Renters complain about Jordin

Arlin Jordin conducts some of his rental business in a bathrobe, according to a former employee and director of an agency that tracks rental abuses.

The 57-year-old Spokane property manager remains free after he was arrested Dec. 3 and charged with second-degree rape in a case where a 34-year-old woman told police that she believes Jordin drugged her drink and then sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious.

Since then, 30 women have come forward and told Detective Jan Pogachar similar stories about encounters with Jordin. In each case, the women said they believe they were drugged after accepting a drink from Jordin. Some of them claim to have been raped, Pogachar said this week.

Florrie Brassier, executive director of the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance, said Jordin is well known to her agency and to her. She rented an apartment from Jordin in 1994.

“We have a history of complaints about him,” Brassier said. “In one egregious case, a woman attempting to rent her first apartment made a deposit. When she changed her mind and tried to collect her deposit back, Mr. Jordin – clad only in his bathrobe – made sexual advances to her.”

Bryce Walton, 29, said he rented a Jordin-owned apartment from 1999 to November 2001 and helped manage one of Jordin’s three buildings on West Boone Avenue.

“I’ve heard from past tenants when I was managing that he offered them to pay with sex,” Walton said. “I didn’t believe it. But now I do. If anybody complained, he would threaten them with eviction.”

According to court records, Jordin has been involved in more than 100 civil actions. Most of those involve evicting women renters.

Attorney Eric Steven, who has represented Jordin in dozens of those eviction cases for the past 10 or 12 years, said his client can be difficult or stubborn but he’s not heard of any improprieties involving sex.

“I can’t remember any case where anybody claimed he exchanged sex for rent,” Steven said. “As tight as he is, I think he’d rather have his money, to tell you the truth.”

Spokane attorney Bevan Maxey is representing Jordin on his rape charge.

“I hope I’ll have an opportunity to get a fair hearing … if all this publicity continues,” Maxey said.

Detective Pogachar said Monday that the reports involving Jordin were forwarded to Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Ed Hay for consideration on the existing rape charge. When she returns from vacation on Monday, police officials will decide which of those 30 reports they will pursue, she said.

Hay did not return a message left at his office Wednesday.

The Spokane Police Department declined a request by The Spokesman-Review for a photograph of Jordin. Police spokesman Dick Cottam said printing Jordin’s photograph may generate more calls. Since Pogachar is on vacation, the department doesn’t have anyone with knowledge of the case to answer the phone, he said.

Steven acknowledged that he’s spoken to Brassier about complaints brought by Jordin’s former renters. But he defended Jordin, saying he provides apartments to low-income renters that other landlords would refuse.

“I see a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon against Mr. Jordin. But my experience has not corroborated these allegations of inappropriate conduct in a housing context,” Steven said.

Those who are acquainted with him say Jordin drives a Jaguar convertible. Walton, Jordin’s former renter, agreed with Steven that Jordin can be difficult and blunt. And there was another constant: a blue terry cloth robe.

“Every time I went to his apartment … he would offer anybody hard drinks,” Walton said. “It would be five in the afternoon and he would still be in his robe. He’d bring over new tenants for them to fill out the application and he’d be in a bathrobe.”

Walton said Jordin would cater to young mothers. He would ask them to file for one-time housing subsidies from the state Department of Social and Health Services that would pay the deposit and one month’s rent.

“The money went directly from the state to him,” Walton said. “Then he’d find a way to evict them.”

If these practices were frequent, Steven argued, he would have heard about them from the women or from their attorneys.

“I genuinely believe that if it was pervasive, it would have been bought to my attention,” he said. “If something is going on, it comes to my attention one way or the other.”

He said the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance can help forward complaints but it doesn’t decide whether renters have committed violations of the federal Fair Housing Act. Those decisions come from the Washington Human Rights Commission or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“There’s only one viable complaint that I’ve ever heard about and I was not hired to represent him,” Steven said of Jordin.

But Brassier said the nonprofit agency does have standing to take the case to the U.S. Department of Justice if enough women come forward to show a pattern of sexual discrimination over a period of time.

That’s why she wants every woman who believes she has had an inappropriate landlord-tenant experience with Jordin to call her office. That includes those women who have already spoken with the agency, she said.

“I just think he should have to pay for what he has been doing,” Brassier said. “I do know how to make people make a fair housing case. That’s what we would like to help people do.”