EUGENE, Ore. (BN) — A university student was shocked Sunday evening to gaze out his kitchen window and find a loveseat, rattan papasan chair, coffee table and other assorted furniture being used by the squatters residing behind his apartment complex.
“It’s definitely nicer sh– than mine,” Matthew Gofeld, 21, told Brimborion News. He said there’s been a steady accumulation of items in the field over the last month, but that no one seemed to be doing anything about it. “My neighbor’s called the landlord, the city,” Gofeld said. “No one seems to know who owns that space back there. It started out just one dude, now there’s like five. And they look like they’re settling in for the long haul. Their tents are nice, too. Nicer than the one I got.”
Both the building’s owner and the land management offices hadn’t responded to a request for comment before the filing of this story.
“It’s obviously stolen stuff,” said Emily Freundlich, another resident in the building. “But, like, from where? I should go out and ask. I mean, I could use a new kitchen table set.”
“They got this, like, burgundy loveseat out there,” Gofeld said. “It’s pretty huge. I have no idea how it got there. I’m up here eating and studying every night after I get home from the library, and I can see the field, and I never saw anybody move it in. You’d need like a U-Haul to do it. And at least two more people to haul it around. There’s no way it could fit on the back of a bicycle—you know, with those like little baby carriers for biking your kid around that they use?”
Asked if he thought it could have balanced atop a shopping cart and then been wheeled there, Gofeld replied, “Maybe. You’d have to be pretty skilled at pushing a shopping cart, because you’d need one hand stabilizing it the whole time, especially over grass. The best way to prop it up and balance it would be on its back, long-ways, but you don’t want it too high, because that would raise its center of gravity and make it impossible to keep from tipping over.”
“I saw it get put back there, yeah,” said Gregory Stevens, a neighbor who’s complained several times already. “They got some gullible son of a bitch with a van to do it. I’ve seen this guy before. Some jackass Good Samaritan who goes around thinking he’s doing the Lord’s work by helping the homeless, when all he’s really doing is contributing to criminal vagrancy, drug abuse and pissing off everyone else who actually has to deal with it. F—ing people in this town, I swear to God.”