A Maine occupant who does not own the unit cannot join the association's foreclosure
A Maine occupant who does not own the unit cannot join the association's foreclosure
2026-09-12 · Maine · Courts
What happened. On 2 April 2026 the Law Court decided Oak Hill Condominiums v. Marchetti, 2026 ME 31, Docket Sag-25-369, and drew a line Maine associations had not had drawn before: an occupant who does not own the unit cannot make herself a party to the association's foreclosure, even where she has her own federal and state housing-discrimination claims arising from the same facts.1
The facts
Diane Marchetti owns a unit at Oak Hill Condominiums. Her daughter, Caroline Thibeault, occupies it; Thibeault's son has a disability. In January 2025 the association sued to foreclose for unpaid common charges, assessments and rule-violation fines — the fines alleged against Thibeault's commercial use of the unit.
Marchetti, as owner, answered and asserted failure-to-accommodate defences under the ADA and the Maine Human Rights Act. Thibeault then moved to intervene in her own right under M.R. Civ. P. 24(a)(2) and, in the alternative, permissively under 24(b), asserting Fair Housing Act and MHRA claims of her own.
What the Law Court held on intervention as of right
The panel — Mead, Connors, Lawrence and Douglas, JJ., and Hjelm, A.R.J., with Lawrence, J., writing — was unanimous. The interest Rule 24(a)(2) protects, in a foreclosure, is ownership:
“the interest at stake is one of ownership, an interest only Marchetti has as the sole owner of the condominium unit… This makes Thibeault's interest purely possessory as an occupant… Thibeault's argument that her statutory and federal civil rights are the interests at stake is unpersuasive because the underlying foreclosure action puts the ownership rights of the unit at stake, not her civil rights or rights to housing.”
The court added a second, independent ground: Thibeault's interests were already adequately represented by Marchetti, who had raised accommodation defences herself.
And on permissive intervention
Rule 24(b) failed on efficiency rather than standing:
“joining Thibeault as a party would unduly delay the foreclosure action… Effectively, the efforts contemplated by Thibeault seem to be duplicative of the measures already advanced by Marchetti.”
Note what that reasoning depends on. The duplication finding rests on the owner having actually raised the accommodation defence. An occupant's motion in a case where the owner defaulted, or defended on the arrears alone, would present a different record.
What it changes for boards and managers
The foreclosure docket stays a two-party proceeding. An association pursuing 33 M.R.S. § 1603-116(a) foreclosure, which Maine runs through the civil foreclosure machinery at 14 M.R.S. § 6321, is not obliged to absorb a household member as a party. That matters for cost and for timetable; the court named delay as the reason.
It does not make the discrimination claim go away. The court was careful that Thibeault remains free to pursue a Maine Human Rights Commission complaint, and to raise an accommodation defence in any later eviction proceeding. Keeping a claim off one docket moves it; it does not extinguish it, and an association that treats the ruling as a win on the merits has misread it.
The fines in this case were aimed at the occupant's conduct. The alleged commercial use was Thibeault's, while the fines and the foreclosure ran against Marchetti as owner. That is how Maine's Condominium Act is built — the owner answers for the unit — but it means the person whose conduct is at issue may be the one person the court will not hear. The occupant's position will arrive as the owner's defence rather than as a separate appearance, and accommodation requests from occupants will be litigated in that same form, so the record of them carries as much weight as the record of those from owners.
Read with its companion case
Six weeks later, in Tidewater Loft Condominium Ass'n v. Moskal-Kanz, 2026 ME 46, the Law Court vacated a foreclosure judgment in its entirety because the trial court refused to let the owner put evidence behind exactly that kind of accommodation counterclaim. Tidewater cites Oak Hill for the related point that such affirmative defences underpin a claim against the association for housing discrimination.
Together they set a clear allocation: the owner's accommodation defence must be tried, and the non-owning occupant's independent claim belongs before the Human Rights Commission or in a later possessory action — not as an intervention in the assessment foreclosure.
What to watch next
Maine has no intermediate appellate court, so the next word on any of this comes from the Law Court directly. Two questions are open on the published record: whether an occupant can intervene where the owner has not raised an accommodation defence, and what a reasonable accommodation actually requires of a Maine association — the merits question Tidewater sent back without deciding. Nothing here states how either comes out.
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