America’s Hidden Homeless: Hundreds of children growing up in overcrowded FL motel
America’s Hidden Homeless: Hundreds of children growing up in overcrowded FL motel
Two Rome-based photographers have captured gripping photographs of some of the estimated 500 hundred families who are living in Florida motels.
Nadia Shira Cohen and Paulo Siqueira moved into a room at the Remington Inn near Orlando to share the stories of the families impacted by struggles including personal tragedies, mortgage crises and illness which forced them out of their homes and into a life of paying daily or weekly to live in the motel not far from Disney World.
From a father unable to work after undergoing brain surgery for injuries suffered following a car accident to a family impacted after a relative fell ill with diabetes – Motel America documents the struggles and every-day life facing the motel residents.
Florida is home to one-third of country’s homeless families, and Cohen and Siqueira reported that homelessness had gone up 12 per cent during their two-week stay at the motel in Florida in 2012, according to Feature Shoot.
In the midst of hardship and grief though, the photographers found that among the families there was happiness too as they discovered the children, who had hobbies and dreams, to be particularly strong.
For some of the older children, those dreams include wanting a future not like their parents, but together, the families survive the best that they can until they can find a stable home of their own.
