MANCHESTER, NH – Last Wednesday morning, two tenants in 9th Division – Circuit Court – Manchester entered a settlement with their landlords who are evicting them, not because they are behind in their rent, but because the apartments are to be renovated.
Under the law, the tenants have no recourse if a landlord needs to renovate a property.
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Those losing their housing today are now finding find themselves searching for an apartment they can afford in a city where the vacancy rate is 1 percent, the real estate market is on fire with apartment buildings being scooped up by small landlords and equity and investment companies, and an apartment once being rented for $1,100 a month, now costing $1,900 a month, plus utilities.
Housing advocates believe landlords are exploiting a loophole under a “just cause” provision and evicting long-term tenants. While they cite the need for renovations, housing advocates say some landlords are not renovating the buildings. Landlords know in this market they can increase rents by a large amount or sell their property for a large profit, making hundreds of thousands of dollars more than just a few years ago.
“In a market like this it is easy to sell a property and make a big profit for a place that is seriously sub-standard as long as the purchaser has the wherewithal to do the rehab,” said Elliott Berry, managing attorney of NH Legal Assistance Manchester office and long-time director of its Housing Project. However, he said more and more landlords, instead of maintaining the properties, are simply “putting them on the market and walking away with their profit.”
He said low- and middle-income people are at the mercy of market forces “which at this point in time are strongly, strongly contrary to their interests.” The second part of the problem is “how easy it is for landlords to claim they’re renovating the property and either they’re not going to renovate it at all or the renovation does not require the dislocation of the tenant.”
There is no inspection of the apartments to see if a landlord has done renovations.
Jessica Margeson, tenant organizer with the Granite State Organizing Project, said “renovation” is a loophole landlords are using for what she terms “mass evictions.” Some new owners are renovating the buildings but, she said, others are changing locks to digital ones, jacking up rents by $300 to $500 a month without doing any repairs and issuing eviction notices.
The result is displaced tenants having a tough time finding another apartment they can afford. Shelters and local hotels, where the city places the homeless in emergency situations, both have waiting lists, according to Margeson.
“I’ve been at this for more than 40 years and I don’t remember the market conditions being so bad for tenants,” Berry said. “It’s tragic.”
He said the market is particularly hostile for tenants with evictions on their records or who are very low income. “They are being forced into a market where they are going to have to pay more than 50 percent of their income and this is not sustainable,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
Margeson said evictions are stressful for people. She was working with one tenant who had a heart attack while packing up her stuff “because we couldn’t find a hotel room for her and she was heading to a homeless shelter.”
Margeson said on Wednesdays and Thursdays, when landlord/tenant sessions are taking place in Circuit Court, the vast majority are renovation evictions.
Eviction for Renovation
Last Wednesday, a Manchester Ink Link reporter sat through a few hearings. Prior to the session beginning, a court clerk informed tenants that there were lawyers available from New Hampshire Legal Assistance to help them through the process as well as representatives from Southern New Hampshire Services, the agency overseeing the issuance of $100 million in government funds through the New Hampshire Emergency Rental Assistance Program (NHERAP), to determine if they qualify for assistance.
When COVID-19 struck two years ago, a moratorium on evictions was enacted. That ended in September 2021 but the state did not see an upturn in evictions because of NHERAP, Berry said. He calls the program a “whopping success,” one that both tenants and landlords appreciate, he said. However, he expects those funds will run out by the end of the year at which point local welfare offices, which foot the bill for emergency placement of people in motels, “will really be under pressure and more people will be homeless.”
Nick Norman, director of Legislative Affairs and Government Affairs Chair for the Apartment Association of New Hampshire, said the program was “very, very helpful but that did not cover the people who scammed the landlords. There were many tenants that were not paying rents for months and months and months and then abandoned the property. Landlords never recovered that money.”
Asked what percentage of tenants did that, Norman said that it was not a high percentage but at the same time said “that’s a foolish thing to think – to talk about only a few people did that. If only a few people left a landlord high and dry for eight to 10 months, it’s a big deal.”
Norman, whose group numbers about 2,500 landlords statewide, said his members are upstanding citizens and good business people. Sometimes they do renovations because the property needs improvement, he said. He said he doesn’t know of any landlord who has sub-standard property and are kicking tenants out so they can raise rents or sell the property.
“You’ll find that people like to exaggerate,” he said.
He said landlords, by and large, are very good and so are the tenants. There are a few bad ones on both sides, he said, but there are “a lot more bad tenants percentage-wise than there are bad landlords.”
One tenant who reached a settlement with her landlord on Wednesday was Jeannine Laflamme, 41, of 225 Grove St., Unit 2. She has to be out of her three-bedroom apartment by May 9.
“It’s not a complete dump but it hasn’t been updated in the three years I’ve lived there,” she said.
Laflamme’s mother, Christine Padilla, 69, who is on Social Security, lives with her as do her three teenagers on a part-time basis.
She said New Hampshire has failed to take care of its working-class people.
Her mother has been on a waiting list for eight years for senior housing. “She’ll be dead before she gets a place,” she said. Padilla can’t afford one on her own.
Laflamme, who works as a bill collector, “so my bills are paid on time,” said she had been on the Section 8 waiting list since her children were born. The oldest is 17.
She anticipated the eviction. Her landlord, she said, extended her lease so she would be protected. However, as soon as the lease ran out – about nine months ago – she received a notice to quit and a rent increase. Her rent was $1,300 a month and has since gone up to $1,500.
She needs a three-bedroom apartment at a minimum but with three teenagers she really needs four.
“A new place is non-existent in the state of New Hampshire,” she said. Laflamme is waiting for her income tax refund and, once in hand, she’s taking her income and her family and moving to Florida “where residents are taken care of. The workforce is leaving” the Granite State, she said.
Dante Baker of 537 Howe St., also was being evicted because of needed renovations.
Both Laflamme’s and Baker’s buildings are managed by EJG Property Management of Derry. A call to them said they do not comment on court proceedings.
Bruce E. Allaire Jr. found himself in the same position as the other two. He signed an agreement Wednesday to be out of his apartment at 494 Wilson St., by April 23.
Allaire lives there with his parents, Bruce E. Sr. and Judith Allaire, his girlfriend Coven Covey and their 10-month-old son Bryce Allaire. They pay $1,000 a month for the three-bedroom, one-bath unit. His father is retired, he explained, but doesn’t make enough to have a place for just him and his mother. “That’s why we all live together,” he said.
He said the apartment building has five units and all of the tenants were served eviction notices with the landlord citing the need for renovations.
The building is not maintained,” he said. “It’s dilapidated.” He said owner Maria Giakoumakis has been trying to sell it but no one has bought it because it is so rundown.
“That’s why they say they have to have us out, so they can renovate it,” he said.
Allaire, who works for Weston Foods, formerly Freed’s, said his family has lived in the apartment for three years. Losing one’s home at any time is tragic, but it is especially so for the Allaire family since his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and was scheduled that Friday for surgery.
He says the family already has rental assistance and they have been approved for their moving expenses to be paid. “It’s an issue of finding a place that will accommodate us all,” he said. “We’ve been looking since we knew she wanted us out, but we haven’t found a place yet.”
Maria Giakoumakis, 42, owns and manages about 100 units in the city. She said she bought her first investment property when she was 23.
She said her philosophy is to try and not go up on rent, if possible, to ensure she retains good tenants. In those 20 years, she said she has evicted people for non-payment of rent, but only three — including Allaire – citing the need for renovations.
She said she felt terrible about having to evict the Allaires but she had three potential buyers for the property and all said they would not buy it because of the way the Allaires’ maintained their apartment and surroundings. The Allaires, she said, were the only ones she evicted.
Giakoumakis did not want to say publicly what the specific issues were with the Allaires.
She said one other time when she evicted a tenant citing the need to renovate, it was an individual who was a heavy smoker – in a non-smoking building – evoking complaints from another tenant with a young child. She said the apartment had to be completely renovated because of the nicotine-stained walls.
Giakoumakis said she is aware of landlords in the city evicting tenants citing the need for renovations and investing a minimal amount of money in the properties. One person, she said, bought a three-family building for $485,000 and evicted the tenants who were paying about $1,100 a month for a three to four-bedroom apartment. Then, she said, the landlord spent about $2,000 per apartment making minor repairs and sprucing it up with some paint before re-renting the apartments for $1,800 to $1,900 a month.
She said if the market continues as it is, no one is going to be able to pay those rents.
“It’s really a scary time,” she said. Landlords are being squeezed by expenses and tenants are being squeezed with increasing rents, she said. “I’m curious to see how the next 3 to 5 years play out.”
Giakoumakis believes there is going to be a correction in the market and when that happens “landlords are going to get caught off guard.”
She said the only solution she sees to the rental problem is “more housing and more competition.”
On Thursday, a reporter at the courthouse had a chance encounter with Heather Monrroy, 52, of 639 Harvard St. In February, the new owner of her apartment building – 3375 Capital Harvard St. – had its management team tape a letter to her door, and other tenants’ doors as well, telling them they had 30 days to get out. The notice, she said, came within an hour of the new owner buying the property.
Her son and her grandchildren live in the apartment across the hall from her, she said, but he has a lease until the end of April at which point he also will be facing eviction.
She was trying to find out if the notice was legitimate. A court official gave her the phone number for NH Legal Aid.
Monrroy said everyone in the building was given an eviction notice, including a 74-year-old woman who has lived there for 22 years.
The reason cited is the need for renovations.
Monrroy pays $200 a week for her one-bedroom, third-floor apartment that comes with no parking space or laundry hookup. For three years, she’s lugged her laundry up and down two flights of stairs to take it to a laundromat.
“This is hard,” Monrroy said of being evicted. She said she, her son and her grandchildren have decided to move in together. They are the lucky ones who have found an apartment, although it is presently occupied and Monrroy said she is not sure when it will be available, particularly if the landlord needs to make repairs once the tenant moves out.
In the meantime, her anxiety level is soaring. If the apartment isn’t ready by the time she is evicted, she said she will stay with her son.
Berry said people who have been evicted and are unable to find a new place, end up in shelters, hotels or doubling up with others. The latter, however, puts the other renter in danger of being evicted for having unauthorized people living in the rental unit.
