Squatters in Portland now occupy a $1.8million building that housed the city’s first strip club until two years ago.
For months squatters have lived in the building’s upper floors, moving electrical appliances in through a second floor window and using a screw gun and crowbar to reenter the building whenever they are locked out.
According to residents, one of the squatters carries a machete and ushers women in and out of the property at all hours of the day.
‘It’s pretty much a cat and mouse game,’ Bassel Ayoub, one of the build’s new owners, told Oregon Live. ‘We don’t like this any more than the neighbors do. I don’t know what else to do at this point.’
The building is now representative of the fight to help clean up parts of Portland where policies have let some run amok.
The building was a former hotel and home to one of city’s oldest and most celebrated strip clubs, Mary’s. Singer Courtney Love famously danced in the club, according to the Willamette Week.
The upper levels of the three-story brick building were once the Stewart Hotel, which until a few years ago was a shelter for Portland’s low-income residents.
In 2021, tenants of the building sued their building’s owners, alleging squalid conditions. Later that year it was bought by Ayoub and his business partner, local dentist Hadi Nouredine.
Ayoub says the building is still hooked up to power despite the fact he has stopped paying electricity bills. ‘I haven’t paid a single bill,’ he told the outlet. ‘That’s still a mystery to me.’
Ayoub said he and Nouredine are now discussing plans to either renovate the entire building or tear down the upper two stories and keep the street-level space for retail.
But he said either option could take three to five years to complete.
Ayoub said he’s made multiple attempts to remove squatters and secure the building but they just return. Photos published by Oregon Live show a padlocked ladder restricting access to the fire escape and metal latches installed over the ground-level entrance.Â
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