Local housing advocates say the Wilson Street property is an example of the city’s failure to fully police its housing code and the disproportionate harm that inflicts on Manchester’s most vulnerable residents.
“The majority of affordable housing was the older housing stock, and because the older housing stock is so dilapidated, a huge amount of them are being sold and rehabbed right now,” said Jessica Margeson, who works on housing issues with the Granite State Organizing Project.
Few Manchester residents have spent as much time studying the local housing enforcement process as Margeson. She first started learning about building regulations and tenants’ rights out of necessity, when she and her two children were living in a poorly maintained apartment, and she wasn’t getting anywhere asking the landlord to fix the problem. When she tried standing up for herself, she said, she was evicted.
“The whole time, I thought, ‘If I can do this, I’m going to teach others how to do this,’” she said. “Because this isn’t fair.”
Today, Margeson helps renters fend off evictions, track down unresponsive landlords, file complaints with the city and more.
That experience has shown her how unaddressed housing problems can disrupt so many other aspects of a person’s life.
Living in decaying housing — with excess moisture, dust or simply the stress that comes with not feeling safe in your own home — can directly harm tenants’ physical and mental health, she said. It can also be expensive for families who don’t have a lot of money to begin with to replace food, clothes or linens that have been spoiled by bugs or other hazards, she said.
At the same time, she said, moving is also expensive and destabilizing — especially for families with school-aged children or those who rely on support systems in a particular neighborhood. And these problems are especially hard on those who don’t have the time, money or power to challenge retaliatory landlords or unresponsive city officials.
City data also underscores the disparities in who’s most often affected by substandard housing in Manchester. About half of all housing complaints logged by the city’s code enforcement department in the past decade are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, representing less than a quarter of the city’s population. Those areas also tended to be poorer and more racially diverse than the city as a whole.
Manchester officials acknowledge that certain neighborhoods are in need of more housing oversight than others. To that end, Leon LaFreniere, who oversees Manchester’s housing enforcement, said they have two inspectors who focus predominantly on housing or zoning enforcement in lowand moderate-income neighborhoods. But he said those inspectors don’t receive any specialized training or approach their work differently than other inspectors, aside from having a specific geographic focus.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the city’s complaint database might not capture the extent of local tenants’ housing concerns. For example, the property on Wilson Street only shows up four times since 2013; tenants say they’ve largely directed their complaints to the building’s owners or property manager, not city officials. They said they didn’t know who else to contact for help, or didn’t trust that their concerns would be taken seriously.
Margeson said she sees this with a lot of other tenants living in substandard apartments.
“They kept quiet, because when the city came around every three years, it still passed their building,” she said. “They’re not thinking that they can reach out to the city, because the city has already OK’d this.”
LaFreniere said his agency tries to do what it can with its available personnel and resources. However, he was not able to say how many buildings were currently out of compliance with the local housing code or how that figure has changed over time. As of press time, he was also unable to provide data on the number and nature of the kind of violations they’re most commonly encountering, citing limitations in the city’s information systems.
In general, LaFreniere said the city tries to work cooperatively with both tenants and landlords. In some cases, that means giving landlords multiple chances to fix a problem; city records show it can sometimes take more than a dozen inspections before a building is deemed to be in compliance with the housing code.
LaFreniere also said the city has to treat every violation on a case-by-case basis. In other words, it can’t step up enforcement on a particular building or property owner just because they had lots of violations in the past.
While the city can take landlords to court if they don’t comply with orders to fix up their property, that’s not always successful. LaFreniere said it’s hard to get property owners to show up to those hearings, and judges often end up reducing the city’s penalties.
“It’s a challenging thing to do,” said LaFreniere. “You’re basically telling people what they can and can’t do with their property in the ‘Live Free or Die’ state, and that doesn’t always go over well.”
According to city records reviewed by NHPR, most of the fines issued against property owners since 2019 have gone uncollected. However, city officials said many of the same properties facing these citations have managed to achieve compliance by correcting the underlying deficiencies, even if the fines remain unpaid. Some of the properties in question also changed hands after the citations were imposed, and officials said in those cases they’re trying to ensure the new owners fix the outstanding issues, as well. — CASEY MCDERMOTT/NH PUBLIC RADIO
