States Motel — Hotel in Portland

I gave 3 starts to 'neutralize' my review because I have never been here before, so I think it'd be unfair for me to leave 1 or 2 stars.

That said, with all of the other bad reviews I see and from what my parents always told me about their stay at this motel a long time ago, I'm surprised that it's still going. I'd like to share what my parents told me.

My parents stayed here when they visited my grandparents in the very early '90s (I didn't exist yet). My grandpa reserved a room for them here after they flew in late at night from the East coast. My parents didn't expect a fancy place or anything since grandpa was doing them a favor. They knew it was in an old, run down area, but they weren't expecting anything fancy and they figured it would just be fine for just one night.

It wasn't fine.

My dad said that the old Indian (from India) guy at the front desk was nice enough, and there was Indian music playing. They said that it just seemed run down at that point. They didn't sense anything unusual. When my parents got to their room, they could still hear the Indian music playing, so the walls were obviously very thin. They found it hard to sleep.

A few minutes later, they heard some guys arguing in the main lobby area. For the next several minutes (maybe hours?), the Indian music and arguing was punctuated by gunshots. My parents just laid there, paralyzed, and they were unsure of what to do. They just wanted to get out of there, but they were too scared to leave their rooms because of all of the gunshots.

They left the next morning as quickly as they could. A few years later, when I was little, we ended up moving to Oregon, and we visited Portland a lot for vacations when I was a child. Anytime we were ever in Northeast Portland to visit family, my parents would talk about the States Motel and laugh nervously and they always talked about how bad it was and how scared they were.

Out of curiosity, I decided to Google it today to see if it was still there, and it was...and there are SO many other bad reviews that all sound pretty similar to my parents' story from the early '90s.

It appears that things haven't changed much since 1992. You are likely going to be much better off if you...

Needed a quick place to sleep for a few hours after a delayed flight. This was the cheapest motel in the area but still way more expensive than it should be. I would avoid this place like the plague, the room was dirty, carpet was crunchy, hair in the bathroom, blinds were broken, no lamps, no cold water in sink, no shower liner, the smoke detector was broken. It was apparent that the owner did not care one bit about the place. Really sad as it only needed cleaning and some TLC to be a 2-3 star motel. As a business owner myself it saddens me when people do not care about their guests. If I had my family with me we...

We were there approximately four minutes, determining that the place was uninhabitable. It was filthy. The toilet looked like it hadn't been cleaned in months. How can such a horrible place get a business license in Portland? We went back to the front desk to get our money back, and they lied that we'd gone through Expedia to book and would have to get a refund from them. They even had a fake document that said "Expedia" on it (head's up, Expedia!). We were there because of a family medical emergency and had to book quickly from Eugene on the basis of proximity to Providence Hospital. We will continue to...