Who to call when your landlord won't make repairs

LACONIA — The city's housing rental market has a 1% vacancy rate — so tight it squeaks — which means that landlords don't necessarily need to take good, prompt care of their units, and tenants wait to complain to authorities for fear of finding themselves homeless.

“Sometimes these guys, they don't do maintenance because there’s a housing shortage,” said Laconia housing inspector Glenn Caron. “Where else are you going to go?”

When this particular style of property management is adopted, buildings can fall out of repair, becoming safety and fire hazards in their respective neighborhoods.

If a tenant’s requests for repairs are falling on deaf ears, many don’t know where to turn. The best chance they have is to call the city code office, or the local fire department if there is a safety issue that isn’t being addressed by the property owner.

However, some individuals are afraid to reach out for help due to a fear of retaliation from their landlords. At times, dishonest tenants who are facing eviction will call on the services to delay their own eviction. Combine these factors with housing inspection and safety programs that are understaffed, and you can have situations like the one found at 28 Spring St.

The building is a narrow, multi-family housing unit with upstairs and downstairs apartments. The exterior is clad in white, aged paint.

Those who enter the building’s common stairwell will encounter dirty carpeting, battered wooden banisters and a persistent scent of cat urine in the air.

On the second floor is Amber Griffith’s $1,100 a month, one-bedroom, one-bath apartment. Griffith is a single mom who claims that her unit has been without heat for about a year, despite her requests for repair. 

Exposed wires, scorched outlets

“The last time I had heat was back in February, my apartment was filled with smoke,” said Griffith. “When I first started talking to him [the owner] he thought I needed a new thermostat. That night the heat would not go off. Then my house filled with smoke, so I had somebody come and shut it all down. A friend of mine came who is allowed to do that. I sent an email to my landlord saying he had to shut my furnace off, he said they would deal with it in the spring because the winter was almost over.”

Griffith’s aforementioned friend is Jeff Cote, owner and operator of Cote’s Property Services LLC. Cote has experience in HVAC, and stated that when he came to check out the boiler, it was red hot. Cote ended up explaining the situation to Usen Wareagle, the owner of the building over the phone, who denied many of Griffith’s repair request claims.

“Last year they needed a thermostat adjustment. I haven’t heard anything since then,” said Wareagle. “They haven’t made a work order either. They never followed the lease instructions that said to contact me either by phone or email.”

When the status of the apartment was described to Wareagle, he stated that the damage must have been done by the tenants, and shared a series of photos he said were taken before the Griffiths moved in. Wareagle’s photos show the apartment in significantly better shape than the unit’s current condition.

“I don’t know why these people come in and trash the place and don't request anything to be repaired,” he said.

“He doesn’t communicate at all,” Griffith said, stating that most of her requests for repair have been ignored. “It’s hard to communicate with him. He chalks it up to not getting emails or text messages. But when he asked us to all get renters insurance, he was able to text and email everyone. Very random, very weird, very awkward for us.”

“They’ve already been evicted for non-payment,” Wareagle explained. “She had a rental assistance program that paid through November, they told us that would end in December,” said Wareagle. “Rather than seek additional assistance she did nothing until January when she was notified it would run out.”

Wareagle also added that the Community Action Program would not have approved the unit for rental assistance if it had been in its current state, while Griffith claimed that CAP had agreed to rent the apartment under condition that it would be repaired.

Griffith had received a new award of assistance to pay December’s rent, but claimed that Wareagle would no longer accept payment from her. After a court date, Griffith was granted three more months to stay, but she intends to find alternative housing.

Caught in the middle

In the battles between landlords and tenants, the truth can be very difficult to discern, and usually lies somewhere in the middle, according to Caron, the city's housing inspector, who ends up caught between conflicting landlord and tenant claims frequently in his role.

“If someone is having an issue, whatever it may be, I get in touch with the landlord,” explained Caron. “I send a mailer out. I give them between 14 and 21 days. That's the first notice. Saying kind of at the end, if you have any questions, please get in touch with the office and call. If they don't do that, they get a second notice. After that they get a final notice. If they don't respond, there may be legal ramifications, we may be sending it to the city's legal team.”

Caron is the only housing inspector for a city with a population of nearly 16,500 people. When tenants properly contact him for help, many don’t realize that it can be a long process, leading to perceptions that the city isn’t doing anything about their claim.

“In this case because it being winter, I went to the landlord directly,” Caron said. “He [Wareagle] knows the stuff needs to be taken care of, he’s got a properly licensed plumber working on it. He’s going to have an electrician handle it. He’s doing the things he needs to do to correct it.”

Regardless of which party’s specific claims were false or true, the apartment appeared to be in very rough shape when The Daily Sun came to take photograph.

Behind the damaged front door was a strip of canvas to block out the draft. The windows were covered and sealed with makeshift materials, while a series of space heaters crowded the kitchen and bedroom areas. The oven was open, ready to be turned on as a backup heater during the night when temperatures drop. 

The living room was sealed off in plastic and left unoccupied to conserve heat. Both the walls and linoleum flooring in the kitchen and bathroom showed signs of peeling and perforation. Exposed wires dangled from a bedroom ceiling, and there were scorch marks on electrical outlets. According to Griffith, using one of the burned outlets resulted in smoke filling the adjacent room.

During the bathroom tour, Griffith gestured towards a hole in the wall. 

“When I first moved in here, I pulled needles and drugs out of that little hole right there.”

Griffith also pointed out her kitchen faucet, which she claims to have replaced herself, after her repair requests went unanswered for months.

“He just doesn't do it," Griffith said about Wareagle conducting repairs, “he’ll either ignore me, claim he never got them, or he’ll fix it next week. Then next week, next week.”

The combination of burned-out electrical outlets, a reliance on space heaters and an oven for warmth is a recipe for a potential fire. 

According to the Laconia Fire Department, safety inspections are conducted on a complaint basis, rather than as a preventative measure due to a staffing shortage.

“What we rely on is complaints really, both through our fire prevention office, and the city health officer. If there’s concerns, worries about fire violations, health violations or straight up concerns, you can call the fire department and it will go through our office. We'll try to investigate and make the building fire safe,” said Laconia Fire Chief Kirk Beattie. “We’ve had a difficult time keeping people in that position so the inspection of the multi-families hasn’t been as robust as we would like, but it’s something we’ve been working on.”

Beattie stated that even if the fire department had a part-time inspector, it would be impossible to keep up with demand. “The other issue is there are thousands of rentals in the city,” Beattie said. “We do rely on tenants to call us if there’s problems. We can go out to work right with the tenant and building owner to fix any problems.”

As for her claims of not having heat, Griffith did not notify the housing inspector until almost 12 months later, claiming she didn’t know who to call. 

“She’s saying it went on for a year. I don’t know why she didn’t make a phone call. I had been at that building looking at other things a few months earlier in the summertime,” said Caron, who described an earlier visit to the property regarding problems in the downstairs unit. He stated that Griffith could have reached out to him at that time, but didn’t.

“When it seems like these people are way far behind and about to be thrown out, they call,” Caron said.

This was the case for the unit below the Griffiths, where a pair of occupants took on nearly 20 cats, and in one alleged instance, dismantled a series of water pipes, then called the code office to report them as damaged when they were facing eviction. “She said the pipes were falling apart,” recalled Caron. “They were taken apart. They were unscrewed.”

Desperate and dishonest tenants like those of the downstairs unit can waste the city’s time with false claims, and incur heavy repair costs to the property owner, which in turn can drive up future rent.

For tenants like Griffith, there is a palpable fear of losing their housing that might keep them from seeking services until the last minute, or not at all. Griffith cited fear of eviction and lack of knowledge regarding available services as to why it took her so long to reach out.

“That’s why doing this with you petrifies me, dealing with the courts petrifies me,” said Griffith when she agreed to an interview with The Daily Sun. “The code inspector scares me because that could put us out of a home, and my children and I haven’t financially done that yet or found a place. Not that the code inspectors are bad people, they want everything to be safe. But at the same time, I have children to take care of.” 

For Caron, deciding whether or not to condemn a building is a moral balancing act. 

“The problem is, if I do that, you have a family with children that have no place to go,” said Caron, who reiterated that his priority is that people have a warm place to be in the winter months, rather than no place at all.

“There are issues [in the Spring Street apartment], and the landlord is taking a bit longer than I would like to see personally, but it seems like he is trying to fix the issues, so there shouldn't be a need to throw people out. People may think I’m wrong, but I’m looking at the whole thing.”

For families whose homes are condemned, the current first option is to have them stay in one of four available family spaces at the Carey House, a local shelter for people experiencing homelessness. 

As for the Griffiths, their heat was repaired earlier this month, nearly two weeks after the initial promised date.

In the case of both the code office and the fire department, it is up to tenants to make the first call if they are having issues with the property that are not being properly addressed by the building’s owner, and not to wait months and months for problems to get worse.

If you are a tenant who is having a dispute with your landlord regarding maintenance, call the city code office at 603-527-1293 and ask for the housing inspector. If you believe your home is a fire, health or safety risk and your landlord has not addressed it, call the Laconia Fire Department at 603-524-1293.