‘Rats and bedbugs and roaches and mold’: Dismal conditions found at some hotels sheltering homeless families and migrants

The Globe requested all state inspections of hotels used as shelters as part of an in-depth review of the Healey administration’s response to the homeless and migrant crisis.

Most of the 128 hotels were rented sight-unseen by inspectors from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, the lead agency overseeing the Emergency Assistance program that provides shelter to homeless families. The program’s cost to taxpayers ballooned to nearly $1 billion this fiscal year, triple the budgeted amount.

Hotels typically are inspected annually by the local building department, as required by state law. Local boards of health are responsible for making sure they maintain minimum standards of fitness for human habitation under the state sanitary code.

But the extraordinary housing crisis forced the state into the hotel business. With a shelter system at capacity and a right-to-shelter law that requires the state to find space for homeless families, officials rented rooms in scores of private hotels.

Their own contracts with hotel operators and social service providers say that state inspectors will “regularly” inspect all units and common areas to confirm compliance with sanitary codes and ensure that no conditions would “endanger the health and safety” of the families. Each room is expected to meet an acceptable standard before being occupied. The contracts also give the state the power to deny payments to contractors whose hotels are in the worst condition until they fix deficiencies.

The Globe requested information on any contractors penalized for deficiencies from the state housing agency. It provided none.

Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for the housing agency, said the state works with property owners to resolve problems, but relies on local government officials’ oversight of hotels.

“To meet the unprecedented demand for shelter, the state is required by law to use hotels to prevent families with children and pregnant women from being left with no place to stay,” he said. “These hotels are private businesses that are licensed and inspected by local governments. Although the state is not the authority that inspects and licenses these hotels, we do reserve the right to visit and examine hotel rooms in response to complaints from families in our shelter system.”

Whether the hotels are being regularly inspected by authorities is almost impossible to discern, because the state redacted the addresses of the shelters in the inspection reports provided to the Globe. In some cases, even the photos attached to inspections were blacked out due to privacy concerns.

In the case of the Brighton motel, now known as Catholic Charities Inn, neither the city nor the state had done an inspection last summer before homeless families were moved in, records show.

Dot Joyce, a spokesperson for Catholic Charities, defended the rushed efforts to accommodate homeless families before cold weather arrived.

“Instead of having children and families sleeping in the street during the wintertime, everybody moved quickly to get them into shelter,” she said.

The Globe obtained the state’s inspection reports through a public records request. Connor could not point to any reports completed before homeless families moved in.

The inspections showed 12 shelters had serious potential health and safety violations, such as mold or vermin infestations, or had rooms with exposed wiring or blocked exits that could be life-threatening. In five inspections, the problems were troubling enough — such as missing smoke detectors, an unconnected toilet, inoperable heating systems — that the state imposed a deadline for repairs, usually 24 hours.

Even at the three hotels where inspectors didn’t find violations, they discovered torn window screens, dusty vents and filters, and signs of roach activity. The state continues to use all but two of the inspected hotels as shelters.

At one large hotel shelter — whose location could not be determined because of the state’s redactions — three state inspectors went room to room taking photos. They chronicled nearly 140 potential health and safety violations, most related to mold and mildew, including soft floors in some rooms, suggesting water damage.

In more than 20 rooms, inspectors reported mice, roach, or fruit fly infestations. Under a photo of a room with a crib next to a bed, the caption reads, “fruit flies infestation client has seen mice.”

One inspector noted in the report that the rodents were coming in from under wall air-conditioning units and added that it was a “common complaint on the 2nd floor.”

The state relocated four families from their rooms as a result of that inspection, Connor said.

It is unclear what, if anything, the state required the hotel owner to do to address the problems in the other rooms.

Connor declined to explain why only certain hotels have been inspected, but acknowledged that inspections are often triggered by complaints. He also declined to say how many complaints would trigger an inspection.

The agency has declined the Globe’s requests for the complaints it receives on a hot line, instead providing only the number of complaints in recent months.

Kimrâh Minuty, who is Haitian American and was born in Massachusetts, described a nine-month-long process of trying to convince providers that the Catholic Charities Inn was full of mold. She’d just had brain surgery when she and her daughter moved in last summer; both are sensitive to mold and began having reactions, she said.

Now she thinks families should not have moved there in the first place.

“In certain ways, I’m physically worse off than I was going in,” said Minuty, whose asthma and health conditions were worsened by her stay, and who suffered a collapsed lung in December. “That place had rats and bedbugs and roaches and mold. I could see you having one or the other. But you’ve got all four.”

The state is paying $1.9 million this year for the use of the rooms at the motel, which is owned by JHM River LLC, affiliated with Jamsan Management. The Lexington-based firm also operates hotels that have been used as shelters in Hudson and Concord. A company executive, Deepak Ninan, did not return messages from the Globe.

Catholic Charities stressed that it did not own the motel, or even choose the location, but merely contracted with the state to provide social services to families at an area shelter.

The motel’s certificate of inspection from the city expired in July 2023, just a few weeks after it opened as a shelter, city records show. It has not been inspected for safety by the Boston Inspectional Services Department since June 2022, city records show.

Minuty filed a complaint with the Boston Public Health Commission, prompting an inspector to visit in August and declare her room a health hazard, according to a redacted complaint obtained through a city public records request that Minuty identified as her own.

She was moved to another room. But that one also had mold.

A state inspector who finally visited in November found mold in at least 10 rooms, according to the report. Of the 45 hotel rooms, only seven had no issues, the inspection report shows. Thirty-one rooms logged 57 problems the inspector said required immediate attention, including nine of the rooms with mold; two rooms and a playroom with inoperable smoke detectors; one room with an odor of urine; and two with roaches.

Joyce provided an email that suggested many of the repairs were fixed quickly. However, the listed repairs failed to address at least four rooms with mold, others with wet walls and stains around air conditioning units, and any roof repairs.

By the time she left for stable housing in March, Minuty was living in her third room with mold and had created a petition from about 30 families complaining about conditions.

Soon after, the state released the results of an air quality test that determined there was still mold in at least 24 rooms that would be closed for remediation.

Still, Connor — whose agency had identified 10 moldy rooms back in November — said in March that the state took action “as soon as we were made aware of mold at this site.”

Initially, Catholic Charities relocated the 24 families in the affected rooms to other buildings, including another hotel owned by JHM in Woburn. The state planned to keep the other 23 families in the building throughout the remediation project, but the city intervened.

The Boston Public Health Commission in April issued another violation and ordered the building cleared entirely while it was cleaned. Otherwise, anyone with asthma or a compromised respiratory system would have been at risk for their condition worsening by airborne mold spores agitated by remediation, said Leon Bethune, director of the commission’s community initiatives bureau.

The contracts for both JHM River and Catholic Charities require compliance with all local, state, and federal laws, including the State Sanitary Code.

Many of the hotels that the state tapped for shelters are older buildings and may not have been fully occupied before the current crisis.

They are far from ideal for housing families for months at a time, but the state had little choice, said Susan Gentili, chief executive officer of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, a nonprofit that works with homeless families.

”There’s not a lot of options when there’s an influx of families,” Gentili said. “It’s been an incredibly challenging time.”

The council provides case management services at four hotels in metro Boston suburbs and Gentili said her staff and families have complained to the state about problems at some of the sites. The council oversees one of the hotels that the state inspected in November, and the agency’s report flagged problems such as damaged or missing sprinkler components, mold in some rooms, and roach activity.

Gentili said she believes all the problems have been fixed. She did not know if state officials came back to ensure that the hotel owner made all the improvements.

Usually, the state finds safe shelters for families, but this was a rapid ramp-up for the housing agency, she said.

“I don’t think they were able to follow all their ideals,” she said.

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com. Follow her @StephanieEbbert. Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her @fernandesglobe.