Rock Hill City Council approves new rules to restrict people from living in hotels
Rock Hill on Monday moved forward with new limitations on hotel guests to cut down on police and medical calls for service.
The City Council voted unanimously for zoning code changes that city officials said would curb drug overdoses, panhandling and loitering caused by people living in hotels. Critics said the move will harm hotel owners and people who don’t have a permanent residence.
The city already caps stays at 30 consecutive nights in any hotel or combination of hotels, but the extended rules will add a second limit of 60 total nights within a 180-day period, with some exceptions. Residents in York and surrounding counties also will be prohibited from renting hotel rooms with exterior doors in Rock Hill since those hotels create more service calls, according to the city.
Future hotel owners will have to meet with police about the designs. New hotels must build rooms that open into an interior hallway and install security cameras.
Camping and self-storage sites also will be affected.
The regulation will undergo revision before council votes to implement it, so Rock Hill residents won’t experience any immediate effect. Council members said they expect city staff to collaborate with hotel owners and nonprofit workers on these revisions.
The vote diverged from the Rock Hill Planning Commission’s recommendation to reject the proposal because it was too much information to consider at once and lacked sufficient community input.
Several council members said they did not agree with everything in the regulation, but approving it allows the city to continue working toward a solution to a serious problem.
“It won’t grow stale. It won’t disappear. Nobody’s gonna sweep it under the rug,” councilman John Black said. “It will get everybody together.”
How new hotel regulations will impact people without homes
Police had more than 2,800 calls for service across 31 Rock Hill hotels in 2024, according to city data. Most of those calls came from the Riverview Road area.
“I think the purpose, as I understand these edits to this ordinance, are to make sure that the guests ... have a minimum level of cleanliness, quality and security,” said Mayor John Gettys.
The new rules will:
- Allow room inspections upon request by the city with owner consent, subpoena or warrant, or urgent circumstances
- Require additional information on guests that is available to the city
- Make hotels display information on addiction, housing and human trafficking in public areas
- Prohibit people from living in self-storage units, aside from the site operator
- Prohibit anyone from camping at a campground for more than 14 nights out of a 60-day period, aside from one full-time campground employee
- Restrict people from camping on their private property to two days per month for single-family residences and rural farms
For hotels, exceptions already exist for people relocating to the area for employment, short-term workers, homeowners undertaking a large remodeling project and people who suffered total or significant damage to their homes. On-site living space for a hotel owner or manager is allowed, too.
Guests have to prove they have a permanent residence in order to receive those exceptions. Then they can stay up to six months. The city can choose to allow longer stays, too.
The new regulations will add another one-time exception for people without a home to stay in hotels up to 90 nights in a year as long as they are accepted into a city program that helps them get permanent housing.
But according to advocates who work with people who are experiencing housing insecurity, that isn’t nearly enough.
A majority of people experiencing homelessness go more than a year without a permanent residence, according to Rev. Emily Sutton, the executive director of Bethel Shelters. Sutton addressed the board during Monday’s meeting.
Gettys said several affordable housing developments will open this year, bringing more than 500 units online. That won’t be enough to meet the needs of the displaced if hotels stop housing long-term residents, Sutton said. Those units are already spoken for, she said, and won’t be housing any of her shelter’s most vulnerable tenants.
“The root cause of homelessness is not drugs, it’s the housing problem,” Sutton said.
Homeless service providers in Lancaster, York and Chester counties don’t have enough shelters available or funding to accommodate everybody in need who is relying on hotels for long-term stays, Melissa Carlyle told the planning commission during its Jan. 7 meeting. Carlyle is the operations director for the nonprofit Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless.
That means many of those people could not access housing elsewhere, she said.
“There simply aren’t enough beds,” Carlyle said. “Sometimes there truly isn’t another alternative.”
Hotel owners say ‘extreme’ regulation change will hurt business
Hotel owners weren’t happy with the proposed changes, either.
Business people said their livelihoods were at risk of ruin should the new regulations take effect and felt the city hadn’t adequately explored less “extreme” possibilities. They suggested more lighting and stronger collaboration between law enforcement and hotel owners as a start.
Malay Patel runs the Royal Regency Inn with his family, who migrated to the U.S. eight year ago and started their business. Patel, his parents and his wife clean rooms every day because they can’t afford to hire more help.
Patel said he rents a majority of his 38 rooms to locals on any given night. They stay an average of two to four weeks at a time and don’t cause any problems. Restraining their ability to rent would threaten his financial stability and possibly cost him his business, he said.
“We do not want to earn our income from giving rooms to bad people, but we also don’t want to lose our income, business and livelihood,” Patel said.
Bill Butler, a Charlotte-based lawyer representing Extended Stay America, said the regulation would hurt businesses with corporate clientele, too. Short-term workers would have to request approval from the city if their stays exceeded the limit, creating a “record keeping nightmare,” especially if their trips don’t have solid dates at the time of planning.
Dilip Patel, owner of the Microtel Inn and Suites on Riverview Road, said he felt the changes were “railroaded in” because businesses weren’t given enough time to provide feedback.
“The major thing is that you’re saying that the local people can’t stay in the hotels,” Dilip Patel said. “We’ve got problems, but let’s solve it together and figure out how to do it.”
This story was originally published January 27, 2025 at 11:45 PM.
CORRECTION: Bill Butler is a Charlotte-based lawyer representing Extended Stay America. A previous version of this article spelled his name incorrectly.
