The destitute couple with three young children, ages three, two, and 10 months, and the gregarious 58-year-old woman known as “Auntie Michelle” to motel occupants, represent the latest tragedy of the little-known world of alternative homeless shelters — dilapidated motels.
The Knights Inn fire in Broome County, NY occurred at the end of June with six fatalities. Besides the loss of lives, dozens of kids and parents have been displaced, again, with their meager belongings destroyed in this disaster. The overburdened, understaffed county social services system that spent $9.4 million last year to “house” families in hotels, according to SpectrumNews, had to scramble to relocate the families and find emergency provisions to help them through this crisis.
Fires happen in motels and hotels, typically 3,500+ a year according to my Google/AI search. Top causes: cooking, electrical malfunctions, smoking, and heaters. An average of 15 people a year die in those fires. No mention of how many of these fires occur in places where families and individuals get placed because of homelessness, or what happens when fires again displace them. Besides fires, systemic dysfunction also cause families to lose their fragile motel arrangements, as these families in Sacramento recently discovered.
21st Century homeless shelters
This Binghamton area motel was a standard go-to for accommodating homeless families and individuals.
“The Broome County Department of Social Services placed over 200 households at the Knights Inn from April 2023 to March 2024…[and] paid the Knights Inn $750,000 for emergency shelter despite the motel getting written up in every inspection for two and a half years.” (NY Focus)
Broome County, one of New York’s poorest, has experienced a significant increase in homelessness over the past 10 years, and they lack resources to do anything but temporarily stick people in area motels.
Beyond NYC’s urban shelter network, motels serve as a substitute for shelters, with sparse supportive services. It’s rare to hear about governments forking over money for motels to shelter homeless folks.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Brian Goldstone, Pulitzer-winning author of There Is No Place for Us, takes readers into the harrowing world of five homeless families who turned to Atlanta area extended-stay motels on their own dime which technically renders them not homeless, disqualifying them for what little homelessness assistance exists. Anyone who thinks these arrangements don’t qualify as homeless needs to spend time sitting in the parking lots observing the nefarious activities families have to navigate.
Besides the unsavory environment, the pressure of raising enough money to keep the roof over your family’s head creates a level of immeasurable stress for the adults. Other aspects of “motel living” such as feeding your family, finding privacy, lack of space to keep things orderly, and coping with unsavory “neighbors,” takes the comfort out of the concept of “just like home” lifestyle.
Poverty, the lack of affordable housing, and domestic abuse guarantee the flow of families to these non-shelter shelters. Not just Broome County; family homelessness a nationwide crisis, albeit ignored and mostly invisible, and it’s bound to worsen.
Having spent 20 years meeting with homeless families in motels and other make-shift locations across the country, I heard their common tales of woe about difficulties of not having a place to live. This film I made in New Mexico contains the litany of struggles families typically endure, often with little to no help.
Other than independent efforts like mine, family homelessness gets sparse news coverage. A recent study by NYC-based Institute of Children, Poverty & Homelessness examined NYC’s news media coverage of family homelessness and came up with crickets.
“This invisibility contributes to missing the structural factors that drive family homelessness. Considering their impact on family homelessness, it is alarming that Domestic Violence and Overcrowding received so little attention.” — (ICPH)
The fact that most of the families are headed by single mothers might factor into the equation.
To quantify this issue, according to national statistics compiled by SchoolHouse Connection, of the 1.5 million students identified as experiencing homelessness in public schools:
- 11% stay in shelters
- 9% in motels
- 5% are unsheltered
- the rest, 75%, doubled up with others.
The statistics don’t include families with infants, toddlers, or youth not in school, or students not identified as homeless, easily doubling the 1.5 million count.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Alternatives to No-tell motels
Not all motels end up being places of last resort. A few communities have seen stellar efforts by local shelter programs to establish more suitable arrangements for families, often purchasing and revamping motels, then staffing them with counselors and others to meet the various needs of families.
I’ve seen what a difference for both kids and adults when a respected facility offers quality support services and decent living spaces. The environment is conducive to recovering from various trauma experiences. Activities, nutrition, and safety reflect the value of families. Adults can find space and guidance to process their lives. Childcare and places for kids to be kids create opportunities for kids to regroup.
Here’s a short list of these facilities I’ve visited:
- UMOM, Phoenix, AZ
- Interim Housing Center, Downers Grove, IL
- Family Gateway, Dallas, TX
- HomeFront Family Campus, Ewing, NJ
Essential ingredients of these and other well-run family shelters include:
- adequate staffing trained in trauma-informed care,
- flexibility to allow for individual family circumstances when enforcing shelter rules,
- reasonable time frames for length of stay limits,
- access to community resources and activities to enrich families’ lives,
- and respect shown for each person despite flaws and foibles.
As a former shelter director (old fashioned emergency overnight), I give high praise to any organization, and hopefully their community, that makes it possible to operate a higher-end shelter program like I’ve mentioned. It takes an extraordinary amount of planning, fundraising, community support building, and much more to bring about and maintain these programs. It’s often thankless, grueling, and frustrating when the forces against you are the elected officials who don’t have a clue about family homelessness but want to make things much more difficult than necessary.
Look upstream
From all I’ve experienced, witnessed, studied, and learned about in countless ways, I’d posit that family homelessness — the myriad causes and feasible solutions — is made much worse because most of the families are female-headed, and parents and their kids are somehow deemed less important.
This article in The Reporters Inc. explores my latest book on family homelessness, Making Bad a Little Better — The Least We Can Do to Ease Family Homelessness.
If community leaders and elected officials truly were concerned about ending homelessness, they’d look upstream at these families and realize that, left to survive without support, these kids may very well be tomorrow’s homeless adults on our streets. We can, and must, do better!
Information about my books, and my videos.
For more stories about homelessness, poverty, affordable housing, social justice, public policy, and building stronger communities, follow Fourth Wave. Also check out our Livestreams and sign up for our Newsletter. Let’s grow the community! Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other targeted groups? Submit to the Wave!
