Fox News Chicago
June 17, 2009
Family of four living in motel

It's a worst-case scenario in this recession: Homelessness.

Illinois Social Service agencies say the numbers have almost quadrupled in the last year, but many of the newly homeless remain hidden.They're doubled up with family members, or lying low in shelters. Some of them are even checking in to motels.

It's one of those places you see in almost every town, right off a busy road, around the corner from stores and restaurants. It's a place many folks would simply pass by and dismiss, too dumpy-looking, too sketchy, too low class.

Yet it's precisely a place like this, an old obscure motel, that the Daly family has come to call home for more than a year. This became the roof over their heads, they say, when the house they were renting was foreclosed on, when John lost his job.

"We were helpless, said John Daly. "It's kind of hard when you have to come up with the deposit, first month's rent, sometimes last month's rent. We just couldn't come up with that amount."

Jennifer Daly added: "Our credit's not the best. That's another issue." And so they turned to a $42 dollar a night motel in the western suburbs.

The couple has managed to bring in some money through occasional odd jobs...sewer work, moving furniture...janitorial work. But they say the nation's surging unemployment rate has essentially pushed them to the bottom of desirable job applicants.

"People that had better jobs are going for lower jobs like you know I mean cause they have to. So there's more people going for the job that i would normally," said John.

"We've tried to get our families to help but you know ...they they just can't afford it."

Their possessions now reduced to a microwave and mini-fridge. They wash their clothes in the motel bathtub. On any given night, the Dalys believe as much as one-third of the 55 rooms at their motel are occupied by families just like them.

"They don't see themselves as homeless, they don't want to be labeled as homeless. They see themselves as they're going to catch a break pretty soon and things are going to change," said Rene Heybach,a director for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

She estimates as much as 7-thousand Illinois families have been secretly living in so-called "no tell" motels at some point or another during the last year.

She added: "Chiefly they have been used in communities that don't step up to the problem of homelessness. They have not created a shelter. Many of them vigorously fight having shelters in the community, and they don't create affordable housing, subsidized or public housing and so there it is you got the hotel/motel."

The Dalys say they've been consistently unable to get the kind of help and funding assistance that homeless folks out on the street can readily obtain. They say they've been told by social service agencies that they're technically not homeless as long as they can consistently pay for a roof over their heads.

According Rene Heybach, "They have to demonstrate a period of instability and movement over and over again before they're really going to help If they had nowhere to go but a shelter, they'd be eligible for more government assistance."

In fact, that's exactly what they've done a dozen or so times over the last few months when they couldn't afford their nightly motel room fee. But a shelter, they say, is no place for a child.

Still, Heybach says motels like these are sometimes no better.

"Things are going on outside that kids see. Deals are going down...They are things you would never want your kids to see or experience."

We asked the kids, Mark and Logan, if there was any good part to living in a motel room. "That we got somewhere to live. That we have a roof over our heads."

The National Center on Family Homelessness recently released a study that indicated one in every 50 children in America were homeless.

Most of the families living in motels are in the suburbs because shelter systems are less prevalent there than they are in Chicago.