Poor economy has some tenants living in substandard units

Empty 40-ounce malt liquor bottles are strewn across the floor, mixed with discarded clothes. Hair clippings from an impromptu haircut litter a backroom floor. Next to the hair is some old bedding, evidence that someone has been sleeping there.

"You can imagine how thrilled the neighbors have been," Code Enforcement officer Pam Wilderman said, standing amid the trash last week in the backyard of a home at 198 West Main St.

The recession has led to a jump in the number of people living in substandard housing, as some tenants try to pack more people into units to make rent payments more manageable and some landlords become more lax in monitoring the apartments they own.

Wilderman recently cited the Sudbury landlord and kicked out the tenants of the illegal apartment, one of several in the city.

The landlord was charging the tenants $800 a month to live in the first-floor apartment. The second floor wasn't rented because former tenants had tried to do renovations without a permit, Wilderman said.

But the first-floor tenants still ran extension cords to the second floor, where the power company had forgotten to shut off the electricity.

Wilderman said the homeowners, who have now put the property on the market, should have monitored the home more closely to prevent tenants from bringing in more people than allowed.

The listed homeowner, Donna Morris, trustee of 198 West Main Street Realty Trust, said she and her husband, who have owned the house for about 30 years, aren't to blame.

"That's been sort of a victim of bad tenants," she said last week. "It's just been one bad tenant after the other."

Morris said she and her husband would rent the apartment to the allowed number of people, but the tenants would inevitably bring in more. The couple would try to monitor the home, but usually when they showed up, damage would have already been done.

"It's just been awful," she said. "It's just been a nightmare lately."

Wilderman said her department receives reports of 10 to 12 illegal apartments or units in severe violation of building code. Much of the problem, she said, is because of the sour housing market.

"It's just about as prevalent as it is in Milford or Framingham," she said. "The housing market boomed because of mortgage issues. Now it's going the other way."

At another apartment at 3 Church St., six to eight people were living in a two-bedroom apartment, Wilderman said. She found out about the apartment, whose landlord has been cited for several infractions in the past, when police were called there last week.

In an attic in the home, a sheet of drywall had been put up to cordon off a bedroom. To get to the bedroom, the tenant had to almost get down on hands and knees to access the door through a passage that was, at its smallest, about 3 feet high.

Wilderman said she went to the apartment last week and gave the tenants a week to move out. The person staying in the attic bedroom, she said, had been paying $275 a month.

The landlord, listed as Carlos Olmedo of Waltham, did not return a call for comment.

Marlborough is able to keep a relatively good handle on the problem, Wilderman said, by having departments collaborate through an informal "impact team." She said the group, made up of members of various departments that deal regularly with housing, health and safety issues, meets monthly.

"This is why the impact team is so important," she said. "There is a constant stream of information between the police, fire, inspection, Board of Health, even the trash guys."