The Washington Post did a story about a motel in the Orlando area, the Star motel. I am well acquainted with this establishment from my days as a paramedic. The motels in that particular area, including the Star motel, are well known to local emergency workers. They have not been motels for tourists in decades. Instead, they are inhabited by drug users, prostitutes, and other assorted debris from society.
I remember finding more than one dead body in the place, often with drugs in the room, sometimes with the needle still in the arm of the corpse, and the occasional homicide. Once or twice, a meth lab. The article claims that:
In tough times, the motels degenerated into shelters of last resort in a city where low-income housing shortages were among the most severe in the nation and the social safety net was collapsing. Now they were fast becoming places where it was possible to glimpse what a complete social and economic collapse might look like in America.
This hotel was never a nice place. To the best of my knowledge, there haven’t been any tourists in this motel since before the Clinton administration. This motel’s economy collapsed decades ago. To make this sound like a recent development is fake news.
