BANGOR – Moving boxes have been stacked up inside Rose Hahn’s Curve Street apartment for more than a month.

“I’m so damn tired of it,” a discouraged Hahn said this week, after the latest of several unsuccessful attempts to find a large enough apartment for her and her family before crews raze her building – one of nine purchased by the city and targeted for demolition.

“Trouble is you get one [landlord] that don’t want pets, you get one that don’t want kids, and you get one that don’t want smokers, and you get some that don’t want any,” Hahn said. “Three strikes and you’re out, they say.”

Hahn, who smokes, has one dog, three cats and four grandchildren living in her building, concedes that she has some demographic factors working against her.

But the 69-year-old woman and her close-knit family are not the only people having trouble finding an apartment in and around the city, where the rental vacancy rate has dropped from 7.5 percent to 4.2 percent in the past decade, according to U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 statistics.

Housing experts generally prefer a vacancy rate between 5 percent and 7 percent, a number believed to strike a healthy balance between availability and demand.

Bangor’s vacancy rate, coupled with monthly rents for a two-bedroom apartment in the city rising 5 percent in four years to an average of $512, is causing the city to feel the housing crunch already gripping many southern Maine cities, according to Maine State Housing Authority officials.

“With those kind of increases, [Bangor’s] looking at an ever tightening market,” MSHA Director Michael Finnegan said, citing Portland’s 3.6 percent vacancy rate. “For each $50 or $100 rents go up, it does much more to disenfranchise people and limit opportunities, … especially for low- or moderate-income citizens.”

Hahn, herself, is on a limited income and like most, she looks in the newspaper for empty apartments. As recently as four years ago, she would have had her pick.

Classified advertisements, generally considered an accurate reflection of the rental market by housing officials, also suggest a dwindling supply of apartments from which to choose. In the Monday, Aug. 29, 1997, edition of the Bangor Daily News, there were 87 listings for apartments within the city limits.

The same date this year, there were 27 – only four of which had three bedrooms or more and all of which disallowed pets or smokers.

Those numbers certainly don’t bode well for Hahn, who said she’s becoming increasingly worried that she won’t be able to find a place before school starts for three of her grandchildren – the oldest of which is set to start at Bangor High next week.

Hahn has lived in her upstairs apartment on Curve Street for 11 years, during which time she’s seen the houses on the littered, one-way street slowly crumble from age and neglect. Like city police, she’s also seen her fair share of drunken antics on the street that subsequently developed a rough reputation – one that hasn’t helped Hahn find another apartment, she said.

“You put down Curve Street on the application and the apartment’s suddenly filled,” she said.

But like her neighbors, most of whom have already moved with financial help from the city, Hahn has no choice but to pack her bags.

This summer, the city paid $150,000 for nine of the buildings, which date back to the late 1800s and once housed workers at Morse and Co., a nearby sawmill that closed in 1948. City officials say they have no immediate plans for the properties other than the demolition of the homes, which contain about a dozen low-rent apartments.

In one of those downstairs apartments, Hahn’s son, Clifford Berry, and daughter-in-law, Penny Berry, live with their four children. Because the Berry’s apartment is so small, Hahn said, two of the older kids sleep upstairs in her apartment, the living room of which has been transformed into a bedroom to accommodate the pair.

Next door, Hahn’s daughter, Terry Nicholson, lives with four of her children, two of whom are disabled and use walkers to climb the three ramshackle steps to their building’s front door.

Perhaps a bit more fortunate than her neighbors, Nicholson recently caught a break, finding a three-bedroom apartment in Glenburn for $650 a month. Because she receives federal housing assistance, however, inspectors must certify the home as meeting certain living standards before Nicholson and her family can move.

Hahn and her extended family are atypical, considering the statewide trend toward smaller households, which shrank from 2.2 to 2 people per apartment in the past decade, according to the 2000 census.

In Bangor, like the state’s other major cities, the drop is more significant, with the average rental household dropping from 2.11 people to 1.85 since 1990.

Fewer people needing roommates to pay the rent in the generally healthy economy translates into fewer available apartments, said T.J. Martzial, Bangor’s housing program manager.

In the past decade in Bangor, the city has purchased dozens of mostly dilapidated buildings, which at one time contained about 55 low-income apartments.

In 1995, the city demolished 13 west side buildings containing 26 apartments to make room for Shaw’s Supermarket. This month, the City Council voted to demolish the last three buildings at Union Place, a short, dead-end street that once contained six buildings with 15 apartments.

While Lewiston officials have faced recent criticism for demolishing too many run-down apartment buildings in that city’s downtown, Bangor points to recent renovations of older downtown buildings here to help offset the loss of affordable apartments.

“We’re still way ahead of the game,” Martzial said, also citing the city’s recent effort to place low-income families in their own homes on Randolph Drive. “But being the housing guy, of course I’d like to see more.”

Although the 4.2 percent vacancy rate is cause for concern by itself, according to Martzial, he, like other housing officials, believes the true number to be as low as 2 percent based largely on anecdotal evidence from local landlords.

“In the past two years, I haven’t had an apartment empty for more than two weeks,” said John Karnes, who owns about 25 apartments in the city. “And that’s only because I could be choosy about who I rented to.”

Karnes, 32, is currently renovating a historic building on Park Street, his eighth building in as many years as a landlord. The first day he placed an ad in the newspaper for one of the seven (now occupied) apartments there, there were 25 messages on his machine.

And 25 more the next day – a far cry from just four years ago, he said.

“Back then, it was if you could find somebody with the first month’s rent and half a security deposit, you’d give them the apartment,” Karnes said. “Not anymore.”