
But the backyard is where the action is. Two shopping carts stuffed with junk were parked last month on the back patio, which is conveniently outfitted with a lengthy, ADA-compliant ramp. A long wooden wall covered with graffiti is propped against the back fence. Is this place a hobo camp, an artists’ colony, or both?
The owner of the property, Richard T. ”Troy” Rainsford, a resident of Scarborough, may know the answer, but he made it clear to me that he isn’t interested in talking about this house.
Records on file at City Hall support the hobo-camp theory. In early November, the housing inspections office was informed by police that the property was abandoned and unsecured. When inspectors showed up, they discovered that vagrants had been intermittently occupying the home for some time. One of the walls was slipping off the masonry foundation, and there was exposed wiring in the living area.
That wasn’t the first time inspectors had visited and found problems. In January 2011, when the house was apparently being rented, the Inspection Division received complaints that sewage was backing up into the basement and percolating up into the shower. By September of that year, the tenants were gone and the yard had become a trash dump. Inspectors returned later that fall, with cameras, and documented trash bags and construction debris piled up all over the place. The yard was littered with at least two computer monitors and several rusty appliances. The graffiti wall was there, too.
According to interim city spokesperson Sheila Hill-Christian, a property-maintenance company cleaned up most of the mess a few weeks after that visit (the graffiti wall remained), but Hill-Christian said the city doesn’t know who paid for the work. The house is now secured and posted against occupancy.
According to records on file at the Cumberland County Registry of Deeds, First Horizon Home Loans, a division of First Tennessee Bank, filed suit this past June to foreclose on the property. It’s hard to say when the legal process will conclude, but if those are your shopping carts, I suggest you roll them somewhere else soon.
— Patrick Banks
