A Portland man bought a 1.2-acre lot in April with plans to build his family’s future home. What he got instead was a rubber nightmare stacked six feet high across nearly every inch of his property. When Khanh Tran returned to the land near Southeast 174th Avenue and Powell Boulevard in early June with a contractor in tow, he found roughly 75,000 discarded tires blanketing the site, turning his building plans into a waiting game with no clear end date.
At the time of purchase, there were maybe 50 tires on the property, enough that Tran had already agreed to deal with them as part of the sale. Nobody anticipated an ocean.
The math on 75,000 tires is worth sitting with for a moment. The property is 1.2 acres. That works out to more than a pound of rubber per square foot, assuming you could even walk across it, which Tran largely cannot…