Guests, tenants or squatters? Lawsuit questions rights of Georgia families in extended-stay hotels

A recent lawsuit in Gwinnett County has renewed questions about the rights of thousands of families around metro Atlanta who are living in motels, and when they should be considered guests or tenants.(AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Kevin Dietsch / Kevin Dietsch

A motel in Gwinnett County called the sheriff to remove several people from its property, alleging they were squatters. 

But the sheriff refused. 

The lawsuit that followed has renewed questions about the rights of thousands of families around metro Atlanta who are living in motels, and when they should be considered guests or tenants.



In the case before Gwinnett County Superior Court, S&A Suites argues that the people staying in the Budgetel Motel in Lilburn can only ever be guests. The company reiterates this at multiple points in the contract it makes people sign: “Customer acknowledges they are a valued guest of the hotel and not a resident/tenant.”

According to the company, this “guest” status means when several members of a family at the motel stopped paying for their two rooms last August, they no longer had any right to stay. In fact, they had turned into squatters, S&A Suites argues.

But Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor disagreed with this logic, and wouldn’t follow the motel’s request to apply the state law used for squatters. According to the lawsuit, he recommended the motel go through eviction court — a legal process reserved for tenants. 

In the lawsuit, filed last October, S&A Suites claims the sheriff neglected his official duty to enforce the squatter law.
While the sheriff’s office wouldn’t comment on the ongoing lawsuit, Taylor said in court filings that the law in question is intended for people who enter properties illegally. 

In this case, however, Budgetel allowed the people into the motel and they had paid for their rooms for months. One member of the family, Lataria Banks, said several of them had been there for a year and a half.

The lawsuit from S&A Suites includes the contract motel occupants must agree to. It states that they never become tenants.

Banks said she only stopped paying because the motel was charging them an unexplained fine. According to the lawsuit, this went on for about 10 days when the motel contacted the sheriff to remove them. 

“No matter how long an occupant has dwelled at the Budgetel before missing a rent payment,” the sheriff said in court documents, “Budgetel regards them as criminal intruders who are subject to extrajudicial expulsion.”

The lawsuit has tenant advocates like Erin Willoughby of Atlanta Legal Aid worried about the expanding use of the intruder statute, which can force people out of a property in a few days. Eviction court, meanwhile, is designed to take several weeks. 

The case also highlights the ongoing uncertainty over the status of families who can end up living in extended-stay hotels for months or years as they try to qualify for a house or apartment. The Southern Poverty Law Center has estimated that at least 30,000 people around metro Atlanta could be in this situation. 

Willoughby said these families don’t have a home outside their motel room. 

“They’re receiving mail there. They have their furnishings there. Their children get picked up for school there,” she said. “And have those people become tenants?”

That question recently made it all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court following a lawsuit against a DeKalb County motel. But the justices didn’t provide a simple answer. 

The 2023 ruling said courts should evaluate the rights of motel occupants on a case by case basis and apply a complicated legal framework that tries to determine the intent of the owner and of the person staying in the property.

Attorney Samuel Mullman, representing S&A Suites in the current lawsuit, wouldn’t explain why the motel’s long-term occupants are guests under this framework because he said that would be going into the specifics of ongoing litigation. 

However, he said it’s not up to a sheriff to decide whether people at any motel are tenants, guests or squatters. That’s the job of a judge, he said.

To carry out the squatter law, he said the sheriff must only deliver an affidavit from the owner. If the occupant can prove they have the right to be in the property, they can take the issue to court. 

“The sheriff is never unilaterally allowed to choose what laws he or she is willing to enforce on any given day,” Mullman said.

The family whose situation sparked the lawsuit has since left the motel, which has also changed its name to Live In Lodge. Banks said she was able to move her family into a home.

She’s glad to be gone. 

She said the managers constantly charged her fines for minor issues, like allowing her son to play outside even while she was present. After the payment issue, Banks said that things only got worse. While the owner denies this, Banks said the motel staff went ahead and removed her family’s belongings from their room without the sheriff’s help.

“It was nothing but problems,” she said.