CBS News
Extended-stay hotels, a growing option for poor families, can lead to health problems for kids
Stone Mountain, Georgia — As principal of Dunaire Elementary School, Sean Deas has seen firsthand the struggles faced by children living in extended-stay hotels. About 10% of students at his school, just east of Atlanta, live in one.
The children, Deas said, often have been exposed to violence on hotel properties, exhibit aggression or anxiety from living in a crowded single room, and face food insecurity because some hotel rooms don’t have kitchens.
“Social trauma is the biggest challenge” when students first arrive, Deas said. “We hear a lot about sleep problems.” To meet students’ needs, Deas developed a schoolwide program featuring counselors, a food pantry and special protocols for handling those who may fall asleep in class.
“Beyond the teaching, there’s a social part,” he said. “We have to find ways to support the families as well.”
Extended-stay hotels are often a last resort for low-income families trying to find housing. Nationally, more than 100,000 students lived in extended-stay hotels in 2022, according to the Department of Education, though officials say that is likely an undercount. Children living in hotels are considered homeless under federal law, and in some Atlanta-area counties about 40% of homeless students live in this kind of housing, according to local officials.
And with rising rents and evictions, and decreased access to federal public housing, the use of extended-stay hotels as a long-term option is becoming more frequent. Like other forms of homelessness, hotel living can lead to — or exacerbate — physical and mental health problems for children, say advocates for families and researchers who study homelessness.
In the Atlanta area, inspections of extended-stay hotels have revealed ventilation issues, insect infestations, mold, and other health threats. Children living there also can experience or witness crime and gun violence. The increasing use of extended-stay hotels is a warning sign, observers said, a reflection of the lack of sufficient affordable housing policy in the U.S.
And the crisis is having “lifelong consequences,” said Sarah Saadian of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “The only way that we can really address that shortage is if there are significant federal resources at scale. Build more housing and bridge the gap between rents and wages.”
Often, evictions force families into hotels — and can keep them trapped there. Many landlords refuse to rent to people with evictions in their credit history, even if the tenant isn’t responsible for the displacement, said Joy Monroe, founder and CEO of the Single Parent Alliance & Resource Center, or SPARC, a nonprofit group in metro Atlanta that has helped hundreds of families move from hotels to apartments or rental homes.
Black women and other women of color, often with kids, are evicted at much higher rates and are more likely to find themselves living in extended-stay hotels, advocates say.
Some residents are also families fleeing domestic violence, they say.
Hotels often don’t require security deposits, application fees or background checks, thus providing immediate relief for families seeking shelter. While there are higher-end options, the average rate for an economy-class extended-stay room was $56.68 a night during the first three months of 2024, according to the Highland Group, a research firm that focuses on the hotel sector — which works out to more than $1,700 a month.
And while the rooms offer respite from other forms of homelessness — like sleeping in a car or in a tent — a hotel “is no place to raise children,” said Michael Bryant, CEO of New Life Community Alliance, which helps families in South Dekalb, a part of metro Atlanta, move from hotels to homes.
Children living in hotels are often behind on vaccinations, and they may end up in the emergency room because of delays in care, said Gary Kirkilas, a pediatrician in Phoenix who helps children, teens and families who are presently homeless or at risk of homelessness. About 75% of children with unstable housing whom he sees have at least one developmental delay, and others experience significant emotional and behavioral issues.
Tanazia Scott, who has bounced between two extended-stay hotels for several months, said her three children “feel depressed and upset” over hotel life.
An eviction sent Kassandra Norman, 58, and her two daughters into a monthslong journey of staying in Atlanta-area hotels. For three months, they slept in a car outside a convenience store. “It’s hard to do homework in a car and in the hotel,” said 19-year-old Kazuri Taylor, Norman’s younger daughter.
Some hotels prohibit kids from playing outside in their parking lots, leading to additional stress, advocates say. That was the reason Yvonne Thomas, 45, and her family were evicted from an extended-stay hotel in DeKalb County, she said: “They put us out for nothing.”
And there are other problems. More than a dozen students at Dunaire Elementary live on an extended-stay property called Haven Hotel. In August, DeKalb County’s code enforcement division said the hotel had “not maintained minimum life safety standards.” Roaches and spiders live in rooms and breezeways, according to state health inspection reports. Residents say they have been charged $1 for a roll of toilet paper.
The hotel’s owner and manager could not be reached for comment after multiple attempts.
“No one is talking about these families,” said Sue Sullivan, a community advocate and a volunteer with the Motel to Home coalition in Atlanta, who brings toys, bookbags, food and toiletries on her hotel visits.
A February public health inspection at another DeKalb County hotel found several rooms with poor ventilation, insect infestation, and mold, among other potential health threats. In May, two people were fatally shot there.
Children who witness violence can develop anxiety, depression, and other disorders, said Charles Moore, director of the Urban Health Initiative at Emory University School of Medicine. “They can feel emotional aftershocks,” said Moore, who has visited Atlanta-area hotels.
Closing such hotels, however, can hurt families, given the shortage of affordable housing, the absence of national federal renter protections, and a dearth of places to go, said Terri Lewinson, an associate professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Extended-stay hotels do “offer a low-barrier option for families who have no other options,” she said.
To alleviate the housing problem, county officials and nonprofit organizations around the country have been creatively filling the gap. In the Seattle area, for example, King County officials purchased hotels and converted them into affordable housing, said Mark Skinner of the Highland Group.
In metro Atlanta, SPARC and the local United Way’s Motel to Home offer funding to help people transition into an apartment.
In DeKalb County, where Dunaire Elementary School is located, more than a third of the 1,300 homeless students live in hotels, according to Commissioner Ted Terry.
“I hope we can rescue the children,” he said. “It’s not a safe environment for them.”
Advocates who seek to help people living in hotels propose the construction of more affordable housing and stronger protections for renters against eviction. The federal government has failed to invest in repairs needed to maintain current public housing units, and 25-year-old legislation effectively prohibits the construction of new public housing.
It’s also “extremely fast, easy and cheap” to evict tenants in Georgia, said Taylor Shelton, an associate professor of geosciences at Georgia State University, whose research focuses on social inequalities and urban spaces. “The playing field is tilted heavily toward landlords.”
Under such circumstances, the cycle of poverty is difficult to break, said Jamie Rush, a senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Most parents would want their kids in a safe, stable home,” Rush said. “You can’t budget your way out of poverty.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, with the Nobel committee lauding the “grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki” for its work to “achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
The 2024 Peace Prize was awarded against a backdrop of devastating conflicts raging in the world, notably in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan.
Alfred Nobel stated in his will that the prize should be awarded for “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Since 1901, 104 Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded, mostly to individuals but also to organizations that have been seen to advance peace efforts.
Last year’s prize went to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for her advocacy of women’s rights and democracy, and against the death penalty. The Nobel committee said it also was a recognition of “the hundreds of thousands of people” who demonstrated against “Iran’s theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women.”
In the Middle East, persistently spiraling levels of violence over the past year have killed tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children and women. The war, sparked by a bloody raid into Israel by Hamas-led militants on Oct. 7, 2023 that left about 1,200 people dead, mostly civilians, has spilled out into the wider region.
The war in Gaza has killed more than 42,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count but says more than half are women and children. In Lebanon, more than 1,400 people have been killed, with thousands more injured and around 1 million displaced since mid-September, when the Israeli military dramatically expanded its offensive against Hezbollah.
The war in Ukraine, sparked by Russia’s invasion, is heading toward its third winter with a staggering loss of human life on both sides.
The U.N. has confirmed more than 11,000 Ukrainian civilian dead, but that doesn’t take into account as many as 25,000 Ukrainians believed to have died during the Russian capture of the city of Mariupol or unreported deaths in the occupied territories.
Western officials have estimated Russian military casualties around 600,000, with perhaps 150,000 dead, and public reports put Russian civilian dead around 150, mostly in the border region of Belgorod.
Ukrainian military deaths were last announced in February at 31,000 and the president has said there are six wounded for every soldier killed.
On the African continent, Sudan has been devastated by a 17-month war that that has so far killed more than 20,000 peopleand forced more than 8 million people from their homes, while roughly another 2 million were already displaced within the country before hostilities broke out.
The Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). Unlike the other Nobel prizes that are selected and announced in Stockholm, founder Alfred Nobel decreed the peace prize be decided and awarded in Oslo by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The Nobel season ends Monday with the announcement of the winner of the economics prize, formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
CBS News
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.
PITTSBURGH, Pa. (KDKA) — The northern lights are expected to be visible again throughout parts of the United States on Friday night.
When the northern lights, or the aurora borealis, are visible, the best way to see them is to find a dark spot away from bright lights, allow time to enable your eyes adjust to the darkness and look toward the north.
The northern lights show up best in photos.
Here’s how to use night mode on your phone’s camera to try to capture photos of the colorful auroras.
How do I turn on night mode on an iPhone?
If you are using an iPhone, Apple says the default settings will have night mode turn on automatically “when the camera detects a low-light environment.”
When night mode is active, an icon will turn yellow in the top left corner of your screen.
A number will show up next to that icon showing you how long it will take for the photo to take.
You can adjust how long the exposure will last by tapping the arrow that shows up above the viewfinder.
How do I turn on night mode on an Android phone?
Starting night mode on an Android device will depend on the type of device you have.
On a Samsung Galaxy device, a yellow moon icon will pop up in the bottom right of your screen. On a Pixel device, you can tap Night Light, then tap Capture and hold your phone still for a few seconds. In the Google Camera app, you can turn Night mode on by tapping settings and turning the mode on or off.
Will the northern lights be visible where I live?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued its “Aurora Forecast” for Friday with numerous parts of the United States in the range of potentially being able to see the bright auroras of the northern lights.
Space Weather Prediction Center
The map of the aurora forecast shows that northern parts of the country have a better chance of seeing the auroras.
A view line that shows “the southern extent of where aurora might be seen on the northern horizon” stretches from Washington, D.C. across the Midwest and through Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York.
The northern lights were on display on Thursday night
The northern lights were visible all throughout the country on Thursday night.
Mario Carrasco
Photos of the northern lights were captured in places like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
The colorful auroras had green, purple, red and pink hues scattered throughout the skies.
What causes the northern lights?
When a geomagnetic storm occurs, solar wind is sent toward Earth.
Charged protons and electrons follow Earth’s magnetic field and enter the atmosphere where the magnetic fields are the weakest: the poles.
The electrons smash into all the different molecules that make up our atmosphere, creating a dazzling display of colors in the sky.
Deer Park, Texas — At least two workers at a Houston-area oil refinery were killed Thursday when hydrogen sulfide leaked at the plant, setting off urgent warnings for nearby residents to stay indoors before authorities later determined that the public wasn’t in danger.
Nearly three dozen other people were either transported to hospitals or treated at the scene, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said. Hours after the leak began, Gonzalez said the area was still unsafe for investigators to enter and that officials may not be able to get inside until Friday.
The plant is operated by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, and located in the suburb of Deer Park.
Adrees Latif / REUTERS
Gonzalez said the gas release happened during work on a flange at the facility, which is part of a cluster of oil refineries and plants that makes Houston the nation’s petrochemical heartland.
Pemex said in a statement that investigations were underway and that operations had been “proactively halted” at two units with the aim of mitigating the impact.
Local officials issued a shelter-in-place order but lifted it hours later after air monitoring showed no risk to the surrounding community, Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton said.
The chief meteorologist at CBS Houston affiliate KHOU-TV, David Paul, said the wind was calm Thursday night.
Hydrogen sulfide is a foul-smelling gas that can be toxic at high levels.
“Other than the smell, we have not had any verifiable air monitoring to support that anything got outside the facility,” Mouton said.
Television news crews showed multiple ambulances and emergency vehicles at the scene. Gonzalez had originally posted on the social platform X that one person was transported to a hospital by helicopter, but officials later said at a news conference that no one was airlifted.
The leak caused the second shelter-in-place orders in Deer Park in the span of weeks. Last month, a pipeline fire that burned for four days forced surrounding neighborhoods to evacuate.
2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese group for anti-nuclear weapons work
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.
At least 2 killed, several injured when Texas Pemex plant leaks hydrogen sulfide
2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese group for anti-nuclear weapons work
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.