ATLANTA (AP) – For more than five years, the home of Armetrius Neason has been a hotel outside of Atlanta. He has adorned the walls with dozens of celebrity photographs and black icons. It is the address of the driver’s license and where you receive mail.
But last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, the hotel accused it of paying $ 1,800 in rent and threatened to close it, the 58-year-old said.
“I was packing my bags. I really had nowhere to go, ”he recalled during a telephone interview.
Efficiency Lodge said Neason, despite his long stay, was a guest who could start the property without filing an eviction case in court.
“If you go to a Holiday Inn and you don’t pay the price of the room, the next day your key won’t work,” said Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor and pavilion lawyer who is co-owned by his brother, Ray Barnes. . “It’s the same law.”
Neason’s struggles reflect the increased risk of homelessness faced by motels and hoteliers during the pandemic, according to housing lawyers. Many states do not clearly define when hotel and motel guests become tenants, a designation held by traditional tenants that gives them the right to answer an eviction attempt before a judge. Instead, hotel guests can be summed up in a nutshell.
The legal gap made the life of motels more risky than the typical rental of housing even before the pandemic. It is now even less stable, lawyers say. The loss of jobs during the pandemic has hampered the income of millions of Americans. But hotel guests are excluded from a federal moratorium on evictions of people suffering financial difficulties during the coronavirus outbreak.
Residents of hotels and motels in California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and Virginia have reported being evicted or threatened with immediate eviction over the past year.
“They’re the people who are even more financially vulnerable than most low-income tenants,” said Alexis Erkert, a lawyer for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in New Orleans, who has fought evictions at motels during the pandemic.
Hotel owners say they have also been successful during the outbreak of COVID-19 and need to pay customers to cover expenses.
“They just want their assets and livelihoods to be protected like anyone else,” said Marilou Halvorsen, president of the New Jersey Catering and Hospitality Association.
In another recent hotel dispute in Georgia, Demetress Malone accused Lodge Atlanta staff of removing her door, cutting off her power, grabbing her air conditioning unit and changing the lock after she had trouble pay the rent for the room he had occupied for about a year according to a lawsuit he filed against the property. A call and email was not returned to an Atlanta Lodge attorney, Frank C. Bedinger. A judge sided with Malone in November, saying the hotel had to file an eviction case in its court.
At Efficiency Lodge, a private security guard was carrying an assault rifle and aimed it at residents as he went door-to-door forcing them to leave in September, according to Neason attorney Lindsey Siegel, and a lawsuit that he and another current resident filed a lawsuit against him. the property. Siegel is on the side of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, just to put a person on the street,” Neason said. “You had to go there then.”
Roy Barnes argued residents were forced to come out at gunpoint, saying security was looking for two people wanted for murder.
Neason, who works as a carpenter, arrived at the hotel in 2016 and paid the weekly rent of $ 200, but said a hotel employee told him he did not have to pay the full amount during the pandemic. He was subsequently presented with a subsequent rental bill, he said.
The living room has a small kitchen with two electric hobs. He has hung colorful sports caps stuck in a corner and keeps free weights close to the TV.
Advocates say demands from hotel residents are rare and many other moves are not reported.
“These are people who have already spread to their limits, they are broken,” said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Law Center. “Many of them assume, ‘I’m staying as a guest at this motel.'”
Federal data suggests that a growing number of people rely on motels and hotels to get long-term accommodation. The number of students in the United States who identified a hotel or motel as their primary night residence increased nearly a quarter between the 2015-2016 and 2017-2018 academic years to more than 105,000, according to figures presented by states in the Department of Education.
But U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention excludes hotels or motels rented to a “temporary guest or seasonal tenant” (terms defined by local laws) from their eviction moratorium through March. Some states have stepped up to try to protect motel residents.
New Jersey has its own moratorium that explicitly protects people who live continuously in motels and hotels and who do not have any permanent housing where they can return safely or legally. Halvorsen said dozens of hotels have reported customers who have taken advantage of the stricter rule registered and refused to pay or leave.
The North Carolina Attorney General’s office warned nearly 100 hotels and motels in the state early in the pandemic that its residents could qualify as tenants. The Georgia Law Department offered similar guidelines.
But housing experts say that without a clearly defined rule about when a hotel stay is no longer temporary or seasonal, residents of these properties remain vulnerable to quick eviction when they can’t afford it.
In January, a DeKalb county judge ruled Neason a tenant and prevented the lodge from evicting him without going through the courts. The lodge has appealed.
“Who do you fire and who will you seize if no one pays?” Roy Barnes asked. “This is not a problem that is good on the one hand and all bad on the other.”