Squeezed by high prices, a growing number of Americans find shelter in long-term motels
Melissa Krajewski used to come home from her job as a home health aide to the sounds of children pattering around the family’s three-bedroom apartment.
KINGSTON, N.Y. — Melissa Krajewski used to come home from her job as a home health aide to the sounds of children pattering around the family’s three-bedroom apartment. On weekends, she’d bake with her two girls and watch her son and husband toss around the football.
It was a routine, middle-class life she recounts like a distant memory. For nearly a year, Krajewski and her two daughters have been living in a budget motel room after their rent went up and they were unable to find another apartment they could afford in Kingston, New York, a small town among the rolling mountains of New York’s Hudson Valley.
Now, their meals are prepared in a microwave or small toaster oven, their food stored in a mini fridge that doesn’t have a working freezer and the dresser doubles as a pantry. The room has two full-size beds and a cot tucked in the corner where her 10-year-old daughter sleeps. The girls’ few remaining possessions line the room — a dozen well-worn stuffed animals along the beds, a Barbie dollhouse adjacent to the bathroom, and two makeshift vanities where her 13-year-old daughter keeps a small box of beauty supplies and a mirror decorated with photos.
Rating: 5