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After a property management company bought his building last fall, Josh Gass received a letter in March informing him that the monthly rent for his one-bedroom apartment near downtown Bangor would increase by $500.
A few months later, he received another letter informing him that his rent would go up another $200 if he didn’t sign a new lease, which the company claimed was still under market value.
“Although I understand that rents do increase, I felt that the increase was quite substantial,” said Gass, who founded and is managing director of Launchpad, an arts incubator.
“If it had been like an incremental increase, that’s one thing, but to suddenly slam somebody with $500 or even $700 worth of increases, I don’t care if the apartment was undervalued or not.”
The Bangor City Council may consider a limitation on rent increases throughout the city after councilors and a Maine state representative said they heard from residents like Gass who suddenly saw their monthly rents increase by hundreds of dollars in the past few months.
The rent control measure would be the most direct action taken by the city to stem rising housing costs, following a handful of zoning and rule changes aimed at encouraging the development of denser and more affordable housing.
“The relationship between how much people can earn and how much they pay in rent is becoming more and more untenable as rent prices increase,” Rep. Laura Supica, D-Bangor, said in a July 18 email to Bangor city councilors and city manager Debbie Laurie requesting a meeting to discuss a proposed rent control ordinance.
“As a city that is already struggling to deal with immense workforce shortages, we can’t afford to discourage folks from moving here,” Supica said. “Landlords absolutely need to raise rents to keep pace with the increasing cost of fuel and building supplies, but we have to respond in kind.”
Bangor doesn’t have any rent control ordinance, though it faces a dearth of housing stock for renters and homeowners alike. The city has slowly tried to tackle this problem after publishing a report in 2019 with recommendations from a special housing workgroup.
Supica, a handful of Bangor councilors and one tenant said that a policy capping annual rent increases was critical to help keep residents in their homes. Others said they were waiting to see how people responded before taking a position on implementing rent control.
Bangor should welcome continued growth while ensuring current residents of all income levels can still afford to live there, Gass said.
“You have to make sure that you’re creating an equal mix that is inviting to all sorts of different types of people,” he said. “It’s walking a very fine line there.”
Though housing prices have skyrocketed around Maine, few cities have considered implementing any measures to cap rent increases. Portland passed an ordinance in November 2020 that limits landlords to increasing tenants’ rent by 10 percent every year.
Officials from other cities with tight housing markets, such as Saco, Kittery, Bath and Biddeford, said they weren’t considering rent control policies. Opponents like the Southern Maine Landlord Association said rent control de-incentivized apartment turnover, reduced housing stock and led to higher rents.
Mayors from those cities said they would instead focus on building more housing.
But recent efforts to build or encourage more housing in Bangor have been met with staunch opposition.
Dozens of residents objected last week to a proposed 30-duplex development near Essex Woods. They cited low water pressure, increased traffic and the potential of being cut off from green space and wildlife as motivations for opposing the project.
And in March, residents also opposed allowing boarding homes in more Bangor neighborhoods. The city council ultimately passed a scaled-back version of that proposal.
Councilor Dan Tremble said he was open to discussing a potential rent control ordinance but worried about developers being discouraged from building new housing.
“It’s not something that the government should be trying to control,” he said. “It’s a market force.”
At the same time, Tremble noted that efforts to build affordable housing in Bangor had failed to gain much traction.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said.
A handful of other Bangor city councilors voiced support for the possibility of a law capping rent increases for city renters.
Councilor Dina Yacoubagha said the council had received numerous complaints from residents who saw their rent dramatically increase, making it “critical” that Bangor take action and work with landlords, renters and other stakeholders.
“There has to be a control on this increase,” she said. “It can’t just go up with no supervision, with no cap.”
Councilor Joe Leonard supported a potential rent control measure, but said it should be paired with other measures, like an increased minimum wage. He also cited a looming recession, stagnant wages and inflation as motivations for why the city needed to address the housing crisis, noting that its impacts would fall disproportionately on lower-income workers.
Councilor Clare Davitt forwarded Supica’s email to the full City Council and said she requested that city staff put the issue on an agenda for discussion at an upcoming meeting.
“Given all the conversations we’re having about affordable housing it seems like a good time to begin discussing it further,” Davitt said.