Not quite homeless
The cell phone doesn’t work, but Renee Foster, 14, believes it keeps her safe.
She clutched the device to her ear one recent evening, pretending to be locked in conversation while a mysterious car followed her back to the motel room she shares with her mom and two brothers. “It was so scary,” she said.
South Nevada Avenue can be a dangerous place to live.
The teenager and her family moved into the Cheyenne Motel in November 2005, and three months later her uncle was shot in the leg in one of its rooms. In December, a man visiting a friend at the Chief Motel, next door to the Cheyenne, was shot to death during what police say was a dispute over drugs.
“It’s ridiculous down here,” Renee’s aunt, Roxanne Kofroth, said the night of the killing. “It’s crazy.”
No one knows how many Colorado Springs residents live in the aging, often rundown motels that line the old gateways to the city.
As long as they scrape together money for their weekly or monthly rent, they are not counted among the city’s roughly 1,300 homeless. Hidden in their rooms, they stay away from the shelter run by The Salvation Army. Cooking in microwaves or on hot plates, many avoid taking meals at the Marian House soup kitchen.
The rooms are occupied mainly by transients and working poor paying at least $100 more each month than they would for a cheap apartment.
Bob Holmes, executive director of Homeward Pikes Peak, said he’s heard colleagues who work with the homeless refer to motels as “black holes.”
“You have enough money to be in the motel, but nothing else,” Holmes said. “They can never get first (month’s rent) and deposit together.”
The high cost does not buy luxury. Many motel residents wash their own sheets and even furnish their own rooms. Some move in to find leaky ceilings, malfunctioning heaters and properties strewn with trash. Still, they seldom call city code enforcement officers.
“They don’t have leases,” enforcement officer Cecilia Gonzalez said. “They don’t want to complain or they’ll get kicked out.”
Most of the attention they receive is unwanted — from police called to deal with prostitution, drug dealing and violence.
Fights are common at the Cheyenne, Kofroth said. One recent night, a man walked around outside pounding on doors and smashing windows, apparently searching for his girlfriend after she fled from him at a nearby motel.
The pounding sounded like gunshots, Kofroth said.
Fortunately, Renee was visiting her mom at work that night, Kofroth said. The 14-year-old has been skittish since February 2006, when she watched a man pistol-whip Taino Rivera, Kofroth’s husband, and then shoot him in the leg inside one of the Cheyenne’s rooms.
Kofroth and Rivera live at the Cheyenne with a dog, nine cats and often one or both of Kofroth’s teenage sons. Renee lives in a room next door with Linda Kofroth, her mother and Roxanne’s sister, and two younger brothers.
The families moved to the motel after they were evicted from an apartment. They moved to another apartment after Rivera was shot, but even with victim’s assistance money, they fell behind on rent and were again evicted after four months.
Credit is a problem when the families look for a long term rental, Roxanne Kofroth said. She estimated she has broken leases and missed payments at about 25 apartments since 1997.
“When I was growing up, I was in this partying stage, so I burned a lot of bridges,” the 32-year-old said, explaining the “growing up” phase ended only recently.
Another problem is building up savings. She does not work, saying bipolar disorder keeps her from holding a job. Rivera and Linda Kofroth work the night shift at a nearby Arby’s restaurant.
“I’d rather not be here, but all those places want rent and deposit,” Linda Kofroth said. “Working at Arby’s, I can’t get that.”
Roxanne Kofroth said it can be a challenge even getting together the Cheyenne’s $145 weekly rent. The manager gives them some slack, but they’re always about a week behind, she said.
The room she shares with Rivera makes a fat L around a bathroom, with a bed at one end, a couch at the other, and walls piled with boxes, clothes and sleeping bags. Only one outlet in the room will let her use a hot plate without blowing a fuse.
Recently, she made tacos while seated on the bed, spreading plates of lettuce and shredded cheese around her.
“It would be better if I had an oven,” she said. “I can’t make enchiladas.”
Roxanne Kofroth said she tries to make the motel feel like home. After a recent cold spell passed, she salvaged a table and a few pots at the motel to build a sort of garden outside her room, complete with plastic flowers.
“I wanted to make something for summer,” she said.
She gazed at the display and said the place was “looking like a little bit of home.”
“But not much,” she continued. “I don’t think I could ever call this place home.”
Other long-time residents of the Cheyenne seem more or less content with the lifestyle.
“We have everything that you need,” Greg Lee said. He grumbled about doing dishes in the bathtub, but said cooking is straightforward using a hot plate or a microwave.
“We eat regular meals,” Lee said.
Lee, 49, and Michele Cardosa, 45, have lived at the Cheyenne for about a year, moving there from another motel. Lee is a carpenter, and he often helps the Cheyenne’s manager repair damaged rooms to help make ends meet.
Lee began living in motels in the 1980s when he traveled frequently for work. He offered a familiar explanation why he hasn’t left.
“You can’t ever save up enough to get out of it,” Lee said.
While getting out of motels is tricky, Lee said, getting along in them is fairly simple.
“Don’t worry about other people’s issues,” Lee said.
“There’s people of all kinds of shapes living in these places.”
Colorado Springs police detective Olav Chaney claims to know all the “players” on South Nevada Avenue.
“He’s into crack,” Chaney said one evening in March as he drove past a man sitting on a bench.
Later, he stopped to talk to a woman walking in an alley. He recognized her, a 22-yearold mother with a history of drug use and prostitution.
“You should be home with your kid,” he told her. The woman agreed, saying she was going.
Chaney and two other detectives with the city’s Metro Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence unit have been assigned since 2003 to reduce crime downtown and on South Nevada and East Platte avenues. They have made nearly 200 arrests for prostitution on South Nevada and almost as many drug busts.
The arrests, he said, haven’t entirely cleaned up the area, just made the criminals less visible — many now conduct their illegal business in the motel rooms.
Chaney met in February with a group of business owners trying to start a merchants association on South Nevada Avenue. Prostitution and drug dealing are linked, he told them, and both often lead to violence.
If business owners refuse to tolerate it and call police, he said, it will either drive criminals away or out of business.
The trick is that everyone has to be on the same page, Chaney said.
They aren’t. Some motels thrive by not caring who rents a room or what they’re doing.
“That’s part of their business model,” Bill Kenline said.
Kenline and his family bought the Econo Lodge, 1623 S. Nevada Ave., in 2003. He soon learned that some rooms, particularly those rented to long-term residents, drew streams of visitors at odd hours and were the scenes of frequent fights.
“If you take anybody, you lose the ones you really want,” Kenline said.
Long-term rates at the Econo Lodge are also higher than at many motels, starting at $200 a week compared with $140 at many places.
All 17 of the Cheyenne Motel’s rooms were rented in late March, mostly to long-term residents paying $145 a week.
Robert Anderson, manager of the Cheyenne Motel since 2004 and a resident since 1998, said he prefers such tenants.
“It’s less money, but it’s less work,” Anderson said. “As long as the people behave themselves, it’s all right.”
The problem is that people don’t always behave, said Ken Brown, who holds the lease for the Cheyenne.
He marveled at the number of toilets he’s had to replace and all the sinks that get pulled off the walls.
Brown reluctantly took over the Cheyenne when he leased property that is also home to A Taste of Philly, a restaurant in the franchise he owns. He described it as a headache he would happily do without.
“I would just as soon bulldoze it,” Brown said.
Renee’s family had hoped to be out of the Cheyenne Motel by spring. Plans to leave, though, keep getting pushed back.
In January, Roxanne Kofroth said her sister’s tax return might help the families come up with apartment rent and deposit. But the money went for car payments and other necessities.
Disability payments could be another way out, but Roxanne Kofroth is still trying to apply.
Renee could be spending the summer with relatives in upstate New York.
For the rest of the family, there’s only the two rooms at the Cheyenne Motel.
“I just don’t see us going anywhere anytime soon,” Roxanne Kofroth said.
CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-4813 or anthony.lane@gazette.com
SERVICE AGENCIES
Ecumenical Social Ministries:
Provides housing, work and other assistance to individuals and families. 636-1916, www.ecusocmin.org
Greccio Housing:
Offers affordable apartments for qualified low-income families. 475-1422, www.greccio.org
Partners in Housing:
Provides temporary housing to families with children. 473-8890, www. partnersinhousing.org
Pikes Peak Habitat for Humanity:
Provides homes to qualified low-income families. 475-7800, www.pikespeakhabitat.org
The Salvation Army New Hope Center:
Homeless shelter for adults, 709 S. Sierra Madre, 578-9190
TOURISTS THEN, TRANSIENTS NOW
Old motel signs along East Platte and South Nevada avenues tell different stories.
Images of palm trees, cowboys and Indian feathers hint at what were tourist destinations several decades ago.
The weekly and monthly rates being advertised today speak of a long decline and of residents who call the motels home.
The motels lined roads that used to be gateways to Colorado Springs, and they reached out to travelers looking for relaxation and a taste of the West.
Interstate 25 bypassed these gateways in the 1960s, and in the decades since, the tourists have been replaced by transients, the working poor and criminals hoping to remain anonymous.
A garish, and sometimes dangerous, strip of fast-food restaurants, pawnshops, bars and liquor stores have sprung up between the motels along South Nevada Avenue and East Platte Avenue a few miles from downtown Colorado Springs.
Along Colorado Avenue west of the city, the decay has been held at bay by businesses that still cater to tourists visiting Manitou Springs.
North Nevada Avenue is in the early stages of renewal, spurred in part by the growth of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs campus.
About a dozen North Nevada Avenue motels, some of which served as housing for criminals on work release, have closed in recent years. The North Nevada Avenue Corridor Improvement Plan, sketched out in 2002, aims to attract businesses to the area with a combination of incentives and local improvements.
Manitou Springs leaders are making a similar effort to the west, creating an urban renewal authority with the aim of sprucing up the eastern part of town.
