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More than two years ago, 70 low-income and disabled seniors were told they had to leave their low-income apartments at the Taft Home, a Southwest Portland building next to the McMenamins Crystal Ballroom music venue. State regulators had given the facility’s operators a long list of required fixes, and the nonprofit operator chose to shutter the home rather than comply.
One of the longtime Taft Home tenants, Josephine Allen, pitched a tent across the street and spent the winter warming her hands by lighting fires in aluminum cans with rubbing alcohol. Other Taft tenants were scattered to care homes across the state, while others were taken in by relatives.
For the next two and a half years, the Taft Home stood vacant. Reach CDC, the nonprofit developer that owned it, said renovations to rehab the building would cost between $25 million and $30 million. So Reach looked for a buyer instead.
It found one. On June 28, property records show, an LLC controlled by Michael McMenamin, who with his brother Brian owns a constellation of restaurants, pubs and boutique hotels under the McMenamins name, purchased the building for $1.5 million.
A McMenamins spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the company’s plans for the aging building, but McMenamins’ bread and butter is taking historic or aging buildings and turning them into boutique hotels and restaurants.
The ground floor of the building currently holds a Portland dining institution: Cassidy’s Restaurant and Bar.