Q. There doesn’t seem to be any national data on the phenomenon of people living in motels. Are you familiar with this scenario on a national scale and if so, what can you tell me about it?
A. Route 1 used to be the nation’s thoroughfare for East Coast traffic from New England to Florida, so it’s dotted with old motels and not chain motels but old motels that were places where people would stay when they drove to Florida, some of which are quite derelict at this point but many of which have turned into housing for people. And if I ever had time in my life, I’d really love to do a study of the Route 1 motels and find out what’s going on there.
The data on affordable housing for people in that income group is very clear. That’s where the only serious shortage is, the only absolute shortage is, and so under those circumstances, people have to figure out what they have to do to cope and that’s one of the backups.
Q. Have motels become the new housing projects?
A. I don’t think these are the new projects because it’s not publicly subsidized ... Rather than say that this is the new projects, I would say that this is the new SRO (Single Room Occupancy) ... For many years in cities, what we had were old hotels that had become somewhat seedy and they became what people called flop houses where you could rent a room for a relatively small amount of money each month. Now they are almost all gone because they got torn down in urban redevelopment and revitilization .... I do think the motels have taken over that the more dominant form of that kind of housing at that point.
Q. The other gray area that seems to pop up is the question of whether people living in motels are homeless. Could you weigh in on this?
A. One of the things that’s been in significant debate of late is the definition of homeless. And it’s been a huge debate in Congress over the re-authorization of the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act (CK). And there’s great disagreement among homeless advocates around it. The definition and part of the reason why there’s a need for definition is because there needs to be boundaries around who’s eligible for services and who’s not. And so under the HUD definition, which is a more strict definition than what there is under the Dept. of Education, people who are living in hotels are not considered homeless.
Q. Why do you believe we should care about lack of affordable housing?
A. It’s a stain on the morality of our country. It says that we are not a caring society that is committed to making sure that everybody has a minimum of a standard of living which is the basis of the social contract. If you are a member of our society then we have under a social justice framework there is a floor below which we would not allow anybody to go. It’s called a social minimum. And anybody would say, you have to have a safe place to live, you have to have sufficient food, access to good healthcare, children must be educated, and you should have the ability to earn a living and if you are unable to work then you should have the income you need to sustain yourself. That’s sort of a standard of decency that we do not live up to.
It takes a toll on our sense of our selves as a good people and as a society as a model for what the world look to which is what we aspire to. The quality of my life really depends on the quality of your life. And the degree to which we fail to make sure that people are provided for then we are limiting our own aspirations. Now you can put it in the crassest of terms: People would say, well, it’s unpleasant to have homeless people on the streets of my neighborhood or it’s dangerous to have homeless people on the streets of my neighborhood, or it’s expensive for my emergency room to be clogged up with people …. All of that takes a moral toll on us as well as an economic toll. We have an idealized sense of who we are as a people and it’s incongruent with that. So that creates this dissonance with how we want to perceive ourselves and who we actually are.
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