Why are broke people in movies often living in hotels/motels?

39 comments

1. You don’t need a background check, good credit, a job, a downpayment, or a month’s rent to get a night in a hotel. In the long term it may be more than a mortgage, but short term, when yiu have no savings, it may be the only option. 

2. Motels are usually more expensive, but, finding someone to lease your apartment might require things like credit checks, criminal background checks, first and last months rent deposits, etc. The last one is especially a killer – I used to volunteer for a charity that would deliver hot meals to people living out of motels, and most of them worked. Just, most of them could never save up enough money for deposits. It’s like people who drive shitty beater cars that break down all the time – it’s an unaffordable one-time expense to buy a nicer, newer car, so instead they get nibbled to death. Being poor is expensive, as they say.

3. I had to pay $3,000 up front to move in my apartment. You don’t have to do that with a hotel

4. That really happens. Being broke means you may have terrible credit and/or an eviction and criminal history, which means it can be difficult to rent an apartment.

   People who live in motels may also have sporadic income, meaning they can pay a hotel for a week or two right now, but can’t pay 2 months of rent in advance and don’t have proof of income. Usually, these people also are homeless at times.

5. In addition, people who’ve suffered a disaster are often temporarily housed in a motel. If a fire renders your home unlivable, insurance (your own homeowners insurance or your landlord’s insurance) will pay for temporary housing in a motel.

   Some charities or welfare agencies will provide motel vouchers as well, I think.

6. Some cheaper motels offer discounted weekly or monthly rates

7. Have you ever heard the saying “It’s really expensive to be poor”?

   This is a great example of it. You are correct that even a cheap, crappy motel is probably going to be more expensive to stay in for a month than a low-end apartment that’s likely a little bigger. But think about what you actually have to do to get that apartment. You need to pass a credit check, pay a sum equal to 2-4 times the monthly rent up front (first/last, security deposit, realtor fee), and not have an eviction on your record. Someone who’s hit a financial bottom likely can’t do at least one, and probably all three, of those things. So they turn to the one place that will let them pay by the night/week without doing any sort of background check. Yes, it’s going to be more expensive, but paying more and living day to day is the only option available short of getting government help, which takes time and involves a lot of bureaucracy. For example, the Section 8 Housing Voucher waitlist where I am is 14 years long.

8. Yeah, there’s some really low grade cheap motels. I know of one that charges $50 a week. I fully expect it is infested with bedbugs.

   Edit. Correction it was $50 a week it’s now $75 a week.

9. They don’t ask for background checks, or deposit and honestly I’ve found motels in my city that the month it’s $800 wait cheaper than any 1 bed/studio apartment

10. Mostly because they don’t ask many questions, prefer cash only and can pay by the week.

11. Extended stay hotels in suburbs can cost a little bit under $2000 a month, often paid weekly, and without credit requirements.

    I’ve once had to ask a motel 6 about their weekly rates back in 2021, and they quoted that they would charge $275 a week if I stayed more than 2 weeks. (Afaik, in that state’s laws, the daily hotel tax drops out after something like 3 months, cutting off a few dollars a day after that)

    If the only other option is being in a car or on the streets, that’s painful but still viable as a stopgap measure.

12. Why are you surprised?

13. These places offer monthly rates that are much cheaper than the nightly rate. There is a nearby motel that advertises $399/month despite being $79/night. There is also no credit check, deposit, or background check.

14. Bad credit scores, felonies, and/or no family support to help out with a deposit, etc.

    You need lots of stuff to rent an apartment. Credit score, proof of income, first/last/and security deposit.

    It’s often more expensive to rent than own here.

15. Hotels are usually more expensive, but motels are very cheap. Theres a motel not too far from my town, maybe a 10 minute drive, that only charges 23 bucks a night ($690 a month); which is cheaper than what you can get for any apartment or house in my area.

16. It’s difficult to get an apartment if you can’t prove your income or show a clean criminal or credit history. Also, sometimes local governments in small towns have funds to put homeless people in hotel rooms before the police take them to the nearest big city and drop them off.

17. Motels are more common than hotels for this. And they’re cheaper than an apartment.

18. Do you have to bring your entire kitchen appliances with you to apartments in Germany?

19. A crappy flat or apartment will be cheaper per month, but getting together a hundred bucks for a couple nights in a shitty motel is a lot easier than getting a couple thousand together for first, last and deposit for an apartment. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the paperwork, background check, credit check, income check etc. If you’ve had an eviction in the past, your income is under the table(i.e. there’s nothing to prove you’re actually getting paid), you have a criminal record, or your credit score is in the toilet, you’re going to have a very very hard time qualifying to rent even a crappy apartment without like, 6 months rent and deposit up front. 

    So, motels. Week by week, day by day. 

20. This is not common but yeah it does sometimes happen to some of the absolute poorest in our society unfortunately

21. For a variety of reasons, there is an extreme lack of low square footage housing in the US (a lot of this comes down to minimum sq footage zoning requirements). Single bedroom apartments can be difficult to find outside of the luxury market and often charge rates comparable to a two-bedroom apartment.

    Basically, there are very few cheap single bedroom apartments which a recently fired / divorced / bankrupt person could inhabit.

    Run down motels often offer monthly rates which are competitive or outright cheaper than local single bedroom apartments.

22. Cheap motels can be cheaper than apartments, local and state governments often also use cheap hotels to house homeless.

23. Residential hotels are a form of low end housing. There are places built for single people called single room occupancy hotels built for such housing, and lower end motels sometimes fall into that use. They’re cheap, can be paid for by the week or month without a long term lease or security deposit, etc. a standard apartment might require.

24. In addition to all the stuff I’ve seen other posters say. I haven’t seen anyone point out that some places will give weekly or even monthly discounts.

    My wife and I lived in a hotel for about 3 months after we sold her condo and were house shopping. We only paid $180 per week so it really wasn’t bad for a whole month.

25. There’s a lot of temporary workers, transients, and other people who would pass background here in hotels. It’s a clear sign when the hotel says no vacancy but there’s no cars in the parking lot.

26. It’s very expensive to be poor.

27. A lot of the shittier motels and hotels might also charge weekly or monthly rates for the people who would stay long term. It’s a lot easier than finding apartment, which has become extremely difficult in the recent years.

28. Instead of replying individually: Thank you all for your answers!

29. Big cities often had cheap housing in hotels called SRO (single-room occupancy) but these have been disappearing and are almost all gone, now. And non-chain motels in unappealing/non-touristy locations may offer weekly and monthly rates, along with poor maintenance and shabbiness.

30. Being poor is expensive.

31. My family lived in a motel for a time when I was younger. They had a weekly rate that was favorable to most rents in the area.

32. When I lived in Las Vegas in the mid 00s, we had these places called ‘weekly hotels’ or just ‘the weeklies.’ They were like crappy furnished studio apartments, and if you paid a monthly rate it came in as cheaper than an okay-ish apartment. You could also pay nightly or weekly.

    There were many downsides, as you can imagine. The biggest downside was that if you were even a minute late with your rent, they’d lock you out and then they’d confiscate all your shit and sell it. So if you came up short, there was nothing to do but grab what you could and get outta Dodge before the stroke of midnight.

    I almost had to resort to a weekly because I was in between living arrangements for a few months. I ended up renting a room in a big empty house on a cul-de-sac where all the other houses were sitting empty. It was c. 2008, *right* when the real estate bubble had gone off like a nuke. Vegas got it worse than most places. If you saw that vampire movie with Christian Bale (a remake of ‘Fright Night’, IIRC), they set it in a Vegas neighborhood *exactly* like that for a reason. It was surreal, in a pre-apocalyptic kind of way.

    Well, a lot of the shittier weeklies in Downtown Vegas have been turned into hipster apartments. (Much like the SRO hotels in downtown Los Angeles.) They went ahead and kicked out the bottom rung on the ladder, because like, whatevs y’know?

33. Many motels will offer extended stay rates

34. I have often thought of this myself. Hotels are expensive!

    But I’ve also been around for a while, and I’ve noticed a few things. There are some really crappy hotels where you can get really cheap rates. There are hotels that were built back in my grandma’s day in a spot that was really good for a hotel way back then, but as the city grew it became this forgotten spit of a place in an underdeveloped part of town and nobody wants to be there and nobody wants to buy the property to renovate it. The people who run that hotel offer weekly rates and it’s a really crappy place that I never want to be, but it is cheap.

    I have been to hotels like that, and I’ve seen people that are living there. From young couples to families of six crammed into a space with just two queen beds.

    How long are they living there? I don’t know. I hope not for long. I’d assume it couldn’t be for long. But if you got foreclosed out of your home and need someplace to stay, it would at least be a temporary place to live while you get everything else sorted out.

    Sometimes all you need is a couple weeks before you can get back on your feet.

35. Around us, some places have long term stay motels. They aren’t pleasant and you’re surrounded by other people fallen equally on hard times. They say the most expensive room in a hotel business is the one that sits empty. Most of these places near me loom the part, however.

36. There’s no first and last month’s rental deposit, no cleaning deposit, you can pay by the day or week versus a month, no credit history check. No utility hook up fees, i.e. water, gas, electric. It’s fully furnished.

37. You should watch the movie The Florida Project for life about living in a hotel

38. I travel full time for work and frequently “live” in these sketch-as-fuck long term motels.

    Ball park of like $1200 to $2000 a month. Not much more than an apartment in some of those areas.

    And like others have said… bad luck, bad choices and you end up stuck in these situations unable to rent a proper place/sign a lease.

39. There are “hotels” in my area that don’t advertise, don’t take walk-in guests, and most of the people staying there are relatively permanent residents, which charge weekly or monthly rates equivalent to about $20 a night – cheaper than any apartment. They are utter fleabag roach pits, probably unsafe, probably in violation of any number of city code requirements. The authorities are never notified because the place is full of drug addicts, so even if you’re clean yourself, making waves will cause you a lot of trouble with the crackheads. Nobody really chooses to live there, but people can wind up locked out of more legitimate housing options because of cost, felony convictions, bad credit and the like.

    Also, if the _filmmakers_ are broke, getting a hotel room is their cheapest way to have some vaguely-plausible location to film their movie in.