El Rancho Motel

My family and I have been staying at El Rancho since late July. We’re trying to recover from domestic violence and other hardships, including scams, fraud, and theft, while staying clean and avoiding homelessness. We want to build a better life for ourselves and the people we love. We’re a family of three with medical issues and a child with severe special needs. When we arrived, we were told we’d be put on a list for a bigger room, and that our current room would be made clean, safe, and repaired while we waited. That hasn’t happened. The room had blood on the walls, pet urine, smoke, mold, and other smells. In the first few days I found piles of garbage, pet hair, mold, and pet toys. I’ve spent money and time I didn’t have trying to clean and fix things. Repair requests I submitted in late July and again in September, as well as urgent problems I raised directly, were ignored, delayed for weeks, or met with lies. The manager is rarely around when she should be and often doesn’t answer her phone. She asked tenants to report neighbor problems, then repeatedly told other people who had complained. That has helped create an unsafe, toxic environment. There’s bad drug activity, plus unnecessary traffic and noise through the night that she knows about. She has moved in people who cause problems, and now we don’t feel safe even stepping outside our door. The room itself is falling apart. I have to fix the door every day to keep it shut. It’s an interior door used as an outside door, doesn’t seal, and is flaking. We have no heat because of power problems, and the wiring is badly messed up. There’s mold and evidence of a leaking roof, the floor is getting soft and separating, and the trim keeps coming loose. The bathroom walls have issues, the toilet is sinking on one side and fails to flush nearly 80% of the time, and most of the caulking is gone. We lack hot water about 75% of the time, and the water pressure is poor. The bathroom door is worse than the front one, with holes and bent hinges, and both kitchen and bathroom sinks leak at the drain. The bathroom window is hard to use. The fridge works only some of the time. It has frozen our food for no reason or failed to keep it cold, and we’ve lost food because of that. The king bed is falling apart and missing five legs. Marissa’s bed is in the couch, with springs sticking through. Wi-Fi is out nearly half the time. You can smell other rooms through the walls and in the entryway. The laundry room is unsanitary and moldy, there’s dog feces from other guests, and the washer and dryer work only when they feel like it. The water often smells bad, and the cameras never work either.