[Marxism] In America, Even Workers Live at the White House...

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3413-2005Feb6.html

Shelter From the Soaring Costs*
For Working Poor Priced Out of Area Housing, Charles County's White
House Motel Becomes a Welcome Haven

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 7, 2005; Page B01

There are no rose gardens at the White House Motel.

Not anymore, at least, since Interstate 95 was built and the tourists
who used to stop for crab cakes found a more direct route north and
south. But the motel still stands, hugging Route 301 near ramshackle
vegetable stands in the swampy oak forests of Southern Maryland.

Near the end of the road, just before the bridge to Virginia, the White
House rises up to catch those with nowhere left to go.

Overnight guests occupy just 10 of the 45 rooms. The rest are filled by
the working poor, long-term residents who pay $175 a week and stay for
months, sometimes years. On weekday mornings, school buses rumble into
the parking lot, which is pointed out from the highway by a dented
arrow, to pick up nearly two dozen children.

The residents aren't there for luxuries. A maid cleans only the rooms of
overnight guests. Some rooms are homey, filled with bookshelves and
pets. Others have food stains on the carpet and a haze of cigarette smoke.

Still, there's rarely a vacancy. The manager, Linda Cooper, said she
could draw up a long waiting list from all the phone calls that come in.
They are from people who work full time -- in restaurants, warehouses,
factories -- and yet cannot secure housing in a region where home prices
have skyrocketed and apartments are scarce.

"There just wasn't anything else I could afford," said Tina Burke, 29,
who, with her three children, has lived at the motel in Charles County
for 18 months. "That's the only reason I'm here."

Poverty is not as obvious in Washington's less populated suburbs as it
is in the District. But operators of social service agencies said rents
have increased so rapidly that people are driven to find shelter in all
sorts of places: their cars, unheated trailers, even the woods. In one
extreme case, a Charles woman locked her two young daughters inside a
commercial storage unit, which she had turned into a makeshift
residence, while she went to work. She pleaded guilty to child
endangerment Friday and will be sentenced in April.

"The hotels and motels become our shelters," said Sandy Washington,
executive director of Lifestyles Inc., a nonprofit group that places
about five people a week at motels in Charles. "If there's nowhere else
for people to go, we have no other alternatives."

The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the county is $1,218, too
expensive for 54 percent of local renters, according to the Maryland
Center for Community Development.

For Burke, weeks of searching produced just one apartment in her price
range. It was renting for $750 a month. With an income of less than
$21,000 a year, she said, she didn't meet the minimum income
requirement. She said other landlords denied her because of bad credit.
She owes thousands in medical bills from a cervical cancer operation.

When Burke checked in at the White House Motel in 2003, she said she'd
be there a month. She's a hard worker -- six nights a week, she mixes
margaritas at a Mexican restaurant. And she's nobody's fool -- she
graduated from Leonardtown High School in St. Mary's County. "I got a
4.0," she said of her grade-point average.

She looked into subsidized housing, but Charles, like the rest of the
region, is heavily backlogged. A waiting list for the housing voucher
program, formerly known as Section 8, has more than 2,500 names on it
and takes three to five years to move through.

In Charles, they weren't even taking new applicants for 17 months
because a fire gutted the old Department of Community Services building
and destroyed most of the records.

On Nov. 1, the day the waiting list reopened, Burke drove her dented
Chevrolet Celebrity past the La Plata office, saw more than 100 people
stretched along the sidewalk, and kept going -- back to the motel, where
she cooks on a hot plate and makes calls from a pay phone by the highway.

*'Like a Big Family'
*

None of the inconveniences of life at the White House -- no car, no
cable TV, no privacy with her boyfriend -- bothers Anita Grimes all that
much. Before arriving in November, she spent eight months in a homeless
shelter in Hughesville.

She can handle a motel, she said.

"To me, this is like an efficiency apartment," said Grimes, 35, who
lives on food stamps and her boyfriend's salary as a heavy machinery
operator. "It's not so bad: there's heat, running water, you don't have
to pay for utilities."

It can be a caring place. One late December evening, her neighbor,
Darlene Butler, flitted in and out, sharing Grimes's room and portable
oven to bake a turkey. Butler's daughter, Amayia, 6, and Grimes's
daughter, Leila Coles, 4, drew in coloring books on the floor. Across
the parking lot, a miniature Christmas tree stood near a window,
illuminated by a string of colored lights. The motel almost felt cozy.

When the turkey was finished, another neighbor gave Butler a ride to a
nearby church so she could ask for help with the rent money.

"We're kind of like a big family here," said Grimes. "We're all in the
same boat."

The residents know about want and struggle, about not quite having
enough. And because of this, Grimes thinks that the prejudices of the
outside world mean a little less at the White House. There is just one
class: poor.

"You don't judge someone for living in a motel when you're also living
in a motel," she said. "We help each other out here."

The mothers watch each other's children, and the kids sleep over in
their friends' rooms. Neighbors crisscross the parking lot searching for
Cajun chicken spice, a cup of mayonnaise, a bummed cigarette. One
neighbor gave Grimes's daughter a bicycle for Christmas. Volunteer
firemen drove through at Christmastime with their Dalmatian, dispensing
dolls and toys for the kids.

On Saturdays, volunteers from a church bring breads, cakes and canned
foods to the rooms.

"Of course, I don't want to spend the rest of my life here," Grimes
said. "I want to give my daughter a place where she can play. Where she
can have her own bedroom. But until that day comes, this is home."

*Little Nevada
*

A half-century ago, a far different crowd flocked to the White House.

Built in 1953, the motel's colonial-style "tourist cabins" catered to
waves of postwar vacationers on family road trips. Motel construction
was booming along the Route 301 corridor. Thirteen years earlier, the
Potomac River Toll Bridge, since renamed, connected Southern Maryland to
Virginia and created a main thoroughfare for East Coast travelers.

Southern Maryland's legalization of slot machine gambling in 1949 also
brought hordes of tourists to the neon lights along Route 301. The strip
got a nickname: "Little Nevada." The White House, with its
cupola-crowned, three-story central office, had slots machines then, as
well as a restaurant featuring the popular crab cakes, and red rose
bushes that lined the swimming pool by the highway.

"All the tourists stopped there because the food was really good," said
Millie Marsh, 77, a former White House manager. "It didn't look like it
does now."

But in 1968, the neon went dark: Slots were outlawed that year. Three
years later, the opening of Interstate 95 between the Washington and
Baltimore beltways sucked travelers off Route 301. Restaurants and
nightclubs, once flush with tourist dollars, began to go broke.

In the past decade, several historic motels in Charles closed down. The
Stardust became an apartment building. The Heidelberg was replaced by a
Home Depot. The Martha Washington and the Parkway were shuttered.

"For these old places, the ground became worth more than the motel,"
said Carl Baldus, who, with his partners, opened the Holiday Inn in
Waldorf in 1979, pushing old motels further into obsolescence. "They
started to tear them down and build other things."

When businessman Frank Monopoli bought the White House in 1990 for
$630,000, one-fourth of the rooms were uninhabitable, he said. The
swimming pool was filled in, the restaurant closed, the rose bushes long
gone.

"It was in real bad shape," he said. "There were holes in the walls,
plumbing and heating problems, rugs deteriorated, missing furniture."

He put in new drywall, fixed the septic problems, replaced the siding.
Now the roof shingles are being repaired. Although he hopes to return to
nightly rentals someday, Monopoli knows the long-term renters provide a
steady stream of business that otherwise would be absent. Other motels
along Route 301, such as the Thunderbird and Town 'N Country, serve a
similar clientele these days.

Some tourists still come for bass fishing tournaments on the Potomac or
for motocross races at Budds Creek racetrack in the summer, but Monopoli
has rooms to fill year-round.

"People passing through want top-notch motels. They'll wind up down at
the Holiday Inn or the Hampton Inn, not at my place," Monopoli said.
"And if I said tomorrow, 'Move out or rent by the night,' you'd have a
lot of people on the street."

*An Unsettled Scene
*

On a recent night, being a mother in a motel had Terry Stinger at her
wits' end. For five months, she has shared a room with her husband and
three sons while looking for another place to live.

Calm is rare when the children are home from school. Stinger's
9-year-old, Steven, jumped around the room like Spider-Man, pretending
to shoot webs from his wrists. Cursing from a couple next door mixed
with the crying of Stinger's infant, Brandon, who lay sprawled on the
bedcovers.

The family is waiting for better days. Stinger's husband, Joseph, is due
to get a raise at the Beretta factory in Accokeek. He makes $300 a week,
more than half of which goes for rent.

"I'm going to help my dad when I grow up. Get a mechanic job," Steven
said. "We're going to get a house."

On a hot plate back by the bathroom, the pork chops needed tending.
Stringer grabbed the frying pan. "Y'all are plucking my last nerve. . .
," she said. "This is what I deal with every day."

/ Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report./


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