How Hotels, Once a Last Resort, Became New York’s Default Answer to Homelessness

It’s a makeshift arrangement that provides people a roof over their head but little else. State regulations exempt hotels from providing the same services that families are supposed to receive in the shelter system.

The hotels are “less supportive, less conducive for good health outcomes, good education outcomes,” said Adam Bosch, CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a policy research nonprofit. “If our ultimate goal is to get people moving back toward independence, sticking them in a hotel on a hillside away from services, away from schools, away from transportation networks is not a great strategy.”

Homelessness in New York City received intense media coverage as the migrant crisis became fodder in the presidential election. But far less attention has been paid to the homeless population throughout the rest of New York, which far surpasses most other states on its own.

Few of the migrants were relocated to hotels outside the city. Instead, the spike in hotel housing stems from a combination of soaring rent, dozens of shelter closures and what housing advocates and industry representatives said was a botched response to the end of the state’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium in 2022. After the moratorium ended, landlords began evicting tenants at rates exceeding previous years. With fewer shelters and more people in need, the number of individuals and families placed in hotels shot up.

Barbara Guinn, the commissioner of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said in an interview that her agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use for emergency shelter. The trend has been scarcely mentioned at legislative hearings in Albany.

But OTDA, which supervises the county social services offices, has long known about the problems the hotels present. In early 2020, state auditors warned the agency that it wasn’t adequately overseeing shelters, including hotels used as temporary housing. OTDA acknowledged that hotels present challenges because they don’t have on-site support services or the same level of supervision as shelters.

Rules clarifying the requirement that temporary housing recipients in hotels receive shelter-like services have been on OTDA’s regulatory agenda for at least four years. But the agency, and lawmakers who oversee it, stood by as hotel housing increased. Guinn said she couldn’t “provide insight” on why the agency never formally proposed the rules, but she committed to advancing them this year. The Broome County Department of Social Services did not make its commissioner, Nancy Williams, available for an interview and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Reporting across the state, the news organizations found people living for months and sometimes years in hotels, doing what they can to get by. Families share beds while their belongings fill the corners of their rooms. Without kitchens and barred from using most appliances, they trek down shoulderless highways to grocery stores or scour food pantries for anything they can cook in a microwave. They squish cockroaches skittering in dressers. And hotels often force them to move out every few weeks, keeping stability out of reach.

The four hotels that Stradford’s family was placed in last summer collectively made about $10,000 sheltering it over three months — more than what the family owed in back rent. That works out to more than twice the monthly fair market rent for a four-bedroom apartment in Binghamton at the time.

This isn’t unusual. County social services offices regularly pay the hotels rates that are worth many times fair market rent for permanent housing in their areas, according to the analysis of OTDA’s housing payment data. One motel in Rome, outside Utica, that was the scene of a shooting last fall charged the county $250 a night for a room at times, according to invoices submitted to the county’s Department of Social Services.

Over three months, Stradford’s family struggled to maintain some semblance of its old life while bouncing from hotel to hotel. The family would lose countless possessions. The kids’ educations would be disrupted, as the school bus failed to keep up with their moves. Their experiences would show the importance of the services they weren’t receiving and what happens to New York’s homeless families when they can’t access them.

“It’s Like Malpractice”

Stradford and her partner, Tiberious Moses, had been evicted after she missed work at a children’s group home while recovering from surgery and Moses struggled to support the family with temporary jobs. At first, Stradford was relieved when the Department of Social Services informed her that it would place them in a hotel instead of a shelter.

“Going to the hotel, I originally thought, ‘OK, this gives a little bit more leeway, a little bit more comfort, hospitality, all of that,’ only to find out that it’s not that at all,” she said. “If you are a DSS recipient, you’re nothing. You are the bottom of the pit.”

Stradford’s family — two adults, three children and four dogs — was packed into a room with two beds at an Econo Lodge sandwiched between a gas station and another budget hotel. Stradford said she found cockroaches and had trouble getting the hotel to clean their room. She said she often saw drug use at the hotel and felt unsafe. Law enforcement and emergency services were called to the hotel 116 times in the first half of that year, dispatch logs show.

Despite those conditions, the Econo Lodge received more money to house temporary assistance recipients than any other known hotel outside New York City, according to the OTDA payments data for the 2024 fiscal year. The hotel, now called Hillside Inn & Suites, served more than 900 individuals and families placed by the Department of Social Services for at least 30,000 total nights, earning over $2.3 million.

“We’re forced to rent hotel rooms across the state, and the operators of these places understand that,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, chair of the chamber’s Social Services Committee. “The municipalities’ backs are against the wall. And so they must place the unhoused person or persons somewhere. And so that’s why you see the cost is skyrocketing, because people understand that it’s an easy way to make money off the government.”

OTDA’s regulations say hotels should be considered shelters and provide services if they are used “primarily” as temporary housing for homeless welfare recipients. At least 16 hotels appear to house mostly welfare recipients, the analysis showed.

OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said the agency interprets “primarily” to mean hotels that “house recipients exclusively, or almost exclusively, throughout the year.” He said that hotels aren’t required to deliver services but that county social services agencies “are responsible for some level of service provision.” The state, however, doesn’t regularly collect information on how counties provide services. Guinn said OTDA plans to create a formal process for counties to submit it under new regulations.

The Econo Lodge’s contract with Broome County doesn’t call for the services offered by shelters, like food and assistance finding housing. It requires the hotel to provide little more than a room with housekeeping, linens and toiletries. The hotel’s CEO, Paresh Patel, declined to comment.

In contrast, traditional shelters often put a significant amount of their funding toward social services. Shelter budgets obtained from OTDA show that they frequently retain at least part-time employees to prepare food and help people find jobs and housing. Local social services offices try to offset the lack of on-site services by hiring caseworkers but have struggled to retain them.

Instead, hotel residents like Stradford’s family are caught in a web of conflicts between the way those services are provided, the strings attached to benefits and the rules and limitations of living in hotels. Social services departments might provide them food stamps to buy groceries, but hotel residents usually don’t have kitchens and are often not allowed to have appliances like hot plates. To keep their lodging, they’re generally required to seek housing and to work or look for jobs, but they often don’t receive child care. They have to regularly meet with caseworkers at social services offices but must rely on spotty public transportation.

“To me, it’s like malpractice as a homeless services provider to place people without support services” in hotels, said Deborah Padgett, a professor of social work at New York University. “It’s good in the sense that they get more privacy, but for them to get a life and not be dependent on the government, they need to be close to services and not be punished for making mistakes.”

Guinn said that her agency would prefer counties use regulated shelters in housing emergencies but that there aren’t enough beds to accommodate everyone. Social services offices must rely on hotels when shelters don’t have space or don’t exist in a particular county, Farmer said in an email.

After 26 nights, Broome County relocated Stradford’s family to the Quality Inn & Suites in Vestal, a Binghamton suburb down the Susquehanna River that’s home to Binghamton University. Stradford’s car had been repossessed, so they stuffed a suitcase and the kids’ book bags with as many clothes as they could and hopped on the bus.

At the Quality Inn, the family struggled to eat. They had applied for food stamps, but Stradford said she couldn’t get wage records from her former employer proving she was eligible. Instead, the county provided them a restaurant allowance worth about $15 a day to cover all five of them. To get by, they took the bus to food pantries like Catholic Charities, which had started creating “hotel bags” stuffed with canned food, oatmeal, crackers, macaroni and cheese and snacks for the kids — anything that could be eaten cold or prepared with a microwave.

While many shelters provide food on site, contracts between the hotels and Broome County forbid emergency housing recipients from eating the hotels’ food. Stradford said her family was threatened with removal from the Quality Inn after her 12-year-old daughter, Taylor, tried to eat the continental breakfast.

“When we first started taking families on, we did allow breakfast, and unfortunately there was too much being carried away, so we chose to change that,” the hotel’s general manager, Bernadine Morris, said. The Quality Inn has since closed and could not be reached for follow-up questions.

People can get kicked out of hotels and lose their housing assistance for repeatedly violating hotels’ policies, including by using their own cooking appliances. One woman who previously lived at the Motel 6 in Binghamton said she avoided sanctions by throwing an extension cord from the window of her second-story room to use a pressure cooker on the sidewalk.

Stradford’s nonstop juggling act left her on edge. She was grieving her mother’s death, feeding five people and four dogs, apartment-hunting and hustling to culinary classes and social services appointments. She said her children started feeling the stress too: Her 3-year-old, Samir, was wetting the bed frequently, and the older kids missed classes for their summer courses.

The family began butting heads with Quality Inn managers, who accused them of being disruptive and terminated their stay, according to Stradford’s social services case file.

“I’m not totally surprised that they run into problems with the hotel supervisors and the staff just because they’re trying to find some way to get their needs attended to, and it’s not really fair to expect the hotel to do what those people are not trained to do,” Padgett said.

Shelters are required to have enough qualified staff to meet residents’ needs. The staff members generally have at least some training in how to handle populations with complex needs, said Elizabeth Bowen, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.

After Stradford and her family lost their room at the Quality Inn, the county sanctioned them and declined to find them a new place to stay. Moses, who had just gotten a job at Dave & Buster’s, paid out of his own pocket for a room at the Red Roof Inn in Johnson City. When they arrived, the woman at the front desk saw their belongings and dogs and told them the motel wouldn’t honor the reservation. They had used what little money was left on Ubers and the room deposit. The motel did not return requests for comment.

As it rained, Stradford got ahold of the Department of Social Services and pleaded their case. The county decided to continue housing her family until her sanction could be appealed. It booked them at the Knights Inn, another 10 minutes down the road in a town called Endwell.

“I Got Into Protection Mode”

Stradford’s family became skilled at sleeping on a single bed at the Knights Inn. Stradford, Moses, Samir and 15-year-old De’Vante would sleep side by side while Taylor slept horizontally at their feet.

The rest of the facility was in chaos, Stradford said. She saw hypodermic needles and other drug paraphernalia lying in the grass and underneath the stairwell and people slumped over while standing beside the dumpster. Over about six years that the county used it for temporary housing, law enforcement and emergency services were summoned to the motel for 789 incidents, including assaults, overdoses, robberies, domestic disputes and mental health crises.

The Knights Inn had a litany of issues that prevented it from passing Broome County Social Services’ inspections from 2018 to 2021. According to inspection reports, the rooms were dimly lit due to missing light bulbs and broken lamps. The walls were stained and punched through, and the wallpaper peeled off. Some rooms’ doors didn’t lock. Windows didn’t either or were broken. Carpets were torn, and inspectors found cockroaches in dressers.

Health and safety issues plague hotels used as emergency shelters across the state. A 2020 state comptroller audit found that 60% of the hotels they reviewed outside New York City were in “unsatisfactory” condition — about the same as the percentage of shelters.

One woman, who was living with her children in a motel south of Albany, showed paint flaking off their walls and mattresses covered in black mold. Two other parents placed in the motel said they felt that if the Department of Social Services caught them in private housing that resembled their living conditions, their kid could be taken away by Child Protective Services.

OTDA requires social services agencies to inspect hotels housing families every six months. But an analysis of OTDA compliance data showed that social services districts often fail to keep up with hotel inspections: About 40% of the 351 hotels used to house homeless people outside New York City were out of date on their social services inspections as of mid-October or didn’t have an inspection date listed.

Farmer, the OTDA spokesperson, said that most hotels had been inspected within a year and that some others had stopped housing people.

Even when social services agencies do inspections, records show they sometimes fail to take action. Hotels have to correct problems within 30 days, unless it’s a safety problem. If they don’t, counties are supposed to stop placing people there, according to a directive from OTDA.

Records show that the Knights Inn fixed some of the issues as it went but continued to get written up in every inspection for two and a half years. Despite this, Broome County placed hundreds of social services cases there, earning the motel over $750,000.

A Knights Inn manager, Aizaz Siddiqui, said that the motel moved people out of rooms that needed the most work until they were renovated.

In January 2021, the county said it would stop placing people at the Knights Inn until the violations were corrected. The motel received a clean inspection in July 2022. But Stradford said the Knights Inn wouldn’t give them toilet paper or fresh sheets, which are required in shelters. A bedsheet was used as a curtain for their rear window.

The family stayed for three weeks, but tensions with management boiled over when the family failed to get rid of their dogs by the deadline set by the motel. Eventually, the Knights Inn told them to leave. After giving them a few extra days to find other accommodations, Siddiqui called the police to remove them.

Siddiqui said the families placed at the inn by the Department of Social Services deserve sympathy, but he still has to maintain order. “It’s a tough situation to be in, and we try to work with them as much as we can,” he said. “But again, we do have to fulfill our policies, and we have to stand by them.” The motel declined to respond to additional questions about the conditions.

Stradford’s family didn’t have anywhere else to go. As the State Police arrived, she planted herself on a red cooler in front of their room and refused to leave until the county found them somewhere to stay.

Some community activists she met through local charity work showed up to support her and livestreamed the incident on Facebook.

After a three-hour standoff, management relented and allowed the family to stay two more nights. One of the activists arrived with a U-Haul and drove their stuff to the Motel 6, a 15-minute drive back up the river, past the Econo Lodge on the outskirts of Binghamton.

Things were initially calm at the Motel 6. But about three weeks into their stay, the Motel 6 complained to the county that Stradford had left the children alone, which they were told violated the motel’s guest policy. Stradford said she was doing charity work at the time but complained that she couldn’t attend school or meet the state’s requirements to look for housing if she had to constantly supervise her children.

The motel gave the family the weekend to leave. When they missed their checkout time, the Sheriff’s Office came to remove them.

Moses called Stradford, who was at school, to tell her what was happening. She headed to the Department of Social Services to plead their case.

“I got into protection mode,” Stradford said. “I wasn’t going to leave there and just put myself in a seriously homeless situation. So I told them I wasn’t leaving until I knew that we had a secure spot to go to.”

But her attempts failed. The agency said it would no longer help her family due to the complaints. The clerk used a special tool to unlock the room for the deputies.

Community members once again showed up to livestream the encounter and pressure the county. The Sheriff’s Office helped the family find a motel, where it stayed for two more nights.

In the end, it wasn’t New York’s social services system that found stable housing for Stradford’s family; it was a local landlord who heard about the case and offered an apartment at a rate the family could afford on Moses’ wages and temporary assistance from the county.

Stradford’s family was placed in hotels for 89 days, about the average for a social services case. Many stay far longer. More than 1,500 individuals and families spent six months or more in hotels, according to payment data from the 2024 fiscal year.

“Some of us really get into a hard time and we really do need the help. We don’t just rely on the system,” Stradford said. “I pay my hard-earned tax dollars. I worked multiple jobs. I’m the one that tried to keep afloat and stuff like that. But things happen in life.”

Between their six moves, the family lost most of its possessions: furniture, Social Security cards, birth certificates, tax documents, family photos, laptops, coats, a painting from someone Jasmine was taking care of, Samir’s toy box, Taylor’s art projects and a blanket covered in motivational quotes that Stradford’s mom had given her before she passed. They had to give up two of their dogs.

When they arrived at their new home, they had only a couple of suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes.