When A Budget Motel Is 'Home,' There's Little Room For Childhood : NPR

When A Budget Motel Is 'Home,' There's Little Room For Childhood : NPR:

When A Budget Motel Is 'Home,' There's Little Room For Childhood

Ian opens the door to the motel room he shares with his mother, Karen. Their living situation has exposed the 5-year-old to conditions most students his age don't have to confront. "He saw way too much in the last few weeks," Karen says.

Tess Vigeland/NPR

Just a couple of blocks off the 210 Freeway in San Bernardino, Calif., about an hour east of LA, rest a whole row of cheap, run-down motels. Some people stay for a night or two, others just by the hour.

But some rooms house families with kids — and they're not just stopping in.

This is home for them, at least for now. They've run out of other options for a roof over their heads.

California ranks third in the U.S. — behind only Kentucky and New York — in the percentage of children who don't have a home, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. And the evidence of this is clear in San Bernardino, which is littered with dilapidated neighborhoods and abandoned blocks, even in the city's center.

Here, budget motels have become a last refuge for desperate people with nowhere else to go. Joe Mozingo, the Los Angeles Times staff writer behind the series San Bernardino: Broken City, says that kids who live in these motels get exposed to some troubling conditions.

"Drug addicts and prostitutes, people with severe mental illness," he explains. "It's just kind of a crazy place for a child to grow up in."

For instance, Eddie, the 14-year-old at the heart of one of Mozingo's pieces, had to cope with bullying, the death of his cousin and a mother who was usually strung out on meth — before she got arrested.

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The Golden Star Inn, in San Bernardino, Calif. Karen and her son moved in here after they left the last motel they were living in --€” a place she says was "like summer camp for meth addicts."

Tess Vigeland/NPR

"So he was just totally left alone with his mom's boyfriend, who's also a meth user," Mozingo says. "And he just didn't know what to do. I've just never seen a kid look so lost and in need of guidance."

At the Golden Star Inn, one of the motels just off a juncture in San Bernardino, Karen lives with her 5-year-old son, Ian. (She asked that we not use her last name to protect her and her son.) The morning Mozingo and I spoke with her, she had just filed a restraining order against her husband; she says he's addicted to meth. She and Ian have lived in a shabby, dimly lit room for nearly three months.

In the room, there are signs of an effort to create something resembling a home. Stuffed animals and Disney pillows lie strewn on the bed, and laundry is hanging out When A Budget Motel Is 'Home,' There's Little Room For Childhood : NPR: