‘A place to lay my head.’ Motel closures may displace poor
As the coronavirus outbreak spreads, Miami-Dade’s mayor issued restrictions limiting stays on hotel and motels. The lack of rooms may affect the poor and transient who have nowhere else to shelter during the pandemic.
Ian Prestridge lost his chef’s job when the coronavirus shut down restaurants. He’s been staying in a room at the Rainbow Inn, a shabby motel along Okeechobee Road in Hialeah, that costs $50 a night.
Like many transient workers — he moved down from New York a few months ago — Prestridge is unsure where he’ll go if the Rainbow Inn closes under new county restrictions on lodging. He’s willing to stay, even if the Rainbow shuts off the electricity.
“I’ll stay here with no
AC,” said Prestridge, 21. “I just need a place to lay my head.”
As Miami-Dade County began restricting hotel stays on Saturday, advocates for low-income residents and the homeless worried that there will soon be a dire housing crunch at a time when sheltering in one place is crucial for stopping the spread of the coro
navirus.
In an order released
Saturday morning,
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said hotels, motels and other lodging businesses can’t accept new reservations, but he allowed for a host of exceptions, including medical personnel, journalists, first responders and “persons unable to return home” because of the global pandemic’s effect on travel.
A press release called it an “emergency order to close hotels, other lodging except for essential personnel and to house those who have been displaced by COVID-19.”
The county’s new restrictions are designed to cut down on people interacting with each other, a way to slow the spread of the highly contagious virus that has brought the world’s economy to a standstill and killed thousands across the globe. Miami-Dade County has already ordered the shutdown of parks, beaches, movie theaters, gyms and dine-in restaurants — pretty much anywhere people gather.
Saturday’s order allows individual cities to impose stricter rules. Miami Beach, on Friday, ordered that all “commercial lodging establishments” must be fully closed by 11:59 p.m. on Monday, except in limited circumstances.
Even if some guests outside
Miami Beach are allowed to stay in their lodging, the economic crunch of the pandemic is forcing hotels and motels to close. Roger Ghalloub, the longtime owner of the Rainbow Inn, said he may soon have to close to the few families that remain.
“I have to pay mortgage, water, gas,” Ghalloub said. “I don’t want to see anybody on the streets, but I’m in a bad position.”
Already, Ghalloub said, two nearby motels have shut their doors.
The motels along Okeechobee, Southwest Eighth Street and Biscayne Boulevard in Miami have long had a reputation as seedy spots that attract prostitutes, drug users and sellers, people who pay by the hour. But many of the guests are blue-collar workers, maybe down on their luck, staying in a motel while they get on their feet.
Exactly how the closures of hotels and motels, particularly those cheaper venues that don’t cater to the jet-setting tourists that flock to South Beach, will affect the homeless population remained unclear on Saturday afternoon.
The head of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, which has been scrambling to find housing for Miami’s sizeable homeless population, said he hopes hotels and motels stay open for those with nowhere to go. There may be more than 1,000 homeless people living on the streets of Miami-Dade, where practicing hygiene is already a challenge; another 2,540 are currently sheltered, the trust said.
“It they just dump people on the street, it’s the worst thing that could happen,” said Ron Book, whose organization has been passing out to the homeless on the streets educational pamphlets in three languages, along with thousands of sanitizing wipes and mini-bottles of hand sanitizer.
On Saturday, the trust was scouring sites in Miami-Dade to find housing for about 500 homeless people.
A deal to rent five or six hotel properties — for about $80 a day per room — fell through, Book said. Staffers were looking at some apartment buildings. High-profile Miami developer Jackie Soffer has offered the use of the old Costco building in North Miami, but complications include not having enough showers, Book said.
Book fears that while MiamiDade’s homeless shelters are urging “social distancing” to minimize the spread of the contagious illness, an increasing number of people will have to be quarantined. “I don’t have enough places to put them,” he said.
For now, places like Gables Cove in Coral Gables remained open for business on Saturday, but at only half capacity.
The motel on Southwest Eighth Street rents rooms for about $80 a night. But the people there aren’t tourists and need a place to stay, said Alexandra Escalona, the clerk who rents to customers through a glass window that staff disinfects constantly.
“Most of the people have been here more than one month,” Escalona said.
Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak said that officers would field complaints about any hotels that have guests who don’t qualify to stay, and refer any such cases to the city’s code enforcement department. “We’re not going to go arrest anyone for violating the order,” Hudak said.
At the Parkway Inn Airport Motel in Miami Springs, there were only a few guests milling about Saturday. In the lobby, one woman lay on a couch, browsing on her phone. Another man thumbed through a Thursday Miami Herald, grousing that there was nothing else to read.
Ivan Travieso, 56, sat on a back porch near an alley, chatting with a hotel maid. Travieso, from Havana, arrived in Miami only one week ago and was staying at the inn hoping to get on his feet.
He had hoped to get a job in construction. There are no jobs to be had. Now, he’s living off paltry savings, mostly watching the news in his tiny room. If the inn closes, he has no idea where he’ll go.
“It’s bad,” Travieso said. “If I had known it was going be like this, I would have stayed in Cuba.”
Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this report.