by Spencer Norris, New York Focus

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New York Focus, an investigative news outlet reporting on New York. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week, and sign up for New York Focus’ newsletter here.

Jasmine Stradford sat on her porch near Binghamton, New York, with toys, furniture, garbage bags full of clothing and other possessions piled up around her. She and her partner were being evicted after falling behind on rent.

So last June, they and their children — then ages 3, 12 and 15 — turned to New York’s emergency shelter system for help. It was built to provide homeless residents not only beds, but also food, help finding permanent housing and sometimes child care so parents can find work, attend school or look for apartments.

Stradford and her family received almost none of that. Instead of placing them in a shelter, the Broome County Department of Social Services cycled them through four roadside hotels over three months, where they mostly had to fend for themselves.

“I remember staring at my kids, thinking that I’d failed them,” Stradford said. “Then I remember going to DSS and being completely dehumanized.”

Stradford’s family was part of a growing trend: In the past few years, hotels have quietly become the state’s predominant response to homelessness outside New York City. New York Focus and ProPublica found that the state’s social services agencies placed just under half the 34,000 individuals and families receiving emergency shelter outside the city in fiscal year 2024 in hotels — up from 29% in 2018. The change was most pronounced in Broome County, where hotel cases more than quintupled.

Statewide spending on hotels more than tripled over that period to $110 million, according to an analysis of state temporary housing data by the news organizations. In total, hotels outside New York City were paid about $420 million to shelter unhoused people from April 2017 to September 2024.

It’s a makeshift arrangement that provides people a roof over their head but little else. State regulations exempt hotels from providing the same services that families are supposed to receive in the shelter system.

The hotels are “less supportive, less conducive for good health outcomes, good education outcomes,” said Adam Bosch, CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a policy research nonprofit. “If our ultimate goal is to get people moving back toward independence, sticking them in a hotel on a hillside away from services, away from schools, away from transportation networks is not a great strategy.”

Homelessness in New York City received intense media coverage as the migrant crisis became fodder in the presidential election. But far less attention has been paid to the homeless population throughout the rest of New York, which far surpasses most other states on its own.

Few of the migrants were relocated to hotels outside the city. Instead, the spike in hotel housing stems from a combination of soaring rent, dozens of shelter closures and what housing advocates and industry representatives said was a botched response to the end of the state’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium in 2022. After the moratorium ended, landlords began evicting tenants at rates exceeding previous years. With fewer shelters and more people in need, the number of individuals and families placed in hotels shot up.

Barbara Guinn, the commissioner of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said in an interview that her agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use for emergency shelter. The trend has been scarcely mentioned at legislative hearings in Albany.

But OTDA, which supervises the county social services offices, has long known about the problems the hotels present. In early 2020, state auditors warned the agency that it wasn’t adequately overseeing shelters, including hotels used as temporary housing. OTDA acknowledged that hotels present challenges because they don’t have on-site support services or the same level of supervision as shelters.

Watch video ➜

Rules clarifying the requirement that temporary housing recipients in hotels receive shelter-like services have been on OTDA’s regulatory agenda for at least four years. But the agency, and lawmakers who oversee it, stood by as hotel housing increased. Guinn said she couldn’t “provide insight” on why the agency never formally proposed the rules, but she committed to advancing them this year. The Broome County Department of Social Services did not make its commissioner, Nancy Williams, available for an interview and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Reporting across the state, the news organizations found people living for months and sometimes years in hotels, doing what they can to get by. Families share beds while their belongings fill the corners of their rooms. Without kitchens and barred from using most appliances, they trek down shoulderless highways to grocery stores or scour food pantries for anything they can cook in a microwave. They squish cockroaches skittering in dressers. And hotels often force them to move out every few weeks, keeping stability out of reach.

The four hotels that Stradford’s family was placed in last summer collectively made about $10,000 sheltering it over three months — more than what the family owed in back rent. That works out to more than twice the monthly fair market rent for a four-bedroom apartment in Binghamton at the time.

Nearly half of all payments to hotels were for more than twice the counties’ FMR.

© ProPublica