MELISSA LYTTLE
1
A Motel Is Not a Home
MELISSA WARREN IS carefully folding clothes on a bed in the motel room occupied by her family and their dog. One of two double beds in the 320-square-foot space, it is the only surface not heaped high with piles of packaged food and sundry belongings. As we talk, Brianna, one of her twin girls, skips into the room from the improvised school bus stop on the busy strip outside the motel. Reflecting on her family’s plight, Melissa sums up their descent into motel living: “We went from the frying pan into the fire, and we’re still in it.”
Ten years before, just as their children were learning to walk, Melissa and her husband, Randy, secured a mortgage on a freshly built ranch home in Poinciana. Originally developed as a retirement community forty miles south of Orlando, the town got caught up in the frenzy of the mid-2000s housing boom. “We were suckered in by the teaser rate on the loan.” She smiles wanly as she explains. “Everyone else had one, so we didn’t worry too much about it.” But after two years, the interest rate shot up, well beyond their reach. Soon, they were among the casualties of the foreclosure storm that barreled through the region in 2010. “It felt real good to be in our own place, a home sweet home and all of that, but it didn’t last long, and then the bank just threw us out on the street.”
After eighteen months doubling up with friends who owned a farm nearby, the Warrens moved into a rundown motel west of Kissimmee where I occasionally stayed. “It’s been almost four years now,” Melissa says, “and I can’t see a way out of here. I don’t want to think of us as homeless, but I suppose we are.” She works part-time at Disney World, as do many of her motel-dwelling neighbors on the Route 192 corridor. But that does not provide much beyond the sprinkling of pixie dust bestowed by the name. “I can get a few shifts a week at the Animal Kingdom, but they make sure I don’t get enough to qualify for benefits,” she reports. “Disney is a company that gives its workers advice about how to apply for food stamps, so that has to tell you something.” Unlike many of her fellow workers, Melissa is unsentimental about her employer. She is proud she is not one of “those Disney junkies,” as she puts it, who stretch out a childhood fantasy by working in the theme parks. “They will do almost anything to get a job there, and I know some of them who end up sleeping in vans in the parking lots.”
Melissa and her husband, a roofer who finds day labor whenever he can, are in a bind that is all too familiar to America’s swelling population of motel dwellers. “We just can’t raise the cash to cover first and last month’s rent on an apartment, but that’s not enough anyway,” she explains. “Because obviously we have bad credit, so we’re also talking about an additional two or three months’ security.” In spite of the odds stacked against them, “Randy is the optimist in this household,” Melissa chuckles. “He says that construction is picking up.” He was right about that: it was early 2017, and Sunbelt subdivisions were starting to sprout again. But even though rents and home prices were steadily rising, wages remained stagnant. And when I visited the motel again a month later, the Warrens were gone. “One of them got badly sick,” reported the motel manager. A neighbor told me they had gone back to their friends’ farm. Some folks manage to move up when they leave the motels; others, like the Warrens, are not so lucky. Their cramped room, with a hot plate and a mini-fridge for a kitchen, may have been the best hope for these former homeowners.
FROM TRAVELER’S RESPITE TO LAST RESORT
Motels (and motor courts, their predecessors) have been around for more than a hundred years, ever since they first sprouted along two-lane roads and numbered highways built to serve travelers at the wheel of the earliest automobiles. In the 1910s, the nation’s first long-distance tourist routes were planned and created: the Lincoln Highway, running from New York City to San Francisco; the National Old Trails Road, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, incorporating Route 66; the Dixie Overland Highway, from Savannah to San Diego; Route 101 on the West Coast, running from northern Washington state down to Los Angeles; Route 1 on the East Coast, running all the way from Maine to Key West; the CanAm Highway, from El Paso to Saskatchewan; and the Dixie Highways, which ran along eastern and western routes from Chicago to Miami. Until the 1970s, when many of these storied roads were bypassed by interstate highways, budget motels with exterior corridors were the primary accommodations for motorists passing through or seeking overnight lodgings near tourist destinations. In the last few decades, most of those properties not physically stranded by freeways have been stylistically superseded by interior-corridor budget chain hotels.
Aside from handling the travel business, motels have always offered a housing option for people priced out of the market, in transition between domiciles and livelihoods, or simply down on their luck. But with the unforgiving increase in residential rents and the acute shortage of affordable housing units, they have become the default housing choice for a multitude of low-income households. Outside almost every American town or city connected by the old pre-interstate routes, and in the suburban peripheries around the newer edge cities, you can now find a wide range of occupants living indefinitely in motels that were not built for long stays. They are shacked up outside tourist destinations like Branson and Reno, in the inner-ring suburbs of Denver and Houston, in rural areas like Northeast Oregon and the Appalachian counties of western Kentucky, on the fringes of Kansas City and depressed towns of upstate New York, and all across Southern California. The elimination of budget urban accommodations—boarding and rooming houses, welfare hotels, and SRO housing—and the steady increases in city rents have pushed more and more low-income people out of the metro cores and into sprawling suburbs, where poverty levels have risen dramatically since 2008. For some time now, poor people in these suburban areas have outnumbered those living in cities. And that is also where the motels are: according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, 30 percent of hotels and motels are in suburban locations, and another 31 percent are on or near highways, usually at route intersections.
The new “extended-stay” service apartment is a growing submarket of the hotel industry, and much of the motel inventory that survived the twentieth century is now the primary affordable housing option for families with limited income.1 For those who live for prolonged periods in these often rundown units—at risk from infestation, mold, harassment, and assaults—the motels are a last resort, a stopgap, a place of refuge, or a trap.2 But they also have had to become something like homes, and their swelling occupancy rates are an indictment of American housing policies that have failed to provide the real thing.
One of the country’s largest single concentrations of motel dwellers lies in the fifteen-mile section of Route 192 running from Kissimmee toward Four Corners, where Osceola meets three other counties (Lake, Polk, and Orange). Aside from its motels and other low-rent lodgings, this drag is jam-packed with kitschy attractions, novelty architecture, mini-malls, gimcrack gift outlets, evangelical churches, flea markets, factory outlets, chain restaurants, hookah lounges, tattoo parlors, pawn shops, and ubiquitous dollar stores. Almost everything on this unlovely strip owes its existence to Walt Disney’s decision in the 1960s to locate his second theme park in an area where Florida’s interstate highway and its turnpike intersect. As a result, the formerly ho-hum Route 192 became the golden approach road to Disney World’s main gate for anyone traveling from the south or east. To handle the traffic, it expanded into a four-to-six-lane divided highway. For much of its length, it is officially named the Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway, after the county’s most powerful cattle rancher and politician; its eastern reach, leading to the Atlantic Coast, is also known as the Space Coast Parkway. But as in most parts of the country, this lively thoroughfare is known to everyone by just its number.
Other than three resorts (Fort Wilderness, Polynesian, and Contemporary) that opened along with the Magic Kingdom in 1971, there were no hotels in the early years on the Disney property, so the opportunity to capture the lodgings market on the theme park’s doorstep was wide open. Immigrants and starter entrepreneurs flocked to Route 192 to throw up motels on stretches of firm ground amid the swampy terrain. Unprepared for the influx, Osceola County officials declined to build sewage lines along the route, and the largest setups that could be operated off a well and septic tank were forty-room motels. With few amenities beyond a dinky swimming pool, an ice machine, and a candy dispenser, they were designed for get-up-and-go visitors. A multitude of small businesses set up shop on the strip to waylay motorists bound for Disney World; the only principle behind the haphazard growth of garish signage and wacky facades was grabbing attention by any means necessary.3
The original Disneyland, in Anaheim, California, was located on a much smaller 250-acre plot and was quickly surrounded by two-bit lodgings that were at odds with the company’s hands-on aesthetic. With his 30,000-acre Central Florida land grab, Walt Disney ensured there was plenty of space to insulate Disney World from unsightly development outside its gates, and over time those ample acres started filling up with the company’s own vacation properties. In the 1990s, the company embarked on a hotel-building spree, aiming to capture every last dollar spent by its guests. As the profile of a Disney World vacation moved into the upscale, multiday market, visitors were persuaded to expect themed “experiences” from their living quarters, and so more and more of them booked luxury on-site resorts. The motel occupancy rates on the 192 corridor suffered as a result, and took another hit when Disney’s Good Neighbor hotel partnership program ensnared middle-market franchises outside the park’s boundaries. Finally, not content with the middle and the top, the company took a big bite out of the “value category” market by building its own budget-priced All-Star Resorts.
Meanwhile, most motel owners on Route 192 had done nothing over the decades to upgrade their no-frills properties and had little to offer twenty-first-century tourists beyond a roof over their heads for forty or fifty dollars a night. During the Great Recession, even budget tourism was slack, so the owners turned to weekly and monthly rentals to fill their rooms. There was no shortage of takers: families like the Warrens, unable to fully recover from the foreclosure trauma; tourism employees scrambling to make ends meet on a poverty wage; hustlers working the informal economy; and homeless people with just enough income from government checks and panhandling to move themselves off the street.
THE SANDPIPER
The Sandpiper Inn offers cheap nightly rates, and not much else. Like some other budget motels on 192, it charges guests a small “resort fee” on top of their bill, but no one would mistake the Sandpiper for a resort. Set back a little from the road, bordering a tropical swamp, it has a tranquil air, but no amenities or advantages over any neighboring properties. Built in the 1980s with a well and septic system, it was eventually hooked up to the county’s sewage lines, so it has the capacity to expand. But that is not in the cards anytime soon.
I stayed in a number of “fleabag” motels during my three years of reporting for this book, but the Sandpiper became my preferred base, and I got to know many of the regulars. Unlike them, I had no need to feel at home there, but I developed a loyalty to the place in spite of some off-putting incidents: at least one bout of bedbugs, significant roach traffic, a shooting in the room above, and many overheated altercations in the corridors and stairwells. The owners, an East Asian family who relocated from Brooklyn in 2015, were curious about my book, and we regularly exchanged insights and nuggets of information about the 192 business environment. Although I usually had to stay on the “vanilla” side of the hotel, where the nightly visitors are booked, the warm sociality of the other side, where the weeklies lived and hung out in the exterior corridors, became my workplace.
I did not expect to find much of a connection between the Sandpiper and my previous stint in Osceola County, when I was writing The Celebration Chronicles. But halfway through my time at the motel, I run into a couple who resided in Celebration at the same time I had been there. In 1998, Linda and Barney Hart briefly rented a downtown unit in Celebration before buying a garden apartment, the most affordable housing model in town. “Our street was considered ghetto by Celebration standards,” Linda jokes to me. Still, she says, the apartment sold in 2007 for $390,000, “right before the economy went to hell in a handbasket.” She had worked as a greeter in a builder’s model home, and her husband owned and operated a landscaping company, but the housing crash decimated both livelihoods. “In a recession, the first people to get cut are the pool guys and the lawn guys,” she explains. “We were left holding a huge bag of debt from another foreclosed property, in Poinciana, so we put everything in the storage locker, and our life has been a lot different since then.” After a prolonged spell in Barney’s hometown in the Indiana rust belt—where, she says, “everyone was on meth or opioids”—they were now back in Osceola, only ten miles but a universe away from the lawns they used to manicure in Celebration and the upscale community of Hunter’s Creek.
Before checking into the Sandpiper, Linda, Barney, and their two children lived in the parking lot of a Walmart superstore on the 192 corridor. “Definitely the lowest point of my life,” recalls their son, Brett. “Literally it would be burning hot, and, well, I’m sure you can imagine sleeping in a car with four people and a dog; you’re batting heads all the time because you’re all bunched up.” Linda says she lost her birth certificate and currently lacks ID, so only Barney is working, earning $8.40 an hour as a day laborer. After they pay the Sandpiper’s $280 weekly room rent, the cost of food, gas, and cigarettes easily consumes what is left over. Linda confesses how humbling it has been to nosedive from the gilded heights of Celebration (“I used to be so entitled”) to “living hand to mouth on a patch of the county where my dog kicks up syringes all the time.” At one time, she tells me, she was “making five hundred dollars a night working at Tony’s Town Square Restaurant in Disney World, and now I would be picking up cigarette butts on the 192 sidewalk if I could for a wage.” Still, she is upbeat: “I don’t think we’re stuck like a lot of people are stuck. We’re just stuck for a minute, but it feels longer than a minute when you’re stuck in it. We’ll get back there again. It’s just a matter of time.” But when I next return to the Sandpiper, the neighbors report that Barney lost his job, and the Harts are again on the street somewhere.
For families like the Harts and the Warrens, a motel stay is like a game of chutes and ladders—it can be a step up or a slide down. At another inn, I met a family sideswiped by calamity: evacuated from Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Isabel and Juan Romero were about to lose the FEMA vouchers that paid their rent for several months. Juan had found no stable income, and Isabel was working part-time in a laundry facility at another hotel. “Most of those who came from the island had relatives here they could live with,” she tells me. “But we have no family, our home in Puerto Rico is destroyed, and we have nothing to go forward with our lives.” Their fortunes would turn around in the following months, though. Thanks to assistance from the Hispanic Federation and a local church, the Romeros were able to put together the necessary funds—first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit—required to move from the motel into an apartment complex in North Kissimmee.
The Romeros’ next-door neighbors at the motel were in more or less the same boat. Brenda and Mike Mackie had been living there with their two children for almost three years. The Mackies both had casual work—Brenda in housekeeping, Mike in construction as a day laborer—but they made barely enough to cover the bills. “We can stay in place, but getting out of here and into an apartment is just not possible,” Brenda explains. “We need a break, and not necessarily a big one.” That break would come in 2018 when the Florida housing boom picked up steam, and Mike got better-paying work. Brenda found a two-bedroom apartment for them twenty miles to the south, in cheaper Polk County, and they were able to move up and out as well.
However, just as many motel dwellers are on their way down, on a path to the street, shelters, or tents in the woods. In the fall of 2020, I run into Melissa Warren in the parking lot of the Walmart on Route 192. It has been almost three years since our conversation in the motel, but she recognizes me. Remembering what I had been told about an illness in the family, I inquire after her husband’s health. “Randy moved in with his brother in Jacksonville,” she replies, “so we’re on our own right now, just the girls and me.… For a while we were bled dry by his hospital bills,” she adds, “and then we thought we had it together again, he had some work, and we had an apartment lined up in Kissimmee, but this virus has just knocked us out—no job, no apartment, no nothing right now, and so we can’t even afford to get back into a motel.” I ask whether they have anywhere to live. Melissa raises her hands, palms up and out, and screws up her face. “I’d have to say not really,” she responds but declines to say more. However, she is pushing a supermarket cart with three five-gallon jugs of water—a telltale sign of the unhoused—and is headed out around the back of the superstore, where I know there are homeless encampments in the woods.
HOMELESS OR NOT?
The Sandpiper Inn has its share of occupants moving in the same direction. “I’ve been homeless before, and I’m not afraid to do it again,” Ramon Perez, a fifty-year-old Cuban neighbor at the Sandpiper, tells me when he is served with an eviction notice after four months of residence. “This was supposed to be my best shot, and it hasn’t gone the way I hoped.” Ramon had found work on the strip as a dishwasher, but his heroin habit ate up his paycheck, and he fell behind on rent once too often. Some months later, when I’m visiting one of the homeless camps in the woods not far from the Sandpiper, I would be told he had been there until recently but was now in jail. Notably, like many of the extended-stay guests, he did not regard himself as a homeless person while he was at the Sandpiper. “I’m off the street, and you can’t see me in here,” he explained, as if his lack of public visibility gave him immunity from the stigma.
Ramon’s comment was not entirely off the mark. The official government definitions of homelessness are complex and sometimes contradictory. The landmark McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 defined a homeless person as someone who “lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.” The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) thus excluded from its services people who were doubled up in the homes of friends or family in addition to those living in motels. When the legislation was reauthorized in 2009, the category of homeless was extended to include persons who “will imminently lose their primary nighttime residence”—defined as those who only have housing for the next fourteen days or less, no subsequent place to go, and no resources to obtain permanent housing. If a government agency or a charity pays for a family’s motel room, then that family also meets the HUD definition of homeless. But if the family pays for the room with their own income and has enough money to last more than two weeks, then it is not homeless as far as HUD is concerned.
When it comes to children, on the other hand, the classification is more expansive. Children who are living in motels or doubled up in others’ housing are considered homeless under federal law, even though their parents may not be categorized as homeless by HUD. School districts often refer to these households as “families in transition.” Osceola County has a large “families in transition” program, for example, which provides clothing, school supplies, some extra tutoring, and sixty-four school bus stops along the Route 192 motel corridor. Similar efforts can be found on commercial strips around the nation.
The plight of children growing up in motels has inspired a new wave of public awareness of homelessness, while the image of the unhoused has shifted away from the recognizable stereotype of the single male vagrant. Many of the “new homeless” look like Melissa Warren and her children—white middle-class families fallen on hard times after losing their jobs and houses.4 Although this demographic adjustment has been occurring for some time, the Great Recession brought it into the open. And with Disney World next door, Osceola County’s heavy concentration of motel families was almost guaranteed to attract media coverage. In 2011, 60 Minutes aired a segment focusing on the plight of the Route 192 motel children, and local TV outlets further down the media food chain followed with their own stories.5 By 2017, the population of Osceola County school-age children identified as homeless (most of them living in motels) had grown to 3,500, and that was before Hurricane Maria swelled those numbers.6
Of course, counting the homeless in any locality or in the nation at large is an imprecise undertaking. In 2019, HUD’s much-criticized national point-in-time count found 567,715 people experiencing homelessness on a single January night.7 But that number, as before, excludes people living in motels or doubled up with friends or relatives, so homeless advocates regard this “snapshot” as a wildly inaccurate undercount. The most reliable estimates of the motel-dwelling population come from school district surveys that collect self-reported data from enrolled students. Federal data shows that during the 2017–18 school year, more than 1.5 million kids in public schools experienced homelessness. In the three-year period from 2015 to 2018, sixteen states recorded increases of 10 percent or more in their homeless student population, and eight (including Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Montana) saw increases of 20 percent or more; in Texas, the number of homeless students doubled in those three years alone. Over that same three-year period, the number of students living in motels jumped by 24 percent, offering a rough indication of the overall increase in the population of motel dwellers.8
Whatever the official definitions, self-perception among motel dwellers varies widely. Many of the motel residents I interviewed emphatically set themselves apart from those they regarded as truly homeless. “I pay my rent, I have a roof over my head, and I have a door I can close for privacy,” declares Clancy Becker, a restaurant server who has been living for eighteen months with her ten-year-old daughter in one of the shabbier properties on the back stretch of 192. “I’m not pushing my stuff around in a supermarket cart,” she adds, pointing to a woman who was doing just that, trudging with steady purpose across the parking lot. Previously, Clancy had spent a few weeks in Help Now, a Kissimmee shelter for victims of domestic abuse. In the motel, although there are often fights among her drug-dealing neighbors, the environment is less threatening to her than the kind of violence she has fled. “I needed help then but not now,” she tells me.
In a neighboring motel with a little more polish, Brianna Bond and her tween daughter are playing outside with their dog. “A motel is where you’re supposed to be on vacation,” she notes. “This is not a normal place to live, especially to raise a kid.” Brianna’s chief goal is to try to provide “a normal childhood” for her daughter: “I’m terrified that she would think of herself as homeless, and I don’t want to feel judged as if I myself am homeless, so that’s why we don’t go to food pantries or clothes closets for the homeless, and also because that would take away from people who really need it.” Brianna cobbles together her $280 weekly rent by working part-time in a hotel and as a substitute teacher, she says, because she is “too committed” to her daughter to work full-time. Three years before, she had juggled four jobs to try to stay in her Orlando apartment but ended up hospitalized for exhaustion, and her husband—“a very unsuitable man, when I think back on him”—ended up in prison. Her goal now is to negotiate a place where her daughter could have her own bedroom. “I’m not better than any others who live here, or over there,” she muses, gesturing toward Clancy’s motel, “but I keep apart from them out of self-respect.”
Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Ross
