Monday marks three weeks since a fire destroyed the Knights Inn motel in Endwell on June 22. Six people died in the fire, and over 50 others were displaced. Most of the residents did not have permanent housing.
An investigation last year by the online publication New York Focus and ProPublica described the increased use of motels, including the Knights Inn, as temporary emergency housing between 2018 and the 2024 fiscal year.
WSKG’s Binghamton-area reporter Celia Clarke recently spoke with New York Focus reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network Fellow Spencer Norris about his reporting on the Knights Inn inspection records and general conditions.
Celia Clarke: Let’s start with some context, because Broome County isn’t unique in placing people without homes in hotels and motels in places like Knights Inn. So how does it compare to other counties or places that do this kind of thing?
Spencer Norris: Broome County was kind of unique in this idea that they do have shelters. They have for a while, but we're now at a point where the crisis is at such an overwhelm, and to such a degree, that the vast majority of people are being placed in hotels.
CC: Who or what is responsible for the safety inspections at motels like the Knights Inn?
SN: I think that kind of depends who you ask, and what you're trying to determine. But there's a few different people that are responsible for overseeing the safety of the hotels, one being the town of Union, which is responsible for ensuring that their building and fire inspections are up to code.
Certainly, the department of social services is supposed to be inspecting the hotels every six months. And on their end of things, they're supposed to be looking for, like I said, basic habitability things. If there are repeated issues with the habitability and with the condition of the building, social services is supposed to stop placing people there.
Again, we don't think that there are any known issues at the time of the fire. At least we didn't see anything from the documentation that we have available. But if something does come up, social services is supposed to stop placing people in that hotel, or at the minimum in the affected rooms, until they can get the situation under control.
CC: What have former residents said about the safety or any issues at the Knights Inn?
SN: I mean, they're incredibly frustrated because well before the fire, people have flagged issues with safety and health and the overall conditions of the hotel.
People have regularly said there's just, there's not enough room for them and their families in any one of the spaces. The rooms were frequently in disrepair, they would say.
And the building has gotten clean inspection reports from the department of social services at least for a little while, when we had looked into it, but they went through multiple years where they didn't pass their inspections from social services. And they were being flagged for issues with busted lighting, broken windows.
We also know that the building was flagged in the past for issues with its fire system. At one point, the fire suppression system was not properly working, and they had to get management in to repair it. We think that they did, it wasn't remarked on in their most recent inspection, but this is far from the first time that people have said there are issues.
CC: And there have been fires there before.
SN: So yeah, there were at least two different fires that we're aware of in 2024.
CC: Is there anything more that you want to say about, like, the safety records and about people being housed in these places, like Knights Inn?
SN: I’ve been thinking about people being placed in hotels by social services for about two years, at this point. I first started reporting on the issue going all the way back to January 2024. And the one thing that has stuck in the back of my head pretty consistently is that a lot of these locations, if you go to them and you observe the conditions that people are placed in, I'm not saying that the Knights Inn in particular was so unconscionable, but some of the locations I've been to were clearly like not suitable for human habitation. And I was pretty consistently shocked while I was reporting the story for about a year or 18 months at the sort of conditions that one of the wealthiest states in the country is placing people in, and for not inconsiderable amounts of money.
People are typically being placed in these hotels, typically at rates that far exceed what it would have cost just to cover whatever they owed in rent, just whatever it would have cost to keep them in real stable housing.
And instead you’re winding up with these situations where people are being crammed four, five to a room, and clearly not in the safest of conditions in some situations. You maybe become a little bit jaded or a little bit numb to it, but I think that that speaks to exactly how common this is.
This is extraordinarily common throughout New York State, and it's a shame that it took a massive fire that killed six people to alert people to how extreme the conditions are, but there's lots of other hidden costs in people's day-to-day lives from living in these conditions that are not as obvious and we don't think about, but maybe people will give a little more consideration to now, I hope.
