Hostel owner says man’s efforts to help homeless Rhode Islanders got messy, costly

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — Following the story on Feb. 24 about a man trying to make a difference in the lives of homeless Rhode Islanders, one impacted business owner reached out to ABC6 News.

David O’Connor and Cesar Michie had the right intentions with their efforts, but it got messy and dangerous for Michie, who owns Michie House, a hostel in Providence.

“We are regular people who have cheap rooms, and we are trying to work as much as we can to help our community with all the people that need housing,” Michie said. “But they were doing drugs.”

Michie owns three properties that O’Connor was renting to house homeless people and one of those was Michie House on Central Street.

“We have professional people, we have travel nurses, we have people who are in between houses who have regular jobs but are just having a hard time finding housing,” Michie explained.

However, after three weeks of housing and at least $3,000 in damages later, Michie said it’s out of hand and he’s had enough.

Michie told residents to leave the hostel over the weekend.

“Bloody mattresses, broken TVs, needles, I don’t know how many needles I found in the last month,” Michie said.

According to Michie, he was willing to provide a place to stay for roughly 100 people at first, but quickly realized there was a big drug problem.

“We found fentanyl in some of the rooms we were cleaning it was bad, it was very bad,” Michie said. “I feel like I’m traumatized from seeing all these things.”

“That’s the war we need to work on, that’s the real real crisis, because if these people weren’t on drugs, they can be able to work, they would be able to find housing, there’s places like this that will receive, we open our arms,”

Michie said O’Connor still owes him almost $6,000 for rent and damages.

ABC6 News spoke with O’Connor, who said he’s trying to rectify the financial issues and made a payment of $2,000 to Michie Wednesday.

O’Connor said he thought local or state government would have stepped in by now.

Currently, Michie is losing money with his business closed for cleaning and repairs.