Motel Culture

By DON ROLLINS

Used to be the people on the other end of the phone were asking for help with utilities or food or bus fare. Maybe Christmas toys or a warm coat. Car batteries. Dog food. Diapers.

I’d do some minimal screening, prioritize the first-timers, then parcel out the assistance until somebody sooner or later complained the preacher (me) ought to be saving that money for struggling church members, not strangers. Something about how charity starts at home.

These days at least half of those appeals are for an extra night or two in a low-end motel a planet away from Mar-a-Lago or Park Avenue or any other altar to excess in the Trump portfolio.

I’ve seen a dozen or so of those rooms. Some are marginally habitable to the middle-class American sensibility; others you smell before you open the door. And as always, the biggest heartbreakers are the kids, the old and the ailing. Poverty always comes after the most vulnerable first.

It’s disturbing to note this change in requests for help is not particular to the churches I serve. A recent feature article in The Christian Century cites a similar trend across faith based organizations as “motel dwellers” or the “almost homeless” call with the same request: please just cover one more night.

This uptick in demand for budget motel rooms comes at a time when alternative housing is increasingly scarce. According to a survey done by the D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, more than 11.4 million households are at any given time competing for longer-term shelter, with week-to-week motels being among the most desirable.

The scramble to get or keep a room —despite the increased propensity for violence, prostitution and drugs — is indication public and private entities are either uninformed about, or unconcerned with, bridging the gap between homelessness and stable living situations.

Which means more of those phone calls.

Good news is hard to come by in all this. Although on a broader scale, most efforts to date are not all that different from the band aid response my fellow clergy have to offer. Fortunately some existing programs are strength-based, engaging the motel occupants in determining what will and won’t work — for those who want to find more stable housing, as well as those who want to remain where they are.

Meantime we can at least advance the awareness that people live in the mostly shabby places so many of us pass without a second thought. Most of them, one night at a time.

Postscript: Check out two excellent cinematic resources on motel culture: Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County (HBO, 2012) and The Florida Project (film, 2017).

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister and substance abuse counselor living in Pittsburgh, Pa. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2018

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