Why have rules if they're not enforced?
Yes, people need housing, but they also need safe housing.
The Bangor Daily News has recently taken to focusing on what many (including myself) feel is Maine’s largest issue — housing.
I have had a post about substandard motels used for long-term housing sitting in my draft folder for some time, but today the BDN beat me to it, so I am dredging it up now. Sasha Ray has posted an article (note: BDN is a pay site and you should subscribe, because while they are spread thin, the BDN is one of the only publications around that still makes an effort to cover non-fluff Belfast news) about older motels being used for long-term housing.
In Belfast it’s an open secret that certain rules don’t apply, particularly if they occur to what (the city government itself) deems is a socially disadvantaged class. Do these unwritten rules make any sense? Of course not. For example, if you want to live in a perfectly safe and sanitary tiny home or RV, will they let you do so if you run afoul of the lagging state codes? No.
But if you were down on your luck and desperately in need of lodging and the only lodging available was in an already existing building and not suited to long-term living, could you live long-term in a motel that is not up to code? Yes. During the pandemic it was widely agreed that many of our modern rules were not suited to a state of emergency. So it was generally looked upon as not a high priority to enforce misused properties. Belfast went further and allowed public housing assistance to be allowed for illegal and unsafe rentals. To me this was a line that should not be crossed. I’ve argued (and have not received much pushback in the form of counterpoints) that Belfast goes way overboard in terms of regulating property use and have citied many ordinances that can be eliminated or improved in order to facilitate rental housing growth, so it find it upsetting when we make it hard for the people who are trying to do things right and then just turn around and the government itself just blatantly ignores laws that exist for legitimate safety reasons.
Long before the pandemic the Admiral’s Ocean Inn was for sale for a reasonable price. I looked at it more than once and was evaluating if I could convert it to long-term housing, properly. In Belfast this meant (no exceptions) a long and expensive planning and code process — kitchens would need to be added and all plumbing, electrical, fire and building codes would have to meet current codes for apartments. In this case it meant adding fire sprinklers as well. I did the math and determined that it was not feasible, even if this was something that could have been done 20 years earlier with none of those issues. Many other legitimate investors willing to play by the rules also did the same math — so the property was listed for a long time before selling.
What often happens to these buildings is that they sell to bottom feeders1 — I had seen this happen before in Massachusetts when these facilities become too outdated and desirable for travelers. They turn into their natural end-life — substandard housing, that is, if communities or states turn a blind eye to it. But make no mistake — these buildings get sold to business and people that are able to pay cash and willing to break the rules to make easy money.
Minimum housing standards2 are common sense codes and laws that all states have. which set the bare minimum for what constitutes a suitable long-term occupancy unit, for good reason; there is no disagreement, as a societal standard, that we do not want slumlords taking advantage of vulnerable people. In terms of a motel, if you want to rent long-term, that means you have to have kitchen sinks, adequate electricity for refrigerators and kitchen appliances, and some type of a permanent cooking appliance in the units, because if you do not people will still cook on portable grills (usually hotplates inside and propane BBQ grills outside at unsafe distances) and create an unacceptable fire and life-safety hazard3. These are multiunit buildings lacking fire walls and fire systems, mainly located in rural places where fire coverage is not robust. People can and have lost lives in such unsafe conditions.
The Admiral Ocean’s Inn burned in a fire in January of 2024. While the cause is unknown, it is highly probably that it started in a cooking fire. Maine was in an extended drought last year, and what we have seen with wildfires lately in the US, nowhere is immune if the conditions are right. In just the past decade in east Belfast we have seen three large fires — Ming’s, the Wentworth Center and the Admiral’s Ocean Inn, not to mention the McCrum fire in town. Several of these fires resulted in burning embers landing on many area houses (including mine). We should take fire safety seriously4, especially when they are tied to minimum housing standards. We should not operate with the assumption that Maine is unsafe from wildfires. The BDN recently had some articles highlighting past large wildfires in this state that occurred during periods of extreme drought.5
I can guarantee you that if I or anyone came to Belfast and told them they were going to buy a motel and rent it out long-term, Belfast would require the change of use planning board process and code-enforcement inspections, before any occupancy permit was issued. The entities quoted in the article do not do this. They simply buy them, do what they want and ignore laws. And often they follow up by failing to meet minimum state lodging sanitary and safety license requirements (which the state does enforce), so they often lose their lodging licenses. They then further follow up by not meeting other state and local laws (uncovered/unshielded trash, number of unregistered vehicles, fire code violations, to name a few — all in public view). At this point they are technically and functionally illegal — not permitted to be run as motels and do not meet minimum housing standards for long-term rentals. They are supposed to be condemned and vacated when this happens. Eventually some communities (Bucksport recently) tire of the problems that these places create and they are swiftly shut down (so it’s not a case of whether the town can do so — just whether it actually wants to enforce its own laws).
During the pandemic this was openly occurring with the Admiral’s Ocean Inn and the Gull Motel. I cannot find the quote, but I believe this was even addressed once by a city councilor at a public meeting stating “people need housing” (as an explanation as to why it was allowed to occur during a period of serious societal upheaval, and why public money was allowed to be used for rental assistance at these substandard places).
Well this time has passed — it’s time to tell the owners of motels operating like this that they need to go through the planning process and secure proper permits to run an apartment building. The owners can afford the planning process and they can afford to install kitchens and meet fire code.6 If they can’t do this, it needs to be shut down. Yes this may displace some residents. It’s better to do this in an orderly way than to wait for another Admiral’s type fire that actually threatens their lives.
I worked in the property management field for a long time. Ironically most of the owners that I came across that purchased these types of facilities were actually very successful local business people. The key point — they were often reputable business people with businesses in far away locales. You know the adage “Don’t shit where you eat.” It applies here. They frequently don’t dare run these type of lodging operations in communities where they socialize. I wonder why that is.
In Maine our minimum housing standards are set by patchwork of state housing laws, human rights laws & rules, building/life-safety codes and building codes. In short for cooking, anything that is converted to an apartment in a multi-unit building has to have a functional kitchen with all electric and plumbing up to code.
These units also do not have adequate electricity in terms of amperage, circuit protection and outlets for long-term housing. Extension cords strung across units are common and increase the fire hazard (pinched electrical cords are a common cause of fires — an orange extension cord running an electric hotplate, for example, is going to be undersized for the load as it is and will run hot to the touch).
I largely argue that many building codes are outdated or unnecessary, including some fire codes (technically called “life safety codes”) — but where I do so, it is because empirical evidence shows that overly aggressive fire codes do not actually improve safety, such as the case where Maine is only one of 8 states that requires 3-unit+ townhouse style construction to have fire sprinklers (the other 42 allow a 2-hour fire wall every two units). Maine’s rules here have not proven to be any more life-safe than the other 42-states. Fire suppression systems are an improvement, but townhouse uncontrolled fires are very rare and egress-laws plus fire-safe building methods means that the likelihood of casualty is no greater in the other 42 states.
I largely had the same false belief that Maine was safe from wildfires despite being heavily forested. My sister-in-law owns a sporting camp in central Maine with 5 cabins that has been there since the 1800s. Several years ago I was having a discussion with her about the camp history and she started talking about how the camp had previously had over 20 cabins until a large forest fire (possibly in the 1940s) wiped out most of the camp long before anyone’s living memory.
These companies won’t do this though — what they will do when enforcement happens is empty the place out and sell it. They operate in the liminal space where rules aren’t enforced; the buildings will be priced appropriately until they sell to someone who has done the math and can make a rules-abiding investment out of it. The intersection between investors who want do right and investors that operate these types of establishments is almost nil.