Reporting by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica reveals that many of Maine's public housing authorities have filed a disproportionately high number of eviction cases in recent years.
Because public housing authority rules forbid tenants from returning to subsidized units after an eviction, many end up homeless.
Reporter Sawyer Loftus spent several months analyzing court records and other eviction case data from the last five years. And, as he tells Maine Public's Nicole Ogrysko, the eviction rate from public housing in Maine last year was one filing for every ten units, nearly twice as high as the rate from other rentals. And Loftus says the local authority in Presque Isle filed nearly one case for every five of its units.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Loftus: Some housing authorities filed a lot more cases than others. Like the Bangor Housing Authority filed more cases than the Portland Housing Authority, even though the Portland Housing Authority is one of the largest, if not the largest, housing authority in the state.
Ogrysko: Tell me about Linda Gallagher-Garcia, because her story seems to really illustrate this gap in assistance and the instability that those living in public housing might face.
Linda Gallagher-Garcia is a woman who grew up in Aroostook County, and she left for about a decade or two. She has struggled with stable housing, largely because of the costs of rental housing in the state of Maine. And in her case, in the last seven years that she's been back in the state of Maine, only three of those years has she really been stably housed in a long-term setting, two of which were in the Presque Isle Housing Authority, in a public housing unit. And it was that last eviction from the Presque Isle Housing Authority in 2022 that has kind of caused the most difficulties for her in finding another place to live. Since 2022, she has on and off been homeless again. You know, part of what drew me to this story was the consequences of an eviction from public housing. It can vary greatly from public housing authority to public housing authority, but when we reviewed all of the rules from all of the housing authorities in the state of Maine, there was similar language around, basically, a prohibition of re-entering the public housing system or accessing Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher benefits as well for a period of years after you've been evicted for specifically nonpayment of rent. So once you are evicted from a housing authority in Maine, it'll be difficult, if not impossible, to get housed again in a timely fashion at another housing authority, especially if you owe a debt.
What did housing authorities that you spoke to have to say in response to the data that you presented them and to some of these personal stories that you described in your story?
When we were talking specifically to the Presque Isle Housing Authority, they said that they couldn't comment on specific individual cases about tenants for confidentiality reasons, which is totally fair. But broadly, when we were talking about data with them that we had found and seen, you know, the Presque Isle Housing Authority said to us that, you know, eviction is really meant to be this thing of last resort, and no one, including housing authorities, want to evict someone. But just like any other business model that, you know, rents out properties, a part of their bottom line is rent collection. And so if someone is behind on rent to the housing authority, they're not upholding their end of the bargain.
Does anything exist that might help folks like Linda or others who are in these situations?
It's difficult to say. I mean, in Maine, we have the Stable Home Fund, which recently came online in Oct. 2024 and, in theory, you know, that program could benefit renters like Linda, except they're specifically excluded. When an individual in public housing in the state of Maine is is faced with a rental hardship, there are very limited options. We found that often what happens is housing authorities will enter into a repayment agreement, which is not uncommon. It is a standard practice across the country to enter into a repayment agreement with a tenant who is behind non rent. But that repayment agreement often is asking tenants to pay on top of what they already can't afford in monthly rent. So it's hard to tell if that really works. In Linda Gallagher-Garcia's case, she said that she entered into one of these repayment agreements when she was in court for her eviction, but was unable to make one of the payments, and that's what ultimately led to her eviction, her formal eviction from the housing authority, about a month after the case started in court.