ever stay in one of these before?

[datasuspect]

a residence hotel, long term weekly housing?

[Roon]

1. I used to manage a weekly crack motel

for two years! I don't know how I survived it. Days after I was shitcanned they put up bullet proof glass around the front desk.

[datasuspect]

2. yikes!

i bet there was unsettling parade of humanity there.

[Roon]

8. I learned a lot about people (and crackheads)

We had prostitutes, drag queens, queers, drug addicts, drunks, skinheads,drug dealers and one very nice old lady who lived there because she said, "she liked that activity and action" And we all got along with each other because we had to live together. I was a resident manager so I lived there too.

I got sick of being woken up in the middle of the night to let people in their rooms that locked themselves out. So I put a sign on my door. 10.00 lockout fee. So this one crackhead decided he didn't want to pay that after locking himself out and tried to climb up to his second floor room window by using the neon sign. He did thousands of dollars of damage to the sign all because he didn't want to pay me the 10.00. I have a million stories like this. lol

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. Not nearly as bad as that....

but on a family vacation when I was a teenager, we were in Toronto and there was some big exhibition going on. No room at any of the inns, so we ended up (for one night) in a motel in some distant suburb where the sheets were so thin that my toenail literally tore through it. We called it the Bates Motel.

At least there were no bugs, to our great relief.

[LeftyMom]

4. My mom used to tend bar in a place where one of those was upstairs.

She lost her job when some crackhead burned the place down- by leaving a hot pipe on the mattress IIRC. Since then, the city's been pretty big on getting all the SROs converted into pretty much anything else. Unfortunately, they haven't been so great at getting new cheap places for the low-bottom addicts and other one-step-above-homelessness people to live.

[Kutjara]

5. I spent several months in a motel that had...

...a part set aside for weekly residents. You couldn't stay any longer than 28 days at a stretch and you couldn't reserve one of the rooms in advance; so you had to go somewhere else for one night and then hope there was a room for you when you came back. This was in Santa Ana, CA, and there's apparently a town ordinance that mandates this policy. Nobody who worked at the motel had any idea why the families that lived there had to be made essentially homeless for one night per month (other hotels in the area were a lot more expensive), so I just put it down to some protonazi in local government with a chip on his/her shoulder about "riffraff."

I met several people during my stay and was stunned at how hard life was for them. One woman was a grandmother whose daughter and four grandchildren were (illegally) occupying a single room. The daughter worked three jobs from 6am to midnight, but still had to find time to ferry her children to and from school activities, while granny did the laundry and grocery shopping and looked after the two youngest kids. All this hard work was barely enabling them to pay for the room and eat crappy food, prepared in the room's tiny microwave oven. This family was "lucky," because a friend had showed them how to concoct a phony "lease" showing they rented an apartment nearby; otherwise the kids wouldn't have been able to attend school (the only plausible reason I heard for the "28 day rule" was to keep nonresident kids out of the school and welfare system).

Oh, this was an "American" family, nice and white, not some "evil" Mexicans or other demonized immigrants. God only knows how those not "blessed" with the correct race are surviving.

Sometimes I think we're living in a modern version of The Grapes of Wrath.

[datasuspect]

7. it's a cultural phenomenon

biased against low-cost housing.

it's another form of ethnic cleansing - more like economic cleansing. and that's what gentrification in its heart truly is.

a "hotel" or "rooming house" didn't always have a negative connotation. it was a cheap way for singles to live without setting up housekeeping.

this form of housing has become virtually nonexistent in major cities, save for the "weekly motels" that litter the outskirts of most cities.

[KitchenWitch]

6. I have not, but I have a friend that now lives in Minnesota that used to live in one

in NYC.

[Elidor]

9. Some of them look a whole lot nicer than that, but yes

Clairmont Lodge on Clairmont Road in Atlanta, at I-85. It was a somewhat scummy place, but fairly quiet. The damn bill was a daily albatross around my neck. If you could afford the weekly nut, it wasn't a killer, but the daily rates would drain you fast. It was understood by most inhabitants that you did not get your freak on at the Clairmont. It was neutral territory. The furniture was nice and the kitchen had an open wall overlooking the living room. Nobody ever knocked on the door trying to sell me drugs or freaky bitches, so I stuck around a while. I was driving a cab at the time, so I seemed to fit right in.

Driving a cab sucks in Atlanta. It probably sucks everywhere, but it especially sucks in Atlanta.