ATLANTA (AP) – For over five years, Armetrius Neason’s home has been a hotel outside of Atlanta. He has decorated the walls with dozens of photos of black celebrities and icons. It is the address on his driver’s license and where he will receive mail.
But last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, the hotel charged him with a $ 1,800 rent arrears and threatened to shut him out, the 58-year-old said.
‘I was packing my clothes. I really had nowhere to go, ”he recalls during a telephone interview.
Efficiency Lodge said that – despite his long stay – Neason 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 your room rate, your key won’t work the next day,” said Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor and attorney who is co-owned by his brother, Ray Barnes. “It’s the same law.”
Neason’s struggles reflect the increased risk of homelessness facing motel and hotel residents during the pandemic, housing attorneys say. Many states do not clearly define when hotel and motel guests become tenants – a designation owned by traditional tenants that gives them the right to contest an attempted eviction in court. Hotel guests, on the other hand, can be briefly removed.
The legal divide made motel living more risky than renting a house, even before the pandemic. Now it is even less stable, the lawyers say. Job losses during the pandemic made it more difficult for millions of Americans to make rent. But hotel guests have been banned from a federal moratorium on evictions for people in financial difficulties during the coronavirus outbreak.
Hotel and motel residents in California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and Virginia have reported being evicted or threatened with immediate eviction in the past year.
“They are people who are even more vulnerable economically than most low-income tenants,” said Alexis Erkert, a lawyer with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in New Orleans who fought evictions in motels during the pandemic.
Hotel owners say they were also hit during the COVID-19 outbreak and need paying customers to cover the expenses.
“They just want their property and livelihoods protected like everyone else,” said Marilou Halvorsen, president of the New Jersey Restaurant and Hospitality Association.
In another recent Georgia hotel dispute, Demetress Malone accused Lodge Atlanta’s staff of removing his door, interrupting his power, taking his air conditioning, and changing his lock after struggling to pay rent for the room he had lived in for about a year. according to a lawsuit he filed against the property. A phone call and email to a Lodge Atlanta attorney, Frank C. Bedinger, was not answered. A judge sided with Malone in November, saying the hotel should file an eviction case against him in court.
At Efficiency Lodge, a private security guard carried an assault rifle and aimed it at residents as he went door to door forcing them to leave in September, according to Neason’s attorney, Lindsey Siegel, and a lawsuit he and another current resident filed . ownership. Siegel is affiliated with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, just to throw someone out on the street,” said Neason. “You had to go then.”
Roy Barnes disputed that residents were forced to evade 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 paid his $ 200 weekly rent, but said a hotel worker told him he wouldn’t have to pay the full amount during the pandemic. He later got a bill for overdue rent, he said.
The room in which he lives has a small kitchen with two electric hobs. He’s hung colorful sports hoods in one corner of the hook and keeps free weights near the television stand.
Proponents say lawsuits by hotel residents are rare and many other removals go unreported.
“These are people who have already been pushed to the limit, broken,” said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “Many of them assume, ‘I’m just staying at this motel as a guest.’ ”
Federal data suggests that more and more people are relying on motels and hotels for long-term housing. According to figures provided by states to the United States Department of Education.
But the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention excludes hotels or motels rented to a “temporary guest or seasonal tenant” – conditions that local laws must determine – from the moratorium on evictions in effect through March. Some states have tried to protect motel residents.
New Jersey has its own moratorium that explicitly protects people who live in motels and hotels continuously and do not have permanent housing to which they can return safely or legally. Halvorsen said dozens of hotels have reported guests taking advantage of the stricter rule by checking in and then refusing to pay or leaving.
The attorney general’s office in North Carolina warned nearly 100 hotels and motels in the state that their residents could be classified as tenants at the start of the pandemic. The Georgian Department of Law provided similar guidance.
But housing experts say there is no clearly defined rule about when a hotel stay is no longer temporary or seasonal, that residents of such properties remain vulnerable to prompt eviction when they cannot afford.
In January, a judge in DeKalb County ruled that Neason was a tenant and blocked the lodge from evicting him without going to court. The lodge has appealed.
“Who will you fire and who will be shielded if no one pays?” Roy Barnes asked. “This is not a problem that is all good on the one hand and all bad on the other.”