by Sawyer Loftus, Bangor Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Bangor Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Jasmin Belanger agreed to a plan to pay $750 in back rent, she had no idea how the decision would haunt her.

It wasn’t until 10 months later, while apartment hunting to distance herself from an ex-boyfriend she said had abused her, that she discovered an eviction on her record. She hadn’t ever been ordered to move out, having paid her back rent on schedule. But it turned out that the 2023 deal she made in court with her landlord to help her avoid eviction created a paper record that made it look like she had been evicted. That black mark kept her from finding a new place to live.

Belanger’s landlord was the Bangor public housing authority, which operates apartments for low-income residents. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development strongly encourages public housing authorities to offer so-called repayment agreements to tenants who have fallen behind on rent in order to help them stay in their homes. It recommends that authorities reach these deals before cases reach eviction court.

But housing authorities have flexibility as to how to design and enforce such agreements. And the way these second-chance opportunities are executed in some parts of Maine — verbally in eviction courts with little judicial oversight — has come back to harm even tenants who meet every term of their deals.

That’s because judges here don’t pause eviction cases even when tenants and housing authorities reach agreements. In fact, those judges often grant landlords possession of properties at the time that repayment deals are made — expediting the process of kicking out tenants who violate the agreements.

Some states have taken steps to prevent this, requiring landlords to return to court to evict tenants who don’t fulfill the terms of their repayment plans. Housing authorities also could choose to pause or close eviction cases if repayment agreements are made in court, but they rarely do so in Maine, said Erica Veazey, an attorney with Pine Tree Legal Assistance, a legal aid group based in Portland that represents low-income tenants throughout the state.

Most housing authorities in Maine, including Bangor’s, told the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica that they follow HUD’s guidance and try to reach agreements with tenants outside of courts. But court records show that’s not always true in Bangor, the state’s second-largest housing authority. There, 54 tenants had repayment agreements made in court, according to the newsrooms’ examination of eviction filings between 2019 and 2024. All 54 tenants ended up with eviction judgments in court records, including those who may have repaid their debts. (If a repayment agreement was made outside of court, it would not appear in any official record.)

Maine’s court system is one of the last in the country to rely on paper records, making a holistic accounting of such ghost evictions difficult. But the Bangor cases show for the first time how these repayment agreements can backfire for tenants against the intent of the HUD guidance.

Presented with these findings, Mike Myatt, executive director of Bangor’s housing authority, said he........

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