When a polar vortex chilled western Kentucky this winter, a local school worker got a concerning call about the Noble Lodge Apartments, a motel complex in midtown Paducah that was housing more than 70 people.
Heather Anderson works with unhoused students in the Paducah Public Schools system as a McKinney-Vento liaison. She said she felt like she needed to take action after a late-night call from a family staying at Noble Lodge.
“I received a call at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night from a family that lived in the hotel. And they informed me that their electricity was off,” she said. “That prompted me to send that information on to Code Enforcement because it was 5 degrees that night.”
National Weather Service records indicate the measured temperature on Jan. 20, the night Anderson got the call, reached single digits and never got above freezing. Anderson said her call led to Noble Lodge Apartments being condemned in January, but she felt compelled to keep the ten local students staying at the complex safe.
“It was cold that night,” said Kimberly Egan, who was a guest at Noble Lodge Apartments when they were condemned. “It’s crazy because they turned the power off and it’s an electrical issue.”
Egan and her five kids had been staying in one of the rooms at Noble Lodge for around a year. She said someone who worked at the complex brought her family in, rent-free, after they had spent the summer homeless and camping in Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.
A free roof over their heads only lasted so long, though. Egan said she later verbally agreed to a nightly fee to stay at Noble Lodge, but the situation quickly changed.
“We was there for like a month or two for free, and she worked it out to where we was supposed to pay like thirty dollars a night,” Egan said. “Well then they ended up jacking our rent up within three days to like almost $90 a night.”
At $30 a day, Egan and her family would have been paying the equivalent of just over $900 a month to stay at Noble Lodge. That shift to a daily fee of $90 would mean Egan faced total monthly charges of around $2,700.
These nightly charges became a huge financial burden for Egan, and – though her family had shelter – the environment at the motel wasn’t always safe. Egan and others described continual rodent and insect infestations, water and power shut offs and uncontrolled animals living at the motel.
“My child had gotten bit by a dog there that had bit four people prior to her,” said Egan.
She said her 13-year-old daughter now has scars on her face from the bite. Egan said that when issues like these were raised with motel employees, they went unaddressed.
“They wouldn’t deal with the mice issue. They wouldn’t deal with the bug issue. They wouldn’t deal with the mold issue,” she said. “I had a bacterial infection in my lungs and was sick for weeks. My kids was sick for weeks from staying there.”
Despite the conditions at Noble Lodge, it filled a need for people like Egan and her kids. Noble Lodge didn’t require a credit check, a signed lease or a deposit, which can be prohibitive requirements for people living below the poverty line.
Paducah Cooperative Ministry, a local nonprofit, has been helping evicted Noble Lodge residents find temporary housing. PCM executive director Lacy Boling said people living in poverty can have a lot of difficulty getting access to long-term housing because of a history of eviction, incarceration or debt. She said many in low-income housing carry the weight of unpaid utility bills – some as much as $10,000.
“A lot of folks, if you’ve had an eviction in the last eight years you’re not eligible for low income housing. If you have been incarcerated in the last year you’re not eligible,” she said.
Compiling debts – from utilities as well as medical and other costs – can lead to evictions, harm credit and reduce the number of housing options open to low-income individuals and families. Boling said this is often what leads people to stay in places like Noble Lodge, where they pay astronomically higher prices than the average lease.
“You pay a premium for being able to have the service now,” Boling said. “It’s very expensive to be poor.”
The nonprofit leader said, with homelessness increasing nationally, places like Noble Lodge Apartments could be finding a larger market to thrive in.
Sitting among piles of donations sent in to help kids who had been staying at Noble Lodge, Anderson said she hopes this incident will get the City of Paducah to implement new regulations to protect residents like Egan and her children from business practices that take advantage of low-income families.
“Has it caused an enormous amount of strife? Yes, it has. Will it solve a problem? I hope it will.”
