All in all, Jessy Kendall had a good thing going. 

He had a steady job, a lady friend and an apartment on Wood Street in Lewiston where he was perfectly comfortable. 

He paid his bills on time and didn’t have to worry much about wolves at the door. 

Yep. Jessy Kendall was sitting pretty. 

And then his apartment house was sold. The new management jacked the rent from $750 per month to $1,400. The rent hike was just rumor at first, running wild through the six-unit house like a bad flu. 

The rumor proved to be true. One wonders when the property management agency had planned to let the tenants in it. 

“I had to call them myself to confirm,” says Kendall, “highlighting their lack of transparency.” 

Worst of all, Kendall and a half-dozen other tenants had a grim choice: scrounge up that $1,400 each month, my boy, or be out of the building in two weeks. 

Suddenly Kendall’s nice place on a quiet stretch of Wood Street became a madhouse of desperation and woe. 

“No one in my six-unit building could afford the hike,” Kendall says, “and we were all forced out. Some sought legal help; others were quickly evicted. One tenant, who struggled with addiction, was dead within two months. Housing isn’t just a commodity — it’s a foundation for stability.” 

Anyone who has ever had to move in a hurry knows this: Nothing will heave your life in an upward direction like having to move on short notice. 

But surely there are laws in place to protect tenants in these situations? 

“We had rights,” Kendall says, “but we had to uncover them ourselves. We turned to Pine Tree Legal, only to find conflicting interpretations of how much notice tenants-at-will require.” 

Ultimately, Kendall did the only thing he felt he COULD do. He stopped paying rent and stayed in his apartment as long as he could — until the day before the eviction process would have gotten underway, to be precise. 

Kendall didn’t have the money to pay the rent, so out the door he went. 

The upheaval to his life was now fully underway. 

“I not only lost my home but also had to find new employment, as every available apartment was beyond my means,” Kendall says. “I stayed illegally in my unit, job hunting as an eviction deadline loomed. Eventually, I moved in with my new girlfriend in her low-income housing, cramming my belongings into her small space until I could afford my next place.” 

Ultimately, Kendall landed on his feet. He had put himself on a waiting list for one of those spanking new apartments in the Continental Mill in Lewiston. His patience and tenacity was rewarded and he scored an affordable apartment at the new Picker Lofts. 

Life is good again for Jessy Kendall. 

But it’s hard not to be bitter. 

Having worked with the homeless for a good chunk of his life, Kendall got an up-close look at how easy it is for a person to land on the streets.

He landed on his feet this time, sure. 

But what about those other tenants who didn’t have full-time jobs or friends they could stay with? 

“I’ve worked with unhoused people for over 25 years,” Kendall says. “I know how crucial stable housing is. No one should have to uproot their life with two weeks notice. We need stronger tenant protections and accountability for landlords who prioritize profit over people.” 

Kendall’s asperity isn’t directed at the property management agency that gave him the boot as much as at the system that allows this kind of thing to happen. 

Rent hikes are happening all over the place, he knows, as the scarcity of housing continues and as corporate entities buy more properties. It’s all about the market rate, and about hundreds of other nebulous concepts that the average tenant knows little about. 

And this, frankly, is the part of Kendall’s story — the it-could-happen-to-anybody-at-any-time part — that gives me the willies. Because what happened to him is hardly rare. 

A few months back, I wrote about a 67-year-old grandmother named Peggy who was living in an Auburn park where she slept on the ground and kept all of her worldly possessions in a shopping cart. 

The lady’s landlord had doubled her rent and there was just no way the lady could manage that with her Social Security checks alone. 

Peggy couldn’t pay the rent, so out the door she went. 

It used to be that when I talked to homeless people on the street, I’d keep getting versions of the same old story. These were men and women who were chased onto the streets by drug addiction. Alcoholism. Mental illness. 

The bulk of homeless people still have those stories, but how long will it be before we find men and women sleeping in parking garages simply because some faceless corporation jacked their rent up and, with no safety net of any kind in place, their only choice was to get used to sleeping on the ground and living out of a shopping cart? 

To me there has GOT to be some compromise that protects both the tenant and the landlord while preventing people from getting shooed out onto the street like stray cats. 

I wish I had a sharper mind for business so I could offer up a few potential solutions to this unnerving quagmire we find ourselves in. 

And it IS a quagmire, because for every story you hear about wicked landlords, there’s another about a wicked tenant to serve as a counterbalance.  

A year ago, I wrote a harrowing story about a 75-year-old lady who just could not budge a messy, destructive tenant from the house she owned in Minot. 

The tenant in this story refused to pay rent, destroyed the home’s septic system, demolished a fireplace, let her two cats and two dogs do their business all over the house and generally transformed the once-quaint home into an unlivable hellscape. 

It took months for that landlady to get her property back and by then she was half crazed with anger and frustration, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in the hole. 

The sordid saga of the frustrated landlady and the unmoving tenant was every bit as frustrating as Kendall’s story, just in the opposite direction. 

Which is why any kind of middle ground on this matter remains so slippery. 

As for Kendall, he isn’t out to stick it to landlords everywhere; he just has a problem with 100% rent hikes and two-week notices for those who can’t manage those rates. 

In a perfect world, while corporate landlords are calculating property size, market rates and all those facts and figures that go into setting rents, they might add one more thing to their data set:

Namely, human decency.