Marla Reagan began carefully documenting her living conditions after mold started appearing on the walls, ceilings and window sills of the Sanford apartment where she lived with her son.
She took photographs, called her landlord, hired a mold testing company, and called code enforcement and the city’s housing authority. Instead of quick intervention to prevent the spread of the mold and the looming rodent and bee infestations in the apartment building, Reagan and her son almost became homeless.
That’s because the tools municipalities have to help maintain housing quality are insufficient, leaving renters and municipal officials trapped in a system that doesn’t always work. Instead, code enforcement measures that are meant to keep tenants safe can actually make them homeless because their homes are no longer considered habitable.
Reagan, 60, and her son, 38, were living in their shared Sanford apartment with the help of the federal government’s Housing Choice Voucher program, also known as Section 8. Through the program, low-income families can rent apartments on the private market as long as the housing meets a set of minimum safety standards. If the housing fails inspection, the agency administering the voucher will pull its portion of the rent, putting renters at risk of eviction.
Research has shown that Section 8 is still one of the most effective ways the nation has to reduce homelessness, and most voucher holders live in apartments they believe are of decent quality. But almost a third of families who participated in a national survey published in 2016 self-reported their housing to be poor or fair.
In Maine, more subsidized housing units have trouble passing the required inspection, setting up the potential for tenants to continue living in substandard housing while they await fixes or find another home — if they can.
In the past five years, the Maine State Housing Authority, which administers about a third of all the Section 8 vouchers for the state, conducted 31,282 inspections of apartments. Of those inspections, 45 percent failed, the authority said. It did not have data on how many units were ultimately fixed or how long those fixes took.
The Reagans happened to live in a city with an extra level of accountability: a rental registry, which requires landlords to register their properties and have an additional inspection or else pay a fine. But it did not help the Reagans.
Communities across Maine, including Bangor, have debated in recent years whether to create a rental registry to understand their housing stock and pinpoint areas in most need of improvement. But that additional layer of oversight is not meant to provide immediate relief to tenants with absent landlords.
For the Reagans, meaningful investment in the upkeep of their apartment didn’t come until after they moved out — after the son had lived in the apartment for more than two years.
“Throughout this, I reached out to [Sanford Housing Authority] several times. I called code enforcement,” Marla Reagan said. “I mean the place is deplorable.”
‘When we knew we had a problem’
Reagan’s son has a disability that prevents him from holding regular employment, entitling him to housing assistance through Section 8. So his options were limited when he was looking for an apartment, as landlords are not required to take housing vouchers. Reagan’s son declined an interview.
When her son moved into the Front Street apartment in 2019, Reagan said she was concerned about the condition of the building, but she was living in her own home about an hour and a half away in Waterford. After her home’s pipes burst and she had eye surgery in early 2021, she moved in with her son to recover, Reagan said.
The two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment occupied part of a building constructed in 1900. It had an old claw-foot bathtub, with old handles and fixtures, Reagan said. In 2021 the handle that controlled the hot water broke. Despite at least four to five phone calls to their landlord, no one came to fix it, she said.
“The hot water ran full force — it wouldn’t shut off — full force hot water. That went on for months. We kept calling, ‘Come and fix it; come and fix it,’” Reagan said. “Then, all of a sudden, the mold is coming through the ceiling and the walls and windows.”
With no response from their landlord, Reagan and her son tried to get rid of the mold themselves and to fix the tub, but it didn’t work, she said.
“We kept washing it off, but it just kept coming back,” she said. “That’s when we knew we had a problem, a real problem.”
When Reagan’s son first moved into the apartment in 2019, it was owned by Hill Street Apartments LLC. When the building was sold to White Bark Properties in 2021, Reagan said she hoped things would get better. But they continued to wait for fixes, she said.
White Bark Properties has more rental units in Sanford than any other single entity, according to city data. In total, the company owns 44 buildings for a total of 190 apartments.
White Bark is registered in both Maine and New York, where its owner, Matthew Goldfine, is based, according to Maine business records. Goldfine is the president of Excel Builders & Renovators Inc., a general contracting company also based in New York.
In a statement, Goldfine said his company is committed to safe, secure and code-compliant properties, and that White Bark records show there were a number of issues during the Reagans’ tenancy.
The Reagans violated their lease by having a pit bull terrier chained up, for creating unsanitary conditions and for not paying rent on time, Goldfine said.
The dog belonged to Reagan’s son and was his emotional support animal, Marla Reagan said. Reagan refutes that she and her son were the cause of any problems with the apartment.
What’s more, Sanford code enforcement records show the apartment had problems in 2019, including improper plumbing and inoperable windows. Other units in the building also had issues, including one with a damaged ceiling.
Goldfine’s company has spent “millions of dollars” in capital improvements at properties in Sanford and Springvale, and it continues to do that work, Goldfine said. Since the Reagans moved out of the apartment, it’s been improved with new counters in the kitchen, fresh paint and cleaned floors, according to photos Goldfine sent to the Bangor Daily News.
But it wasn’t until a chance encounter — a plumber knocking on the Reagans’ door asking how to access the basement to fix the building’s boiler — that the Reagans got their tub fixed more than three months after the leak began, relying on the same plumber, Marla Reagan said.
The pair hoped it would solve the mold problem, but it didn’t, she said. The Reagans hired two mold inspectors who found multiple types of mold throughout their apartment, according to their report.
Bees infested portions of the porch, which Reagan said she is highly allergic to. The unit was also infested with mice. Some of their upstairs neighbors never took out their trash, leaving it instead to rot on the porch.
Reagan said she wanted to talk publicly about the conditions to generate awareness — because people should be able to live in dignity.
“I want people to be able to eat food they put in their cabinets and not have the mouse eat it,” Reagan said. “I want them to be able to go to bed at night and be able to breathe because they don’t have to breathe in that crap.”
‘The tools are insufficient’
When Reagan reached out to the Sanford Housing Authority for help in 2021, she hoped it would compel her landlord to act. Instead, she believed she might become homeless because of the way the federal safety net is designed.
The Housing Choice Voucher program, which is the nation’s largest rental assistance program, is often managed at the local level by a housing authority, which distributes vouchers and inspects properties before tenants move in and then on a regular basis.
The Sanford Housing Authority said it could not talk about individual Section 8 program participants but that any subsidized housing must be inspected before people move in.
Marla Reagan said she didn’t know if the apartment had been inspected before her son moved in. But given the mold, mice and bees, she asked for a special inspection, which the Sanford Housing Authority conducted in April 2021. Their apartment failed, according to the inspection report.
The inspection found surfaces covered with a “mildew-like substance,” heavy accumulations of mouse feces in the kitchen and trash covering the upstairs neighbor’s porch.
Reagan told the housing authority she believed the mold was making her sick, according to documentation from the housing authority.
The Reagans called the Sanford Housing Authority about five times and the city’s code enforcement office about six times to report their living conditions, Reagan said. But no one from code enforcement came to inspect the property. There was no city paperwork outlining why this was the case.
In July 2021, Sanford Housing Authority inspected the property again. The inspector, Jen Ouellette, then sent a letter urging Sanford’s code enforcement team to act.
“I am not a mold expert, by any means, but it is apparent there has been water damage from a faucet leak, and also from a leaking roof,“ Ouellette said in the letter.
Housing authorities do not have the power to compel property owners to fix up their buildings. They can only stop paying their portion of the tenant’s rent if a unit fails inspection, putting people at risk of being evicted. That means people like the Reagans can fall through the gaps in a program created to help them when they report the conditions inside their apartment.
“During this extremely difficult time, with the housing shortage as grave as it is, obviously this [nonpayment] would result in these two individuals becoming homeless,” Ouellette’s letter said.
Local code enforcement officials have more power than housing authorities to compel landlords to address code violations, but their options are limited and can also prompt tenants to lose their homes. Officials can issue a notice of violation and seek voluntary compliance. Or the local city or town council can approve legal action, which is often time consuming and expensive.
“The tools are insufficient, from the perspective of the societal norm,” said Ian Houseal, the director of Sanford’s development department and rental licensing program.
A municipality could also issue an order to vacate — or condemn — the building, essentially evicting any residents inside.
“A potential impact, depending on the property owner, [is] putting those people out and making them homeless,” Houseal said. “We have to balance the orders to vacate against a compliance plan as well because there’s a little bit of a brinksmanship going on.”
In the Reagans’ case, Sanford code enforcement didn’t step in until the housing authority asked it to. The city’s inspection on July 27, 2021, confirmed previous findings and also discovered missing smoke alarms.
The city issued a notice of violation to White Bark and gave the company 17 days to bring the apartment into compliance. Records show the company responded, but it is not clear when it did so. It fixed the issues pointed out by the Sanford Housing Authority at least by October 2021, according to an inspection report.
In addition to mostly relying on landlords to voluntarily fix their properties, code enforcement is often underfunded, leaving municipalities without the resources to fight back when they need to, said Vicki Been, the faculty director at New York University’s Furman Center, a research center focused on housing issues. A shortage of workers in the construction industry creates additional challenges, she said.
Having more available apartments could also create more competition for tenants, which might compel landlords to better maintain their properties, Been said.
“The reason why people are able to rent apartments like this is because there’s not enough units,” she said. “If there was more competition, if there were more units available, landlords wouldn’t get away with it.”
There are just 49 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 renter households with extremely low incomes in Maine, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
‘This whole thing has destroyed us’
Sanford rolled out a rental licensing program in 2017 designed to specifically enforce code requirements while bringing up the total value of the city’s rental market, Houseal said.
Every year landlords in Sanford have to get a license to operate their rental units. The program also calls for inspections when they first register a property and then on a rolling basis thereafter, he said, to help landlords spot potential deficiencies before conditions deteriorate.
Over the last five years, the city has obtained enough data to create a plan to direct its code enforcement to apartment buildings that have the lowest value in an attempt to improve Sanford’s overall housing stock, he said.
“It’s not blind in any way,” Houseal said. “We target properties.”
But in the Reagans’ case, the registry didn’t and couldn’t have provided assistance because action was needed, not more documentation of the conditions inside their apartment, he said.
“It is not an overnight proposition,” Houseal said. “We are seeing change, but it’s really slow.”
Rental registries and licensing programs are taking hold across the state, and each one is unique, according to a 2022 report by the Maine State Housing Authority. MaineHousing found that one rental registry program wouldn’t work for the entire state because each municipality may need one for different purposes.
For example, the state’s oldest registry, found in Orono, was formed in 2009 to help manage off-campus student housing and the issues that come with being a college town, according to the report.
Bangor, meanwhile, has little to no data about its rental housing. The assessor’s office has a spreadsheet that loosely tracks the names of landlords and their properties, but it lacks meaningful data to inform housing policy, which is one reason Jeff Wallace, the city’s code enforcement director, said he wants Bangor to have a rental registry.
A rental registry could provide greater oversight of Bangor’s rental properties, while also giving the city more data on what the city’s rental market looks like, Wallace said. A registry could also be used to track code violations and allow earlier intervention to prevent a building from becoming dangerous, he said.
Efforts to form a rental registry have ebbed and flowed since 2019 when a working group made creating a registry its No. 1 priority to begin combating a housing shortage.
The solution to the Reagans’ housing crisis was for Marla Reagan to move out after living there for about 10 months. She was eventually offered another apartment in Sanford operated by the housing authority. But her son, who could not find another apartment quickly, remained there until September 2022 when he found a new place in New Hampshire about an hour away.
They only have one vehicle, which they share. They drive it between Sanford and New Hampshire, and back again when one needs it. The separation puts more stress on her son’s disability, Marla Reagan said.
What’s more, as a mother it has been difficult to be separated from her son, she said.
“Until I can get me and my son back together or get him into my home, this whole thing has destroyed us, emotionally, physically,” Reagan said.
Sawyer Loftus is an investigative reporter at the Bangor Daily News. He may be reached at [email protected].
