Hundreds of students across Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield who are classified as homeless are not sleeping in shelters or cars — they are living in hotel rooms, often for months or years at a time. Of the 2,854 students identified as experiencing homelessness across the three localities in the 2022-23 school year, about 830 of them, or 29%, were living in hotels or motels, according to SchoolHouse Connection data cited in local reporting.
The trend reflects a broader shift described in a new report from Housing Families First, which found that hotels have become an increasingly common last resort for area families experiencing homelessness, as reported by Axios. Hotels fill a gap for families who can often afford monthly rent but face barriers to securing long-term housing — barriers that include security deposits, past-due bills and complicated rental applications, per the same report.
The share of homeless students living in hotels or motels climbed sharply between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years in every locality examined. In Henrico, the share rose from 20.4% to 32.8%. Richmond saw its share climb from 16.6% to 26.6%, while Chesterfield's rose from 19.1% to 26.6%. Statewide, the share increased from 15.9% to 21.5% over the same period, the report notes.
A Family's Years-Long Stay in a Henrico Motel Room
The pattern was already visible years earlier in the story of Amy Gillespie's family, who had been living inside a Motel 6 room in Henrico since 2019 after an eviction, according to VPM. The family paid between $350 and $400 per week on average for the room, VPM reported in 2022. Notably, families like theirs paying for motel rooms out of pocket were not counted among the roughly 450 people officially tallied as experiencing homelessness in the greater Richmond region during that July's count.
That gap between who gets counted and who is actually unstable is central to the current numbers. Between July 2025 and June 2026, 904 local families received homeless services, representing more than 3,000 adults and children, per the Housing Families First report relayed by Axios. Many of those families became homeless or came within three days of losing their housing before seeking help, the report found.
Rising Costs Outpacing Wages
The math behind the squeeze is stark. Housing costs in the region rose 40% between 2020 and 2025, while average hourly wages grew only 28% over the same span, according to the Housing Families First report. The region's population also grew 18% between 2010 and 2025, adding pressure to an already tight rental market. Average rent in Richmond now sits at $1,587 per month, per the report's citation of Apartments.com data — while an extended-stay hotel room in the city costs around $1,900 to $2,300 per month, per WoodSpring Suites statistics cited in the same report. Families also face higher costs for food, utilities and gas, compounding the strain.
Those figures echo longer-running regional data. The Partnership for Housing Affordability has reported that rents in the Richmond region rose 22% since the start of the pandemic, and that from 2009 to 2018, median incomes in area localities rose by an average of 10% while median rents rose by an average of 20%. The region already has a deficit of 20,000 homes affordable to very low-income renters and is projected to need housing for another 29,000 low-income households by 2040, the partnership found, while about 59,240 low-income renter households in the region remain cost-burdened today.
Schools Struggle to Keep Students Stable
The instability shows up directly in classrooms. Henrico County Public Schools served just over 1,300 students last school year under the McKinney-Vento program, which classifies students living in hotels for lack of other options as homeless, according to Project HOPE-Virginia. Families staying in hotels may have to move every 29 days, and some move even more often. “We have families that will move every two or three weeks, which makes it very difficult for our students to stay stable,” a Henrico official told the organization.
Part of the problem is a lack of shelter space in the greater Richmond area, the same Project HOPE-Virginia account notes, which pushes families toward hotels even when hotels strain their budgets further. Henrico officials have also seen an increase in identifying unaccompanied homeless youth since the pandemic. Statewide, roughly 12% of children living in poverty are identified as experiencing homelessness, according to Project HOPE-Virginia's enrollment data.
The numbers track with statewide trends. Virginia public schools reported about 9,000 homeless students after the count fell by nearly 3,000 during the 2020-21 school year from a pre-pandemic level of about 10,000 annually, according to Virginia Mercury. Henrico alone reported 501 homeless students at the start of the 2022-23 school year, even as staff had identified about 1,100 students eligible for McKinney-Vento services. Nationally, public schools identified 1,548,191 students experiencing homelessness in the 2023-2024 school year — the highest number on record and a 12.6% increase from the prior year — and nearly half of those students, 47.7%, were chronically absent, according to SchoolHouse Connection.
Finding Help Through Local Referral Systems
Families seeking shelter in the Richmond region cannot walk into most programs directly. The region coordinates entry into local shelters and housing programs through two primary intake points, and groups including Housing Families First accept families and single adults only through referrals, not direct admission. Hilliard House, one short-term shelter option, accommodates up to 40 children and adults experiencing homelessness at a time.
Advocates emphasize that early intervention can help families avoid hotels and shelters altogether. That intervention includes school-based support, housing coaching and help navigating the barriers that stand between a family and permanent housing, according to the Housing Families First findings reported by Axios. Homeward maintains a list of Richmond-area nonprofits supporting local families in need, offering another entry point for households trying to get ahead of a housing crisis before it forces them into a motel room.
