-It's hard to never have stability, you know,
never know when or where the next meal is coming from,
when or where if the power is gonna get shut off or turned on.
Never know if the hotel itself is gonna get shut down
and when you're gonna have to move,
if you're gonna have the money to move.
-There's a lot of people that lost their jobs.
They have nowhere else to go
and they gotta look for the cheapest way.
The cheapest way is a hotel.
It is not cheap, but it's a hotel.
It's a roof.
-The Star Motel is a painful place to be.
It is not a place suitable for people to live.
It's a heartbreaking place.
No one deserves to live at the Star Motel.
-Even before the coronavirus pandemic,
low-income areas of Orlando
were plagued by a lack of affordable housing,
with families packing into crumbling motels.
The Star Motel in Kissimmee,
which was in disarray before the pandemic hit,
was pushed over the edge by the recent economic shutdown.
The motel's owner abandoned it in December.
Since then, residents have been left to run the place.
The power has been shut off at least four times.
-Come tell her to come and see
'cause they're shutting the power right now.
-They're shutting it off? -Right now.
Tell her to come and see it.
-In early August, the electric company trucks were back again.
The motel's residents needed to pay $1,500 to keep the power on.
-Have you paid anything? Had you done anything for us?
-Actually, I have! Go ask [indistinct]
'cause I just messaged him the [bleep] receipt
for what I did pay on the [indistinct].
-Right now. -I have it on Facebook, too.
-No way. -Today is the due date.
-It should've been paid on Friday.
Like every other Friday it has been paid
'cause we went and got the money.
-They gathered around the courtyard
to figure out what to do.
-If our kids go without light,
it's 'cause of one of our sorry [bleep].
My son don't wanna hear that.
How you let the lights go out, huh?
How I'm gonna tell Junior I let the lights go out?
Man, it can't come to me.
My kids are the most and main important thing
in my [bleep] life.
'Cause I'mma pipe this heat, but they ain't.
Alright, everybody outside in front right now.
Can all y'all put out 100 bucks?
If you can't, please don't talk to me right now.
-70, 80, 90, 100.
That's 200.
-Residents scrounged up enough money,
but, five days later, the power was shut off for good
when the electric company asked them to pay $9,000
in back payments.
Kathia Badillo Feliu is a single mother
who was forced from her home in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria.
She rotates with her family from staying at the Star Motel
and a transitional housing site which did not accept her dogs.
She works a graveyard shift at Universal Orlando Resort.
When the pandemic hit, the shutdown left her
with fewer hours and less income.
-I make $13 an hour.
I get 400 and something, $420, weekly.
I have to make three times the income to get a house
and I'm the head of household.
Even if I were by myself with my daughter,
I wouldn't make it 'cause a two-bedroom is not $200.
A two-bedroom is $1,400.
It's $1,500.
If you find low housing, dude, you have like a three-year wait.
Minimum, six month, but that will never happen
because there are so many people looking for affordable housing
right now that I have been told that it's a three-year wait.
So, I'm expected to wait three years of homelessness
before I ever get a chance of getting into affordable housing.
-There are so many different levels
and so many different reasons why people are homeless.
It's just they're caught between a hard place and a rock
because most work at the theme parks.
They're not being paid a livable wage, you know,
and I see the vicious cycle of,
maybe when tax time comes around, they'll be okay
and, two, three months down the road,
it's the same situation again.
It's just such a -- Kissimmee is such a mess.
It is such a mess.
-Rose Jusino, now a 17-year-old high school student,
has lived at the Star Motel for nine months
and her family has hopped from motel to motel for seven years.
She works at a Taco Bell to help her family,
but was temporarily out of work
when one of her coworkers tested positive for the coronavirus.
-I feel like each year is getting worse.
First, we were in like normal hotels, just normal ones,
nothing special, nothing extravagant.
Then, the hotels started getting worse and worse and worse.
And, now, we're at the Star
and that place is like hell on earth.
Gunshots, music all night.
Everyone drinking and fighting and fussing
and arguing over nothing.
It's just crazy.
The people there are already going through hard times,
as it is.
So they're already arguing and drinking on top of that,
which is not making anything better.
And then, turning off the electricity,
so, now, they have no AC,
so their head is literally boiling.
It's just gonna make them more mad, more frustrated.
Even the smaller things that, usually, wouldn't bother them
on a normal day is gonna start bothering them.
Now, there's more fights, more arguments.
People are quicker to pull their guns and shoot for no reason,
rather than, maybe if we just had that little bit of AC,
you could have somewhere to go chill when you're mad.
In your room, cool down, literally.
-I think what the pandemic has done for our community,
and for our nation, is to bring to light
that we absolutely have an undercurrent of poverty
in our community that many were not aware of.
And so, when you have restaurants and hotels
and other places
in our community of tourism and hospitality,
when they're no longer able to have the base of clients
they need to sustain,
that's gonna trickle down to a group
that was already really, really struggling.
And that's what we're seeing right now.
-Rose and her family left the Star Motel after it lost power.
They scraped up the last of their savings
for a week's stay at the Magic Castle Inn & Suites.
-I wish I was rich. -You already rich.
You're rich in personality, love, family.
We got a lot more than a lotta other people do.
be happy with what we got. You don't need to be rich.
-But there's been moments where I'm like,
"Okay, I'm just gonna drop out and work.
We need the money".
And other times where it's like,
"I'm just gonna quit my job, focus on school.
I need to get my grades up".
And then, as time goes, it's "Oh, my God.
I don't wanna go to work. I'm so tired".
Or "I don't wanna got to school. I'm so tired".
But you have to. You can't just quit.
You can't just stop.
-We're hardworking people that wanna make it.
The hotels are just not people that use drugs,
that they don't wanna get out of there,
people that are comfortable or don't wanna work.
No.
Most of us, we're just trying to make it through
and trying to find a better way of supplying to our kids
and not end up without a roof under our heads.
-No matter where we live, who we live by,
or who we're friends with,
it's just the environment we're in.
A lotta people have a good head on their shoulders,
just in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and they get judged for that.
And that's wrong because you don't know
what that person's going through.
Everybody sees, you know, the smiles and the happiness
and nobody really sees what's underneath all of that,
the pain and the agony
and everything that everybody has to go through,
on the daily, just to keep going.