Tenant Bobby Lopez shows Providence inspectors the basement of the two-family house on Heath Street where she lives with her children. For a time, tenants there were without running water.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — Inside a neglected double-decker on Heath Street, in the city’s Silver Lake section, three families with young children endure the demands of daily life for weeks with no running water.

They try to keep the problem quiet, but a neighbor calls the city to complain.

One January morning, housing inspector Ana Quezada climbs the narrow staircase to the second-floor apartment and knocks.

Inside, a woman tries to quiet her three toddlers as Quezada looks around. The kitchen is warm, the inspector notes, so they have heat. Then she notices office-size Poland Spring jugs next to the refrigerator.

“You guys have no water?”

Quezada tries the kitchen faucet. Nothing.

In neighborhoods throughout Providence, the housing market bust and rising unemployment have left a growing population of tenants living in misery: crowded into apartments with broken windows, leaking pipes, crumbling ceilings, jury-rigged electrical wiring –– and, at times, no heat or running water.

Tenants who complain may get the problems fixed –– or they may be ordered to move out.

“People are desperate and they’re doing dangerous things,” said Sheila M. Barrett, the new director of the city’s Department of Inspection and Standards. “They come in looking for help and we tell them: You have to move. They’re not happy about it, but it’s not safe.”

The extent of the problem is not known. The inspections department has no consistent computer record-keeping, although it plans to computerize the records soon. But the department’s tally of minimum housing code violations last year was up 25 percent from 2006.

Paper files stored in battered metal filing cabinets tell stories of hundreds of properties riddled with unresolved code violations:

“Windows don’t open.”

“No key to front door.”

“Repair roof (leaking).”

“Restore heating equipment to proper working order.”

“Rats.”

Landlords must provide water, heat and electricity to comply with the city’s minimum housing codes. If not, the city can condemn the property and give the occupants 10 days to move out.

But if a tenant refuses to let a housing inspector into the house, the inspector has to get a court order just to conduct the inspection. And it can take months, or even years, before the violations get corrected. And those are just the violations the city knows about.

The woman on Heath Street who had no water told the housing inspector that the water was shut off after the man who used to collect the rent stopped coming by. One of the tenants called the city water department and was told they would have to pay $750 for unpaid fees to get the water turned back on. A community organizer managed to negotiate the payment down to $300. But the tenants still had not paid the bill.

“We’re saving money too, to move,” the woman said. “But for now …”

Quezada, the inspector, listened, patiently. Then, she laid down the law.

“If you don’t have water,” she warned, “we have to condemn the building.”

Rental housing is generally the hardest hit during an economic downturn, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “People who lose their jobs or whose hours are cut back, he said, have a harder time paying their rent — which, in turn, means landlords have less money for repairs.”

In Providence, landlords who do not live in their rental houses are prohibited from getting low-cost repair loans through city or state agencies under a housing plan the city adopted a decade or more ago to promote owner-occupied housing. It’s consistent with a basic tenet of the nation’s housing policy that home ownership improves upward mobility and stabilizes neighborhoods.

“We have tailored our programs to home ownership,” said Thomas E. Deller, the city’s director of planning and development. “We’re not into funding lots of absentee landlords…who have tended to be the problem in our neighborhoods.”

City and community groups don’t want to reward absentee owners by giving them access to credit at a discount, said Ray Neirinkx, at the Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission’s office of home ownership. But with so many properties owned by absentee landlords, he said, that begs the question: “Are we really looking to improve the place? Is it a place-based approach to improve the quality of the home? Or, is it driven by ownership?”

Meanwhile, investors seeking to cash in on falling house prices snatch up multifamily houses at bargain prices, and then post “For Rent” signs.

In the city’s Olneyville neighborhood, a two-family house on Kossuth Street which in 2006 sold for $345,000 was foreclosed just over a year later, only to be bought by an investor last October for $15,000, according to Providence Journal real-estate listings.

Andrea Harris had just been laid off from her job at an after-school program last October and was searching for a cheaper rental when she saw an apartment in the house on Kossuth Street listed for $550 per month.

The house needed a lot of work, Harris recalled, but the landlord had workers who were fixing it up, and he assured her it would be ready by the time she moved in. But shortly after she moved into the second-floor apartment with her five children last November, the gas was shut off. “We had no heat,” she said.

Then the electricity went out.

“When I was helping the kids with homework,” Harris said, “I opened the curtains for light.”

It got so cold that shortly before Christmas she sent her older children to stay with a cousin and she took the younger ones with her to her sister’s house.

Downstairs, Maria Serrer and her children also had no heat and they couldn’t flush their toilet. Serrer complained to the landlord — and then to the city.

“He said, just give him time. Give him time,’” recalled Serrer.

In response to the complaint, Quezada, the housing inspector, inspected the first-floor apartment on Jan. 7 and cited the company that bought the house, Megazone Realty, LLC, for 11 housing code violations. She ordered the owner to “restore heat to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.”

Thirteen days later, Quezada returned for a follow-up inspection and reported that the two most serious violations –– the lack of heat and broken toilet –– had been corrected.

Teofilo Regus, manager of Megazone Realty, said that he had the old electric meters removed in preparation for installing new ones. The problems in the second-floor apartment, he said, also have been fixed. And he said he’s in the process of evicting the first-floor tenant for nonpayment of rent

“These houses were built like 1930 something. There’s always gonna be an issue with the properties. They’re not perfect,” Regus said. “If they want to live in a Five Star resort they can move into a Westin or something. This is Providence. Olneyville … This is low-income housing. But it’s livable

One morning last this week, Quezada returned to the double-decker on Heath Street — where the apartment had no water — to find out if the tenants had paid the $300 to get their water turned back on. Building inspector William Packard also came along to check out an illegal third-floor attic apartment where a couple and their young children were living.

The driveway was covered in snow and ice; discarded air conditioners leaned next to overflowing garbage cans.

The woman from the second-floor was strapping one of her children into her van’s car seat. Bobby Lopez is 26 and lives with her fiancé and her three children. The man she knew as “Nelson Cruz” who used to come by every month to collect the rent had not been by since last summer. She later learned that he’d died.

Lopez let the inspector into her apartment to show her that the water was back on. Then she led the inspector into a dark, filthy basement. A water heater was leaking onto the cement floor. An extension cord was strung along the ceiling for light. Packard looked at the uncovered electrical box, then at the three gas meters. The house had three apartments but it was only zoned for two.

The building inspector climbed the stairs to the third floor to the attic apartment, but it was padlocked shut. Nobody answered.

The next day, he returned to the house and saw the white van parked in the driveway, but nobody answered the front door. He came back and posted a violation notice on the door.

Less than six miles away, in a neighborhood of neat ranch houses in Pawtucket, the owner of the house on Heath Street had just returned three days earlier from a five-month trip to his native Colombia.

Gil Robinson, a machine operator at a factory in Smithfield, said he heard that the man who had been collecting the rent and paying his mortgage for the property on Heath Street had died of a heart attack.

Robinson said that he had no idea that the water had been shut off because the bill wasn’t paid. If he had known, he would have taken care of it, he said.

Violation notices sent to Robinson at the Heath Street house were returned to the inspections department unopened. “Why they not send it to me here?” said Robinson, seated on his living room couch. “Because I don’t want people to live like that.”

larditi@projo.com