‘Motel People’ : Homeless Taking Up New Refuge

Whenever the weather is nice, Tina Cisneros leaves the door ajar at the Anaheim motel room she and her husband and their three children have called home since moving three months ago from New Mexico.

Otherwise, said Cisneros, 24, the room at the Anaheim Village Inn motel is too much like “a cell.” Still, she volunteered, “I guess we’re lucky, compared to some people . . . we’re working.”

She spends her days taking care of the children and her nights working at a fast-food restaurant in Fullerton. Her husband, Richard, 28, works weekdays as a mechanic and weekends as a maintenance man in the motel.

Marooned in their motel room on what amounts to a permanent basis, the Cisneroses are among an expanding group of “motel people,” which housing experts are beginning to classify as the “borderline,” or “hidden” homeless.

Visible Concentrations

Unable to find affordable housing or accumulate the cash deposits required by landlords and utility companies, they are scattered around California in increasingly visible concentrations: along Katella Avenue near Disneyland in Anaheim; on Sepulveda Boulevard as it parallels the San Diego Freeway in the San Fernando Valley; along the Bayshore Freeway south of San Francisco, and in downtown Sacramento.

Motel life is a way station, where people on their way up the economic ladder--moving into the middle class--meet people who have fallen on hard times and are on their way down the same ladder.

The phenomenon is not confined to California, either. Gary Blasi, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said motels with a high percentage of long-term residents are becoming “fairly common throughout the Western states.” He characterizes such complexes as “the suburban equivalent of Skid Row hotels.”

Louisa Stark, of the Phoenix Consortium for the Homeless, estimated that there are 3,000 people in that city living in motels, many of whom have been forced out of “gentrified” neighborhoods. Outside of Albuquerque and Tucson, people unable to afford to move into rental housing congregate in dilapidated motels on roads like Route 66, which have been bypassed by interstate highways.

Hard to Keep Statistics

It is hard to determine just how many people in California and the Southwest are living in this economic limbo.

“I don’t believe anyone knows how many there are,” said Art Luna, chairman of the Orange County Housing Commission. A survey conducted by the county’s Community Development Council indicated a minimum figure of 3,500 to 5,000 people, but interviews with public and private agencies dealing with the homeless suggest that the real number may be at least double or triple that figure.

One problem with keeping track of motel people, observes Michael Elias, director of the Christian Temporary Housing Center of Santa Ana, is that “we don’t count them as ‘homeless’ if they have a roof over their heads.” Brad Paul, a housing activist in San Francisco and board member of the National Coalition for the Homeless, estimated that between 250,000 and 1 million Californians are living in motel rooms. They are better off than people living on the street, in cars or in shelters, Paul said, but often just barely.

“They become prisoners, in a sense, in these motels,” he said. “They are the next group at risk to become homeless in this country.”

The Bureau of the Census has no national figures on motel living, but the growth of the situation is becoming evident elsewhere in Washington. “We don’t know how widespread it is,” said Peter Centenari, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, “although we suspect that it is.”

Despite their concerted efforts and frugal living, the Cisneros family’s vision of moving into housing where they can pay less and get more is as elusive as a mirage on the horizon.

The motel room costs $140 a week. Together they bring home $319 weekly, and from what is left they have to pay for food and clothes, gas for their one car, storage for the family’s furniture, doctor bills for the children and medicine for Richard, who is an epileptic. What is left, they try to save.

‘Caught in a Trap’

Tina Cisneros estimated that in order to escape to an apartment, they would need about $1,500 in cash--first and last month’s rent of perhaps $600, plus deposits for security and utilities.

In similar straits these days is the Wilkinson family, for whom home is a two-room unit in a modest corner motel on Sepulveda Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

It was not always that way.

“We came out here as an upper-middle-class family,” said Sandy Wilkinson, who asked that her family’s real name not be used. Now, she said, the family of four is “caught in a trap.”

In Upstate New York, the Wilkinsons had a good life. Sandy, who has a master’s degree, taught school; her husband, Ed, had a job in financial services. The couple also had a small sideline business. They lived in a three-bedroom house with a pool and sent their oldest child to a Montessori school.

Last May, Ed was recruited by a Los Angeles company that promised a substantial raise and chances for advancement. The couple packed up their two small children and moved to Los Angeles, where they found a $1,000-a-month townhouse, which required an initial payment of $3,000. But six weeks after Ed started his new job, before he received a single paycheck or reimbursement for moving expenses, the company went bankrupt.

After being forced out of the townhouse, the family shared a rented house in a working-class neighborhood that was sold out from under them. Now they live in the motel, where a unit similar to theirs rents for about $650 a month.

After holding out for nearly 10 months, the Wilkinsons filed for public assistance, which they received only after the intervention of a Legal Aid lawyer.

‘Shock to Your System’

Ed Wilkinson, who like his wife is in his late 30s, spends his days looking for work. Because the family has no car, he frequently leaves the motel by 5 a.m. in order to make bus connections for job interviews. Sandy takes care of the couple’s 3-year-old during the day, and takes the 5 year-old by bus to and from a nearby public school.

“It’s a shock to your system to be here,” Sandy Wilkinson said. “I have seen very few educated whites (like us) in this situation.”

Not all of the “motel people” are like the Cisneros and Wilkinson families, and neither do they live in such relatively clean and comfortable--if cramped--quarters.

At least an equal number survive entirely and permanently on public assistance of one kind or another and congregate at such places as the Wishing Well Motel in Santa Ana, which was cited early this year for 600 building and fire code violations, including overcrowding, insect and rodent infestation, inoperable plumbing and hazardous electrical deficiencies.

All, however, face the same economic reality.

“Low-income people don’t have much choice,” said Ken Dufer, who has been living at the Wishing Well for the last six months. “These places aren’t fit to live in.” He added that even families like his, with at least one member working, can never seem to save enough cash to move out of the motel and into an apartment.

“The deposit, that’s what’s killing everybody here,” Dufer said.

“This place is bad,” said Leo Sarinana, another Wishing Well resident. “There’s lots of things we get mad about.” The unemployed carpenter, who came from Texas to Southern California looking for work, acknowledged, however, that “if we weren’t here we’d be sleeping in the park, in cars or fighting for a cot at the Salvation Army.”

“It’s a vicious circle,” said Eileen Schwartz, program director of the Traveler’s Aid Society of Orange County. “They can’t get out of it, they’re stuck in there.”

In some areas, local economic conditions make motel living even more difficult to escape. In Orange County, where 46% of the residents are renters, employment at the lower end of the service sector--in jobs paying an average of $5 an hour or less--is up after a long downturn. Yet the market for rental housing for anything less than about $650 a month is extremely tight.

Waiting lists for the county’s 14,000 units of public and subsidized housing stretch back three years, with a minimum waiting period of six months. Meanwhile, a campaign of stepped-up enforcement of building codes in Santa Ana and other parts of central Orange County is eliminating some of the meager supply of low-cost housing.

At the same time, there are more than 35,000 motel rooms in the county, according to the Anaheim Area Visitors and Convention Bureau. A number of these complexes, especially the cheaper ones, don’t attract enough tourists and business people to remain full.

Many of the more desperate of the motel people “are paying 70% to 80% of their take-home pay on housing,” frequently for a single room without cooking facilities, according to Elias of Christian Temporary Housing in Orange County.

“We can’t give them free food,” said Nancy Bianconi, of Better Valley Services, a social service agency in the San Fernando Valley, “because it needs to be prepared.”

“Going out for prepared food eats up whatever income they have left,” said Jean Forbath, director of the Share Our Selves (SOS) program in Orange County.

Added to the economic pressure of living so close to the edge are the difficulties inherent in overcrowding.

“Several family members living in a single room leads to problems,” said Ron Johnson, president of the Family Services Assn. of Orange County. “It may lead to physical abuse of a spouse or children, even sexual abuse, with whole families in a single bed.”

“There’s a high incidence of neglect,” said Lois Wood, supervisor of the Child Abuse Registry of the Orange County Department of Social Services, because a single parent or both members of a couple have to work and cannot afford child care.

“They may leave a smaller child with an older child in control,” she said, or depend on a neighbor in the motel. “We get a call, and by the time we get there the family has gone, moved to another motel,” Wood said.

“The sense of being closed in on each other in a motel room,” said Rabbi Steven Reubin, of Temple Judea in Tarzana, often results in a “depression psychosis.”

For motel children enrolled in school, truancy sometimes is a problem, and they face hardships peculiar to their living conditions.

In the Tustin school district, teachers and health officials report increased levels of health problems, such as head lice, as well as the need for guidance counseling for the 60 or so motel children.

Oliver Twist-Type Children

“Motel children are something we talk about among ourselves,” said one Tustin elementary school teacher who asked that her name not be used. “They may move as many as seven times in a given school year,” she said. “That kind of in-and-out life allows for no foundation, no basis for learning.”

Some students from motel homes, the first-grade teacher said, are able to perform well in class, but more often they are “almost like little waifs, like an Oliver Twist-type child.”

In the Bay Area city of San Mateo, Evelyn Taylor, principal of North Shoreview Elementary School, found that children coming from a nearby “motel row” were frequently too hungry to concentrate on their classwork. So Taylor arranged for hot meals for her students and their families, and organized a clothing drive.

“We have problems as a family, as a man and wife” as a result of their living situation, Sandy Wilkinson admitted. She said she has tried to alleviate some of these problems by becoming active in her older child’s school and by taking her younger child on day trips to parks and recreation areas. In addition, she and her husband chose a unit with two bedrooms but no kitchen facilities.

“The children have to have their space,”she said. “Psychologically, they feel better having their own room. I think they can function better without a kitchen than without a bedroom.”

Wilkinson, who would speak to a reporter only over the telephone or through the closed door of her motel room, said that she and her husband do their best to “cushion” their children from their situation.

“The adults have to keep on an even keel for the children,” she said. “It’s because of the children you have to keep yourself going.” She added that “they should have some therapy sessions for people like us.”

Long-term life in a motel creates both a syndrome and an insular subculture of its own, residents and community workers agree.

‘Hardly See Each Other’

“We don’t have the money to do anything,” said Tina Cisneros. There are fewer than two waking hours when both she and her husband are in their room at the Anaheim Village, she noted. “We hardly see each other.”

In the evenings, said Christy Thompson, a Wishing Well resident who works for a nearby fast-food outlet, “people sit at home, relax--unless there’s a fight going on. That’s the excitement.”

And regardless of the weekly rate or state of repair of the premises, prostitution, drug-dealing and alcoholism are often part of the motel milieu. Sandy Wilkinson refers to it as “the nightlife.”

At the front desk at the Wishing Well is a sign that reads: “Under the management of the Wishing Well, anyone who is involved with drugs, prostitution or is intoxicated will be reported to the local police department.”

Yet residents pointed out units where, they said, drugs are sold and prostitutes ply their trade, and they complained of strangers looking for both, arriving at all hours of the day and night, knocking on doors. Drinking in the parking lot throughout the day is common.

Yung Kim, owner of the Wishing Well, said that the tenants are to blame for the condition of the motel because “they don’t care” about the way they live. “They stay here all day, 24 hours, drinking beer,” he said.

William Mell, manager of the Tahiti Motel in Stanton, where about 75% of the rooms are rented on a weekly basis, is similarly unenamoured of his permanent clientele. “I’d like ‘nightlies’ better,” he said, but added that the long-term guests “help carry you through the winter.”

An added drawback to motel living, according to Legal Aid attorneys, is that state and local laws regarding residents’ rights are not clear. In some jurisdictions, residents staying in a motel room for more than 30 days become “tenants,” and are no longer subject to baggage lien laws that permit motel owners to padlock the room when the rent is late without going through the eviction procedure.

In other areas, residents occupying the same room for 30 or 60 days come under rent control ordinances. Some motel operators get around these regulations by having residents change rooms or check out and in again after 29 or 59 days.

Think Stay is Temporary

Many of those caught in motel life like to think their stay is temporary. Young couples juggling two jobs and people newly arrived from out of town regard motel residence as a stage they need to pass through before entering (or rejoining) the upwardly mobile stream.

But a greater number, often middle-aged or older, admit that they have come down in the world and live in reduced circumstances and with little hope because of unemployment, bad investments, garnished wages, bankruptcy, extended illness, divorce or abandonment.

“I’ve never been so low in my life,” said Elisabeth Ballard, a Wishing Well resident whose marriage broke up after the family went bankrupt, leaving her to care for her children on public assistance.

Those few public and private programs available to the motel people are geared to the group on their way up. In Orange County, for example, the Salvation Army, the Traveler’s Aid Society and Christian Temporary Housing each offer shelter to employed individuals who are trying to save enough to move into rental housing. Christian Temporary Housing has a highly structured, comprehensive program that provids individualized, step-by-step instruction on budgeting and how to establish or re-establish good credit.

“We’re looking to invest a little more in people who have a likelihood of getting out of their situation,” said the Salvation Army’s Warren Johnson.

In another approach, pioneered in downtown Sacramento and now being duplicated in South Tucson, housing authorities or private foundations have bought motels that have gone broke or fallen on hard times and converted them to shelters or to inexpensive apartments--some available without prohibitive deposits.

In the San Fernando Valley, Rabbi Reubin, Nancy Bianconi and others in the Interfaith Taskforce on the Valley Homeless have drawn up a proposal to buy a 70-unit motel in North Hollywood, financed by private foundations and corporations as well as public funding.

Despite all the drawbacks of motel living, Reubin said, the units “are infinitely better and more private than whatever else is available.”

A number of programs developed in recent years in the Bay Area, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Long Beach provide direct financial assistance to people trying to overcome the barrier of high rental deposits. United Way of Los Angeles has developed the “First and Last Fund,” which is being administered by Catholic Charities. The Orange County Community Development Council is about to launch a project that will provide loans of up to $1,500 for rental and utility deposits for the working poor.

‘Stability of Residence’

Of these programs, the one with perhaps the greatest potential to alleviate the plight of the motel people was developed in 1982 by the Zellerbach Family Fund in San Francisco. The $30,000 pilot grant was initially aimed at providing small loans to keep families together, especially single parents with children. The project, which made grants of only $100 to $300, was later adopted and expanded by a consortium of foundations and private corporation called the Northern California Grantmakers.

Renamed the Emergency Family Needs Housing Assistance Fund, 40 separate contributors provided the $1.5 million to expand the program to six Bay Area counties. Steven Lieberman, of the Northern California Grantmakers, said that in looking at the situations of families in crisis and the efforts of various agencies to keep them together and off public assistance, “the primary factor contributing to the success rate is stability of residence.”

The accomplishments of the Emergency Family Needs Housing Assistance Fund in the Bay Area prompted Assemblyman Robert W. Naylor (R-Menlo Park) to introduce a bill establishing a similar program statewide. Under the bill, $7 million would be made available to counties to make one-time grants for rental deposits and emergency medical needs.

No more than 5% of the $7 million could be spent on administration, and counties would be required to raise a 10% matching contribution from the private sector. Each county would determine elibility standards and would make the grant payments directly to the landlords.

Naylor, a conservative who admitted that he is “not known as a great supporter of the welfare state,” said the bill is “both humanitarian and cost-saving.” Its purpose, he said, is to keep families together and help people on the fringe of welfare from going onto public assistance, or at least to minimize their stay there.

By “intervening before the situation gets out of hand for families in crisis,” Naylor said, the measure would “do a lot of good for people and save a lot of public money.” Although the governor vetoed the bill when it passed last session, Naylor said he is “reasonably optimistic” that, after making his case to Democratic colleagues and the Republican Administration, the bill will pass and be signed.

There is another, less attractive solution to the problem of the motel people in California, at least in Orange County, which Michael Elias of Christian Temporary Housing frequently suggests. “I just tell them to move out,” he said. “It costs too much to live here.”