A Portland landlord has a paid a record-setting fine for numerous housing safety violations.
Sulan Chau was ordered in 2018 to pay over $500,000 to the city for years of unaddressed housing and code violations at 112 Woodford St., including leaky sewer pipes and other violations that could allow fires to spread more quickly and make it more difficult for tenants to escape. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the fine on appeal that December.
The judgment required Chau to sell the five-unit apartment building last July if she was unable to pay. The city’s tax appraised value of the house is $256,700, although that does not reflect its full market value.
Chau made a partial payment to the city of $313,270 in July. Then, in November, a month after the city filed a motion in District Court to force her to sell the building, Chau paid the remaining $200,000, according to city records.
The landlord also apparently has fixed the problems that led to the fine. The house passed its most recent inspection this month.
The owner of the apartment building at 112 Woodford St. recently paid a fine of over $500,000. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer
Chau hung up on a reporter who had called to ask her why she did not address code and safety issues sooner, and why she chose to pay the fine and keep the property, rather than sell it.
A city spokeswoman said the payment is the largest fine collected in recent memory and that it was necessary to gain compliance and protect renters.
“We’re always trying to work collaboratively with landlords to bring their properties up to code and give them the proper amount of time to make necessary changes,” City Hall Communications Director Jessica Grondin said. “It’s never our intent to go forward with legal action from the get-go, but this one was obviously an extenuating circumstance, so we felt the need to carry out legal action to get compliance.”
Unlike rental registration fees, which go into the city’s housing trust fund to support new affordable housing, Grondin said the fine will go into the city’s general fund. She said City Manager Jon Jennings is recommending that the money be used to pay for a new firetruck in this year’s Capital Improvement budget, which was presented to the City Council’s Finance Committee on Tuesday.
The city last conducted a walk-through of the apartment building on Jan. 12, 2018, and the inspector noted that the property passed the inspection. Chau’s other two properties, a single-family home on Codman Street and a three-unit on Falmouth Street, each passed its most recent inspections, also in 2018.
Grondin said the city tries to inspect rental units once every two to three years but will do so sooner if there’s a complaint.
Brit Vitalius, president of the Southern Maine Landlords Association, said he was surprised that Chau paid the fine and kept the building, rather than selling. He said the average sales price for a five-unit building last year was $720,000, or about $144,000 a unit.
“She easily could have sold the building without making improvements and still made a lot of money,” Vitalius said. “She essentially bought the building again for $500,000. It certainly begs the question about whether or not it would have been more responsible and economical just to have made the changes and code improvements made by the city.”
Chau was hit with $510,300 in fines after she failed to fix code and life safety issues at the property for years. Those fines were calculated based on the number of days each violation went unaddressed, which in some cases was over two years. She was also ordered to pay the city’s legal costs.
Court records show that Portland officials had inspected Chau’s building on Woodford Street as many as 10 times starting in May 2015. They identified more than a dozen violations, including obstructed exits, a lack of smoke detectors, electrical problems, “numerous instances of bed bugs” and leaky sewer pipes.
Electrical issues noted by inspectors on Nov. 27, 2017, included a fan hanging from the ceiling, broken outlets, extension cords being used as permanent wiring, missing outlet covers, exposed wires in the basement and a circuit breaker that trips whenever a microwave is used in one of the units.
The inspections began as the city was ramping up housing safety inspections after a 2014 fire on Noyes Street killed six young adults. The duplex had been the subject of neighborhood complaints and code violations. Obstructed exits and a lack of working smoke detectors were among the factors that led to loss of life in that fire.
Chau did not show up to court when the city presented its case in District Court. That failure to offer a defense factored heavily in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s decision to uphold the fines.
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