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Displaced Grants Pass residents upset with OnTrack Monday Feb 27, 2017 at 12:01 AM By Jeff Duewel Grants Pass Daily Courier GRANTS PASS — A year ago, Jackie York and Laurene Lange were uprooted from their apartments at Eighth and A streets, where Jackie had lived for six years and Laurene for a year. They were just two of 15 tenants at the low-income Brookside Apartments, near Grants Pass High School, who were displaced to make room for people receiving substance-abuse treatment from OnTrack. On Thursday, they posed in front of the chain link fence surrounding the apartments, still vacant, save for one person who said he was there for security. A few windows had plywood covers. "It makes me feel like someone pulled a fast one," said Lange, who now lives in a studio apartment nearby. "It's frustrating because they pushed us all out of there." Medford-based OnTrack became the owners of the property at 704 N.E. Eighth St. in April, paying $970,000 for the complex and then evicting everyone. OnTrack, which operates multiple residences in Medford for recovering addicts, said a year ago it was pleased that Grants Pass was going to get a residential facility to add to treatment programs. Then-Director Rita Sullivan said at the time OnTrack would help displaced residents find new apartments, which never happened. The nonprofit organization has been in turmoil in recent months. Sullivan resigned amid investigations by the state Department of Human Services over alleged poor living conditions. Earlier this week, the organization's interim director also resigned. Phone calls to OnTrack were not returned this week. None of it makes Lange or York feel a lot better. "I have two large storage units costing me $165 a month," Lange said, explaining it was the only way to store her possessions when she was evicted. Despite a scramble for something new, York eventually landed in a good place for low-income earners, Parkview Terrace on Fruitdale Drive. She's waiting to upgrade to a three-bedroom place, with her son and daughter, both teenagers. She said being evicted and searching for housing last year cost her daughter a lot of school time. "She's not even going to graduate this year because of the uprooting," York said "We were in a motel. It was chaos. "It all makes me sick." Grants Pass is mired in a housing crunch, and seeing 15 vacant apartments isn't sitting well with some. Erin Levenick, an Oregon Law Center attorney who represented one of the evicted tenants at the apartments last year, feels that way. "It's disappointing with the current rental climate, that those units aren't back on the market," Levenick said. — Reach reporter Jeff Duewel at 541-474-3720 or [email protected].