Shumway residents glad to be rid of massage business

The Shumway Neighborhood Association is believed to be one of the oldest in the region.

Together, neighbors tackled sidewalk-improvement projects and ensured stop signs were appropriately placed.

More recently, they faced a different problem.

A foot massage business they suspected of acting as a front for prostitution was disrupting their formerly quiet neighborhood.

For nearly two years, the Shumway residents worked together; they joined forces with city leaders and the Vancouver Police Department.

“We ran them out, kept calling the cops,” said Jean Harrison, a Shumway resident.

One night, Harrison decided to call the business across the street from her home. A red light indicated the shop was open for business.

The person who answered the phone was “surprised a woman was calling,” she said.

When questions were raised, the business appeared to shutter, only to re-emerge in the same location with a different name.

“There were a lot of men that had foot problems,” Harrison said.

And each time, despite the supposed change in ownership, the same Lexus would pull into the drive with different women, said Anne McEnerny-Ogle, a Vancouver city councilor and at the time the president of the Shumway Neighborhood Association.

The neighborhood mobilized in a “truly grass-roots type of thing,” McEnerny-Ogle said.

“It was an ugliness people didn’t want to talk about but had to,” said McEnerny-Ogle, who lives only a handful of blocks from the business.

School children walked past the massage parlor on their way to school.

Now, people are “happy it’s gone,” the city councilor said.

Traffic in the neighborhood has improved and the intersection isn’t as crowded as it once was.

Erik Podhora, 26, who also lives across the street from the business, said it was simply “not the type of thing you want in your neighborhood.”

Parking was bad, and “it was embarrassing to tell your friends at work and your family” about the situation.

Now, the L-shaped building between 39th Street and the Interstate 5 on-ramp, houses an appliance-repair call center, and the neighbors are much happier.

During the neighborhood crackdown, it became clear it was difficult to prove what was happening. Neighborhood advocates, city leaders and others worked with the Southwest Washington delegation to craft a bill that could make it easier to shut down illicit massage parlors posing as reflexology or a place for therapeutic massage.

Local lawmakers are hoping House Bill 1252 will help when a similar business crops up elsewhere. The measure takes aims at the business owner, rather than the masseuse who could be a victim of sex trafficking, by making it a crime to allow the unlicensed practice of massage therapy or reflexology.

A single violation would be a gross misdemeanor, a second violation would be a Class C felony.

Oregon recently strengthened its laws regarding massage parlors. Rep. Sharon Wylie, D-Vancouver, a chief sponsor of the measure, said the stricter regulations in Oregon increased activity in Washington.

Although no longer a concern for her neighborhood, McEnerny-Ogle is hoping the legislation passes.

“There was just a concern of ‘this isn’t right.’ … It really (started) as a neighborhood watch kind of thing,” she said.