For decades, the Admiral’s Ocean Inn in Belfast was the type of iconic roadside motel that drew travelers seeking a no-frills place to stay during visits to the Maine coast.
In the 1960s, when it was called the Ocean View Motel, advertisements touted its new swimming pool, free TV and location “in the Heart of Vacationland.” Though its pool was removed by the early 2010s, ads still promoted its proximity to the water and other amusements.
Over the last decade, though, it shifted away from its origins as a travel destination. Instead, it became more of a last-resort housing option for area residents priced out of the increasingly unaffordable midcoast.
By spring of 2022, trash, tires, mattresses and unregistered vehicles littered the property, according to an inspection by Belfast’s code enforcement officer. Free range chickens were living in one room, entering and exiting by way of a ramp up to its window.
Early last year, the motel faced a more abrupt change when a fire burned through four rooms, rendering the building uninhabitable and displacing 20 families staying there.
The shuttering of the Admiral’s Ocean Inn has drawn attention to a less publicized part of Maine’s housing crisis. As the costs to buy and rent have gone up, old motels and lodging establishments have increasingly become a form of temporary housing, sometimes for people on the verge of homelessness.
In the midcoast, there’s a web of related companies that has embraced that trend, buying up several motels along the Route 1 corridor in recent years with the goal of refurbishing them and converting them into extended-stay establishments, according to public records obtained by the Bangor Daily News.
But while those companies have marketed themselves as helping to address the region’s housing crisis, they’ve also left some properties in bad shape.
Code violations
State investigators were not able to determine the cause of the 2024 fire, but subsequent local inspections of the Admiral’s Ocean Inn found that unpermitted electric and plumbing work had been done there at some point. An office area had also been used as an unpermitted living space.
Two other properties that are affiliated with the Admiral’s Ocean Inn — the nearby Gull Motel in Belfast and the Black Horse Inn in Lincolnville — have also become longer-stay establishments with documented code issues in recent years.
In a more serious case, a 2023 state inspection of the Black Horse Inn found that raw sewage had backed up onto a carpeted floor in one room, likely due to a dip in the sewage line, and that there was a large hole in the dining area while it was being fixed. Local officials ordered the inn to correct the code violations within two weeks.
Last summer, a room at the Gull Motel was condemned because it had rotting floors and carpet soiled with urine and feces from the previous renters’ pets. When a BDN reporter visited another resident at the time, her bathroom was wet and appeared to have human waste on the floor, due to what she said was flooding from the toilet.
More recently, when a reporter visited the motel in December, another renter who had moved into that same room said that there were no issues with it.
That person identified herself only by her first name, DeAnna. She and her 12-year-old son had moved there two weeks earlier after previously living in a tent in Montville, and she was connected to the motel by a social worker at Waldo Community Action Partners, she said.
“It’s been good,” another renter said, when a reporter asked about their experience at the motel.
Both the Gull Motel and Black Horse Inn have lost their state lodging licenses in the last two years because they were mostly offering long-term rentals totaling more than six months, according to state records.
Dan Wing, who runs a property management firm that serves long-term stay motels including the ones in Belfast and Lincolnville, said during an interview in early February that he works to promptly address problems that are brought to his attention.
The motels have surrendered their state licenses in order to do remodeling, Wing said, and he is working to get them relicensed.
“We’re working with the state. I just talked to the health inspector last week. They’re going to come out and inspect the rest of the rooms so we can get those relicensed,” Wing said. “It’s really just a matter of paperwork, but there are no nefarious reasons.”
Wing argued that the motels have played an important role in addressing Maine’s housing crisis since the start of the pandemic.
“I think there was a need, and we filled it,” Wing said.
A new business model emerges
While there is no central data on how many Maine motels have been converted into longer term housing, experts say the trend really took off during the coronavirus pandemic, when travel dwindled and lodging establishments were repurposed as safe places where homeless people could reside without spreading the virus.
But even as the pandemic ended, a critical housing shortage affecting Maine and the rest of the country has persisted, creating an ongoing need for alternative forms of shelter. This is clear in the Belfast area, where local officials are now considering a proposal to convert the lower level of a church to temporary housing.
“The idea is that this is a last resort,” said Molly Feeney, executive director of Homeworthy, a midcoast group that serves the homeless. “Unfortunately, most shelter beds are full every night around the entire state of Maine, and with this weather, it’s not like camping or outdoor conditions are viable.”
In the midcoast, the model of using motels as a form of housing appears to have caught on in the last few years.
From 2021 to 2023, a set of companies registered to the same address in the southern Maine community of Cape Neddick bought at least five motels across Knox, Waldo and Hancock counties, according to county records.
After one of those companies, DB Hotel LLC, acquired the Black Horse Inn in 2022 for just over $1 million, Ryan Carey, who identified himself as an agent for the buyer, gave an interview to the Republican Journal newspaper announcing plans to refurbish the Lincolnville property, market it for extended stays and acquire more properties for similar purposes.
In the interview, Carey and the seller of the property pointed to the region’s tight housing market, and they suggested the inn could provide accommodations for seasonal and traveling workers, such as nurses and hospitality staff, as well as traditional vacationers.
Carey’s exact role in the companies is unclear. In records at the Waldo County Registry of Deeds, he is listed as the manager of DB Hotel. He is also listed as the manager of Easkey Right, a firm that bought the Admiral’s Ocean Inn in August 2021, and as the sole member of a third company, Easkey Left, which bought the nearby Gull Motel the following year.
Two other motels, the Schooner Bay Motor Inn in Rockport and the Acadia Sunrise Motel in Trenton, were also bought by companies registered to that address in 2023. The website for Acadia Sunrise Motel lists Carey as its owner and says it’s being run under “new ownership” for long-term rentals.
Carey, who is a vice president at the Portland development firm CORE, has not responded to requests for comment. The people hired to manage the midcoast properties have also offered little information about them and on multiple occasions have told a reporter visiting them to leave.
During the interview in February, Wing declined to speak about the broader business model of the companies that have been buying up the motels. He also shared few details about their guests, but said that not all of them stay for long periods of time.
More motels being used for housing
In recent years, other lodging facilities around Maine have also been converted into various types of longer-term living spaces.
In one case, Penquis CAP just reopened the former Pine Tree Inn in Bangor as an apartment building for people struggling with chronic homelessness. In Belfast, a pair of restaurateurs converted the former Northport Inn and Lodge into housing for their workers several years ago.
But experts and local officials say there can be limitations to using motels as living spaces, at least without doing a lot of work to modify and maintain them.
In some cases, they may not have adequate electrical capacity for full-time residents with devices, according to Bub Fournier, Belfast’s code and planning director. He also noted that residents of a motel don’t have the same legal protections as tenants who are paying rental fees to live somewhere.
Wing said that he warns long-term guests against plugging in too many devices.
Feeney, the director of Homeworthy, noted other challenges of motel living, including that it can be hard for residents to regularly eat nutritious meals due to the lack of full kitchens in many of them.
The challenges are especially great for children, whose health can deteriorate in motel-living situations. Feeney said that it can be difficult for kids to get adequate rest in the same space where their families spend their time. Hygiene can also be a challenge, along with the uncertainty of where they will be able to go to school.
“For young people who don’t know where they’re going to be resting their head at night, it has a real impact on their ability to focus and attend school,” Feeney said.
But advocates also say that living in a motel can beat the alternative, especially in a region that has grown increasingly expensive.
“Folks are finding alternative ways to keep a roof over their head when the inventory doesn’t exist,” Feeney said.
