Salina, N.Y. — Nicole Sinda has been living in a one-bedroom hotel room with her partner, three children, two dogs and four cats.
The three kids sleep in the living room – a cot, a makeshift bed on the couch and a toddler bed. There’s an extra mattress stuffed in one of the two closets for when Sinda’s son comes on the weekends.
For this, they’ve been paying $300 a week since November, Sinda said. They were evicted from Eastwood in September when their rental was sold. Then they drifted from a camp to family to the desperation that led them to the Candlewood Suites hotel in Salina near the airport.
The family is one of nearly 80 that had been living at the hotel for months, and even years, after being unable to find anything better. They turned the down-on-its luck hotel into a makeshift apartment complex. For this, they gratefully paid between $700 and $2,200 for a hotel room with a kitchenette.
They created a neighborhood. Parents share the duty of walking kids to the bus stop. They check on the elderly woman with the dog. Sinda’s household grew when she took in two kittens that had been left behind by a guest who checked out.
But now the families are facing eviction by the hotel’s out-of-town owners. Some are being forced into a grim rental market. After being kicked out last week, one woman slept in her car.
Others are hanging on and fighting with hotel management that’s been deactivating their keys and charging some of the guests’ credit cards more than $300 a night, according to receipts provided by one guest.
A few have gotten court orders forcing the hotel to let them stay. That’s because the guests of the Candlewood know that no matter how bad it gets there, it’s worse to be homeless. Syracuse’s low-income rental market is the tightest it’s ever been. Family homelessness here increased 65% since 2021.
Every day at Candlewood Suites is uncertainty. Will there be a bed tonight?
‘We got everything you need’
Syracuse.com | The Post Standard spoke with more than a dozen long-time residents of the hotel and employees, and reviewed residents’ payment records for this story.
The neighborhood at Candlewood Suites is eclectic. The collection includes a hospice nurse, a fast-food manager and his family, military veterans, Amazon workers, the disabled and a retired steel worker. Most of them found the beige hotel through Craigslist ads targeting people living on the edge of homelessness.
“SAVE HUNDREDS EVERY MONTH! NO LEASE – move out when it fits your schedule. NO DEPOSIT – move in anytime. NO CREDIT CHECK – no credit, bad credit? No problem! FREE UTILITIES,” the ad read.
It continues to tout free cable, incoming calls, bi-weekly housecleaning, free laundry and your own kitchen. The hotel also takes pets, unlike many low-income apartment owners.
Nikanya Henry and Mike Brown came to Syracuse from New York City to work at Amazon. They were laid off at the Amazon in the city, so they headed here. At first the jobs were temporary.
“We don’t know anyone but this place. They had an ad: Why worry about an apartment when you can live here? We got everything you need,” Brown said.
They’ve been paying $1,600 a month since February. At first it was for one room with double beds and a kitchenette. They pushed and got a suite with a separate bedroom. They’ve been moved to different rooms several times. The electricity was going on and off, they said. The washing machines in the free guest laundry are always broken.
Candlewood Suites is a middle-of-the-road hotel usually. The chain, IHG, also owns Holiday Inn. The Salina place is not a standout. The online reviews and guests have said things are often broken. One reviewer said there was feces on the wall.
The long-term guests are supposed to get linens, soap and housekeeping every other week, but most decline. They’d rather not have other people in their homes, amid their belongings.
The Amazon workers and many of the other guests say they were awoken May 18 with a knock and a message: You’ve got a few days to get out.
No one was prepared to leave. Henry and Brown say they do not make enough at Amazon to save for an apartment or a car. The hotel bill, food and the daily Lyft ride to and from Amazon eat their paychecks, they said. So they work to afford to live in Room 307.
Now, that’s threatened, too. “If you throw us out, you do realize, I’m gonna lose my job,” Brown says.
‘We weren’t prepared for this’
Asaf Fligelman, a developer with the company that owns the Candlewood Suites, has declined repeated requests to speak about the hotel.
Last week, Onondaga County and town of Salina officials said the hotel had a contract to take Central New York’s first busload of asylum-seekers from New York City. Two days before that became public, the hotel told most of its guests to get out. The migrant transfer was stopped by a court order and for the moment looks unlikely.
But residents said hotel management was still trying to get them out late last week.
Eddie Lenton and his girlfriend became permanent at the hotel by accident. Lenton, 65, is a retired steelworker. He spent most of his life in Auburn, but moved to Georgia a few years ago.
They came back to New York to take care of legal matters in December. Lenton, too, saw the Craigslist ad. In that one, the price was $800 a month.
That’s not bad for a quiet place with cable, a stove and a full-sized refrigerator. Then, he said, the rate was doubled with no notice. He negotiated it down to $1,200, but it was still too much.
By then, though, Lenton was stuck. He developed serious medical problems and ended up going to Upstate University Hospital for treatment.
The care is far better than what he would get in Georgia, so the couple let their place there go. The hotel became permanent. It was expensive, but they had a place while they figured out what to do about Lenton’s declining health.
But last week, Lenton and his girlfriend spent most of their time hiding out, worrying. If they left, they might not be able to get back in. So they hung onto what they had and waited.
“Financially, this is going to kill a bunch of us,” Lenton said. “We weren’t prepared for this at all.”
But inside the rooms at the Candlewood Suites, the most pressing question is tonight. Where will we sleep tonight?
A hospice nurse has been living in a one-bedroom suite on the first floor for four years. She pays $500 a week.
Why isn’t she in an apartment? She’s a nurse who works four 16-hour shifts a week. She comforts the dying.
Can’t she afford more? She could before she had cancer the first time. A decade ago, she got sick, she said. She fell behind. She lost her house. She can hardly say the sentence that comes next.
“I lived in my car,” she says. She repeats it and lets it hang there. She asked not to be identified because her children, who are grown, do not know.
She has been waiting to be kicked out. Her scrubs are in one bag. Her clothes are in another. And then there is her one plastic tote. That’s it for nearly 60 years of life.
Her cancer came back, she says. She thought she wouldn’t live to see this. But here she is. Every day when she leaves for work, she wonders if her things will be out on the curb. She wonders if she’ll be able to get back in and go to bed. The sheets are hers. She hung photos of her kids on the walls, across from the hotel-issued landscape print.
“I’ll have to live in my car again,” she says.
Welcome to Candlehood
That is what has already happened to Hannah Grace and her dog, Athena.
Grace said she had been living in the hotel for seven months.
Hotel management called the police on her Wednesday night and forced her to leave. Grace owed $1,300. She said she had come from New Jersey, looking for a fresh start but has endured one struggle after another. She said she left an abusive partner, she started and lost two jobs.
She started another one last week while living out of her van.
The arbitrariness feels the same as it does in low-income rentals in the city that are plagued by bad landlords. Grace and some residents here are arguing that the hotel management is, in fact, their landlord. Grace, along with Sinda and Lenton, filed court papers alleging that the hotel has illegally evicted them. A Salina town judge granted a temporary order that prevents the hotel from kicking them out.
Mike Branca, a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran, had been living with family in the fall when they were all evicted. He has some trouble with money, he said. His daughter-in-law pays his bills and makes his arrangements for him.
Candlewood Suites seemed OK. He likes to sit outside in the gazebo and chat with the others.
It’s a little neighborhood, he said. “Candlehood,” he jokes.
His daughter-in-law found him another hotel to go to when Candlewood’s management said he’d have to leave. But late last week, he got a knock on his door. Hotel management said he could stay. He’s not sure why. But he thinks he will.
Branca has a tattoo on his arm from when he was in the Army. “Death before dishonor,” it reads. Back in the day, it meant no soldier got left on enemy soil.
The tattoo is faded now. The battles are quieter, more complicated. But it means the same thing. No one gets left behind.
Then he pauses, looks over to the grass where the kids are playing next to the parking lot.
Reporters Fernando Alba and Mark Weiner contributed to this story.
Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people and public affairs in Central New York. Contact her anytime email | 315-470-2246.
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