Alexis pays $450 at the Regent for a room that she's managed to make feel like home. She has a cat named Bambam, whom she credits with her avoiding the worst of the rodent problem. "Everyone in these places should have a cat," she tells VICE. "I'm serious. In the first month I counted 20 mice he killed."
Alexis escorts a fellow tenant back to her room for clean needles. She refuses to drink the water anymore after contracting giardia, a water-borne disease that left her in the hospital.
At both the Regent and Balmoral hotels, tenants are met with "instructions" written in black marker on plywood, glass, walls and doors on how to safely navigate life in their building.
In the 15 years Jeff Manson has lived at the Balmoral, he's found nine dead bodies. "You can smell em three floors up."
Paul was once an oil worker making $200,000 a year in Libya and Iraq. After 10 months living in the Astoria Hotel, he refuses to plug in his TV, touch the fridge or do anything to make it feel too comfortable. "As soon as I can, I'm getting out of here," he says.
Kevin Bouzane is a hip-hop producer and head of Hastings Street Records, running everything off a computer he got for $10 on the street.
"I wouldn't want my mom to come here and visit me. She knows I'm down here and she knows why."