‘Where are we going to go?’ Rock Hill’s proposed hotel limits leave families vulnerable
Quenanecha Williams remembers the cold days when she’d take her daughter to the top of the Interstate 77 overpass near Cherry Road.
They’d bundle up as best as they could and wait for cars to pass by, just to catch a flicker of warmth from the exhaust.
She remembers the nights when they had no bed to come home to, so she told her daughter they were going camping and squeeze into the car for sleep.
She remembers being homeless, which is why she takes a moment to smile at her neighbors living on the street and offer them a bite to eat if she has some to spare.
“That used to be me,” she said.
She fears it could soon be her again.
Rock Hill is crafting new rules to restrict who can stay in hotels and for how long— a move that has the potential to displace families who rely on the rooms for stable housing without affordable alternatives. Williams’ credit score is too low for most rental properties, and she doesn’t have the requisite three months rent to pay upfront as a deposit, she said. She pays $65 a night at the hotel.
The city already caps hotel stays at 30 consecutive nights per year. That hasn’t been enforced, but officials want to crack down with an updated set of rules in 2025 they say will curb illicit behaviors like drug use, panhandling and loitering that are rampant at hotels.
Rock Hill City Council in January unanimously supported the first reading of an ordinance that would limit stays at any combination of hotels in the city to 30 consecutive nights or 60 total nights in a six month period. York County residents would also be restricted from renting hotel rooms with exterior doors, which city data shows generate a disproportionate number of police calls.
Council will vote on a final draft after the ordinance undergoes some revisions with the help of community groups who work in housing and shelters.
“They have so many bright ideas for the rich people in Rock Hill. They have nothing for the people that’s struggling every day, paycheck to paycheck,” said Williams, 36. “It really breaks my heart to know that every 30 days, there’s a chance I would have to uproot my child.”
City leaders discussed making hotels track guest information and share it with the city to monitor whether visitors overstay their welcome. It’s unclear how that process would work.
Williams has already stayed at a hotel off Riverview Road for six months, leaving her wondering what comes next and whether her 9-year-old daughter will lose her sense of stability.
“Taking it away from her, that would mentally break her,” Williams said. “Because where are we going to go?”
Rock Hill hotel crime
Police responded to more than 2,800 calls for service across 31 Rock Hill hotels in 2024, city data shows. A majority of those calls came from the area near Riverview and Cherry roads. But data presented to the City council did not specify what those calls were for or whether they related to crimes.
“The level of criminal activity in that corridor, the Riverview corridor especially, is just not acceptable,” Mayor John Gettys said. “We’ve gotta get serious about everybody living in and feeling safe in Rock Hill.”
Some hotel owners are part of the problem because they aren’t “doing their fair share” to enforce the rules and prevent crime from happening, Gettys said.
While city rules prohibit people from using hotels as residences, a review of guest registers during the first half of 2024 found that every Riverview hotel had guests who had exceeded the 30 day limit.
The hotel where Williams is staying had more than 160 calls to police last year. Still, she said it’s the safest she has felt in a long time.
The hotel brings a sense of community she isn’t used to because many guests are children and mothers just like her, she said.
Kids play outside and catch the bus together for school. The owners invite her in for dinner if they see she hasn’t purchased food lately, and they worry when she’s away for extended periods of time.
“I love the people who run this hotel because they care,” Williams said. “That’s the type of safety that a person should feel in a facility where they’re trying to rehabilitate.”
Shelter shortage persists
Despite her own uncertain future, Williams is concerned about her neighbors: the ordinary folks who want to live peacefully, together, without being swept up as collateral damage in a fight against crime.
“People who don’t cause these hotels any problems, we have to suffer, but it’s not even our fault,” Williams said. “They need to do better and put their focus off the hotels and on better resources.”
Rules could have unintended consequences for people facing financial hardship, according to advocates who work with people experiencing homelessness.
“We don’t know how many people are really utilizing the hotel and motels long term who would be out on the streets or in need of emergency shelter if hotels weren’t an option,” Melissa Carlyle, the executive director of Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless, told The Herald. “There’s not a tent outside or someone sleeping on a park bench, but they’re out there experiencing homelessness, and we just don’t know about it.”
Rock Hill lacks enough shelters for families, Carlyle said. They “almost never” meet community needs and have limitations, like age or gender, on who they can take in. Families sometimes choose whether to split up for the night with a roof over their heads or stay together on the streets.
Family Promise, a shelter for families, has a waitlist of about 180 households, Carlyle said. Boys over the age of 13 often aren’t eligible due to public safety concerns.
Life House Women’s Shelter only has 36 beds, which fill up fast on a first come, first served basis.
Bethel Shelters for men has 68 beds, Carlyle said. The shelter works with local churches to lift that limit during colder months so everybody has a warm place to sleep. But for the majority of the year, people get turned away.
Rev. Jeffrey Hayes, the senior minister at Oakland Baptist Church, wrote a letter to City Council saying the situation stemmed from a lack of affordable housing options and insufficient resources for residents facing unemployment, mental health challenges or substance abuse issues. His church often hosts overflow for Bethel Shelters.
“The ordinance, while perhaps well-intentioned, would not address the root causes of homelessness in Rock Hill,” Hayes said in the Jan. 16 letter. “Instead, limiting hotel/motel stays would likely exacerbate the situation by displacing vulnerable residents who currently rely on these accommodations as a last resort for stable housing.”
New Rock Hill hotel rules
Williams moved from Virginia with her father more than a decade ago. Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, he wanted a “slow place to die” and landed in Rock Hill, she said.
He died in 2013. She had her daughter two years later.
Williams battled drug addiction for a time, which led her to do “dumb things” that she’s working to remove from her record. But that takes time and money, and her first priority is keeping her daughter fed and sheltered. She works in a hair salon and is saving money, little by little, to improve her family’s life.
“Working for myself and trying to be a better me is kinda hard when you’re trying to start over. It’s really hard, but the hotel does make it easy for me to be able to start over and afford the daily things for my child,” Williams said.
The most recent draft of the ordinance makes some exceptions for the 30-day limit. Hotel owners can have one unit for themselves. Other exceptions include: people who experienced loss or damage to their permanent residence, are in the process of remodeling, relocated to the region for work or are doing short-term business in the region. Those groups can stay six months out of a 12-month period without a problem, but they must provide evidence that they qualify.
And any person accepted into a program recognized by the city to help secure permanent housing can stay in a hotel for up to 90 days of a year. This is a one-time exception.
Community advocates say that’s not nearly enough.
A majority of people experiencing homelessness go more than a year without a permanent residence, according to Rev. Emily Sutton, executive director of Bethel Shelters who spoke during the January council meeting.
The city will see 500 new units of affordable housing this year, but Sutton said even that wouldn’t be enough to meet the needs of the displaced if hotels stop housing long-term residents.
New rules are not final, yet
The City Council expressed uncertainty with the way the ordinance was written in January. A majority of councilmen said they wanted to see some changes before signing off on a finished product, though they didn’t elaborate on which details gave them pause.
The ordinance received criticism for lacking proper community and expert input. Mayor Gettys said the city is bringing in more stakeholders before final passage this time to talk about the next draft so people who work in shelters and serve those experiencing homelessness can contribute their expertise.
People who spoke out in January brought credible concerns, Gettys said. Rock Hill might need to revisit time restrictions “to give more time for certain families that are making use of a hotel for shelter-like purposes.”
“They are not all bad actors out there,” Gettys told The Herald. “That’s why we will have a workshop and we will have everybody around the table to find answers that we need to find answers to outside of the things that are obvious. The obvious is, we can’t allow the criminal activity that’s happening out in that area to continue.”
For now, Williams said she’s making the best of her situation. She and her daughter paint each others’ toenails and have “girl time.” Williams joins her daughter for jump rope and skating with the other kids in the hotel.
It’s home.
“I try to make it fun so that she don’t realize. In mommy’s heart, I’m hurting, but in my daughter’s eyes, we are having a ball. When it comes to my child, she’s happy,” Williams said. “You gotta be one of us to understand what’s going on instead of looking from the outside. That’s not how you solve a problem.”
This story was originally published February 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
