ATLANTA (AP) – For more than five years, Armetrius Neason’s home was a hotel outside Atlanta. He adorned the walls with dozens of pictures of celebrities and black icons. It is the address on his driver’s license and where he receives correspondence.
But last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, the hotel accused him of owing $ 1,800 in arrears and threatened to leave him out, the 58-year-old said.
“I was packing my clothes. I really had nowhere to go, ”he recalled during a telephone interview.
Efficiency Lodge said that Neason – despite his long stay – was a guest who could open the property without opening a court eviction.
“If you go to a Holiday Inn and don’t pay the room rate, the next day your key won’t work,” said Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor and lawyer for the chalet, which is co-owned by his brother Ray Barnes. . “It is the same law.”
Neason’s struggles reflect the high risk of homelessness faced by motel and hotel residents during the pandemic, housing lawyers say. Many states do not clearly define when hotel and motel guests become tenants – a designation upheld by traditional tenants that gives them the right to challenge an eviction attempt before a judge. Hotel guests, in contrast, can be briefly removed.
The legal gap has made life in motels more risky than renting a typical home, even before the pandemic. Now it is even less stable, lawyers say. The loss of jobs during the pandemic made it more difficult for millions of Americans to earn their rent. But hotel guests are excluded from a federal moratorium on evictions of people who struggled financially during the coronavirus outbreak.
Hotel and motel residents in California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and Virginia reported being expelled or threatened with immediate eviction last year.
“It’s the people who are even more economically vulnerable than most low-income tenants,” said Alexis Erkert, a lawyer at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in New Orleans who battled motel evictions during the pandemic.
Hotel owners say they were also hit during the COVID-19 outbreak and need to pay customers to cover expenses.
“They just want their assets and livelihoods to be protected just like anyone else,” said Marilou Halvorsen, president of the New Jersey Restaurant and Hospitality Association.
In another recent hotel dispute in Georgia, Demetress Malone accused the Lodge Atlanta staff of removing their door, cutting off their power, removing their air conditioning and changing the lock after having trouble paying the rent for the room they occupied for about one month. year, according to a lawsuit he filed against the property. A call and e-mail to Lodge Atlanta attorney Frank C. Bedinger were not returned. A judge sided with Malone in November, saying the hotel had to open an eviction case against him in court.
At Efficiency Lodge, a private security guard carried an assault rifle and aimed at residents as he went from door to door, forcing them to leave in September, according to Neason’s lawyer, Lindsey Siegel, and a lawsuit that he and another current resident filed for property. Siegel works for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, just to put someone on the street,” said Neason. “You had to go then.”
Roy Barnes contested that residents were forced out at gunpoint, saying security was looking for two people wanted for murder.
Neason, who works as a carpenter, came to the hotel in 2016 and was paying his $ 200 weekly rent, but said a hotel employee said he did not have to pay the full amount during the pandemic. He was later presented with a late rent bill, he said.
The room in which he lives has a small kitchen with two electric burners. He hung colorful sports caps off hooks in one corner and keeps free weights close to the television stand.
Proponents say lawsuits by hotel residents are rare and many other removals are not reported.
“These are people who have already been pushed to the limit, are broken,” said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “Many of them assume, ‘I’m just staying as a guest at this motel.'”
Federal data suggests that an increasing number of people depend on motels and hotels for long-term housing. The number of students in the U.S. who have identified a hotel or motel as their primary night residence has increased by almost a quarter between the 2015-2016 and 2017-2018 school years to more than 105,000, according to figures submitted by the states to the Department of Education.
But the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention excludes hotels or motels rented to a “temporary guest or seasonal tenant” – terms letting local laws define – from their eviction moratorium in effect until March. Some states have gone to great lengths to try to protect motel residents.
New Jersey has its own moratorium that explicitly protects people who continuously live in motels and hotels and have no permanent home to which they can return safely or legally. Halvorsen said dozens of hotels reported guests who took advantage of the stricter rule when checking in and refusing to pay or leave.
The attorney general’s office in North Carolina alerted nearly 100 hotels and motels in the state at the start of the pandemic that its residents could be considered tenants. The Georgia Department of Law offered similar guidance.
But housing experts say that, without a clearly defined rule about when a hotel stay is no longer temporary or seasonal, residents of such properties remain vulnerable to rapid eviction when they cannot afford it.
In January, a DeKalb County judge ruled that Neason was a tenant and blocked the accommodation from evicting him without going to court. The store appealed.
“Who do you dismiss and who is executed if no one pays?” Roy Barnes asked. “This is not a problem that is good on one side and bad on the other.”