Sandi MacDonald won’t forget the afternoon last fall when she and her 9-year-old son stood in the doorway of a low-budget motel in Bangor and saw the room they were going to have to call home.

“I knew it wouldn’t be much, but my heart just fell when the chamber maid opened that door. My son’s eyes immediately welled up. There were holes in the walls and mold all over the bathroom. It was a tough moment,” the 32-year-old mother of three said.

But after the family spent a month pursuing every affordable apartment advertised, this is where they ended up.

A scummy motel room had become the family’s only answer for affordable housing in Bangor.

Just last month, a front-page story in the Bangor Daily News boasted of Bangor’s “building boom” with more than 250 new homes expected to pop up in the next six years in pleasant subdivisions with names like “Rolling Meadows.”

All good for the city coffers and certainly for area homebuilders, but with price tags ranging from $120,000 to $300,000, not much good to the city’s population looking for truly affordable housing.

“The concern we have right now regarding affordable housing in this area is more acute than it’s ever been,” Bangor’s Housing Director T.J. Martzial confirmed on Thursday.

With apartment vacancy rates estimated at only about 2 percent, low-income residents are finding themselves on endless waiting lists for housing. Shelters, motels and sometimes automobiles are becoming home while they wait.

The problem has become so severe that federal and state housing vouchers, which are more precious than gold to those in need, are being returned to the agencies handing them out.

“What’s happening now is that we’ve actually got people returning the vouchers because they can’t find a place to live. It’s something we’ve never experienced before,” Martzial said.

The city is working with developers to build new affordable housing units. Sixteen new subsidized apartments are going up on the Griffin Road, and 32 more units have been proposed at the former Naval Reserve Center on Essex Street.

It’s a start, but not enough, and with both land for such apartments and federal subsidies to build them in short supply, Martzial doesn’t see the situation improving anytime soon.

Just a year ago Sandi MacDonald stood in the doorway of that motel room with her son. Back in the privacy of the car that day, her son broke down into heaving sobs and begged his mother not to make him live there.

She drove away and did not look back.

The family finally found their home at the Econo Lodge on the Odlin Road and lived there for five months.

“It had only one bed, a small table, two chairs, a tiny refrigerator and a microwave,” MacDonald recalled this week. “But it was clean, and the staff there were wonderful. They even let us use the lobby for my daughter’s fourth birthday party.”

Last March, the family finally received a Shelter Plus voucher through Community Health and

Counseling and was able to snag a sunny and newly renovated apartment on Essex Street.

Now MacDonald sits in her sun-drenched living room and proudly shows off the kids’ bedrooms. The apartment is decked out in Halloween decor, and MacDonald is thrilled to be able to cook for her kids on a real stove.

It looks and smells like home.

“The sad part is that there are so many families just like mine out there right now all through this city. It’s amazing to me that in this day and age that it’s so easy to end up homeless. You can have $500 or $600 a month available for rent, but you still can’t find a home.

“People need places to live. People need homes in order to raise their children. It’s that simple,” she said.

True enough.

No meadows, rolling or otherwise, required.