Casa Linda today
"Casa Blanca Casa Linda is the last stop and last chance for a lot of people," says Pauline Spalding, office manager of the monthly-rate hotel on Murfreesboro Pike.
At a time when it's becoming difficult to find any housing at all in Nashville, the low-rate, 30-day efficiency apartments are filling somewhat of a void. A felony conviction can severely limit options, and in a tight housing market, a criminal record can often be a deal-breaker for property owners.
Before it was a last stop and a last chance, the $600-a-month hotel was among the first few Holiday Inn franchises in the country. The Holiday Inn in time became a Quality Inn, and ultimately ended up as Casa Blanca Casa Linda in the early 2000s. Walking through the parking lot and in the courtyard, you can see traces of what it used to be. The former family restaurant at the front of the building is now a MetroPCS store, and the Church of the Nations currently rents what used to be an auditorium and lobby area; the church will soon move, and a Subway will go in its place. A full-size swimming pool soon to be filled in with dirt sits empty behind the phone store.
The property as one of the first Holiday Inn hotels in the late 1950s
The complex is technically two properties: Casa Blanca ("white house" in Spanish) in back, and Casa Linda (which translates to "cute house") in front. Residents and office staff use the combined name — the origin of which nobody is quite sure.
"It came with the place when the owners bought it, and they just decided to keep on with it," says Spalding, a petite but muscular 47-year-old. Her collared blue work shirt and black cargo pants contrast with her sparkly pink manicured nails and nearly matching phone case. A red-white-and-blue Punisher tattoo adorns her tanned forearm; a tattoo of a lifeline is on her wrist.
More than 90 percent of the tenants at Casa Blanca Casa Linda are felons — most are on probation, and a significant number are on the sex-offender registry. Probation officers know to send people with a criminal background to Spalding. Homeless men coming straight out of the Nashville Rescue Mission are also sent her way — living at the Mission doesn't exactly qualify as a residence in the eyes of most apartment complexes, and Spalding knows they'll have trouble getting in elsewhere. There's a huge waiting list for Casa Blanca Casa Linda: She says a binder, now with more than 50 applications, stays consistently full.
An American flag hangs next to Spalding's desk, and more patriotic memorabilia fills the office. Her belt holds a 9mm Springfield XD handgun on the right side and a Taser on the left. She's only had to unholster the gun once at the hotel, but the other weapon has been used more. Recently, one of her residents, a manager of the MetroPCS in the front of the building, was attacked by a customer. When they called Spalding to come help, she used the Taser on the attacker, and was able to hold the man in the store for police after he managed to pull the prongs out of his chest.
"Mom really is a badass," Spalding's 18-year-old daughter Breanna Cafarella says of the event, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. "She should get the Best Mom of the Year Award."
If the hotel showed up on reality TV, it might be hard to tell if the premise was concocted. Here, the drama is real. Spalding calmly talks residents down when they come into the office upset, but she raises her voice when she needs to.
Very often, Spalding walks the line between munificent matron and hardass chief of hotel operations. When she strolls through the property, kids run out to hug her. Residents call her Miss Pauline, sometimes when they're screaming at her. Even when tenants know she's nowhere nearby to listen, they won't speak badly of her.
"People do get really mad at her, and they'll scream and yell and holler and get nasty," says Cheryl Smith, 43, a tenant who works in the hotel's office. "But most of the time, they know they're in the wrong, and that's why they act that way."
Cheryl Smith, 43, has lived and worked at Casa Blanca Casa Linda for the past four years.
It's clear some people don't care for the number of rules at the hotel. But it's just as clear how little Spalding cares about upsetting the residents who refuse to follow her rules. She will kick people out if she knows they're selling drugs on the property, and doesn't hesitate to evict people who consistently flout her guidelines.
Spalding says that when she first started working at Casa Blanca Casa Linda, six or seven people would get arrested a day. She first worked on a security team hired by new ownership, Fallbrook Property Group out of California. The police were tired of coming down there all the time, she says, and by the time she became office manager, she knew a lot had to change. The hotel started limiting how late guests could stay — residents can't have guests past 9 p.m. — and started towing cars not covered by a resident's lease, no exceptions.
"And you just have to tell the people you know are drug dealers to stay the hell off your property," Spalding says with a shrug. "If you can keep [drug dealers] out of here, most of these people on probation stay out of trouble. And I am not shy about calling someone's probation officer. I'll do it in a heartbeat."
Spalding used to work as a probation officer in Wilson County, where most of her clients were sex offenders. She also worked as a liaison between the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Smith County Sheriff Department in Carthage, Tenn., from 2005 to 2007, when the office was facing an audit.
"They didn't like me there either, because I had to tell the truth about what was happening."
Spalding doesn't hesitate to say why she gives sex offenders a place to live: "They've done their time." She recognizes that some people don't like that she has families and sex offenders living on the same property. Maintaining peace there is a balance, she says, but there's more peace with Spalding in charge than there had been in the past.
"This place has its issues, but it used to be like the wild, wild West before Pauline took over," Smith says. "It used to be you were afraid to even walk out of your door."
Smith and her boyfriend James Knight were living in a tent four years ago when a friend told them about Casa Blanca Casa Linda. When they first moved into the hotel, they wondered whether it would've been better to just stay on the streets. Spalding says when she first started doing security for the property in 2010, she found herself in tears constantly. The rooms were almost always in disrepair.
The maintenance crew at Casa Blanca Casa Linda is working on painting each building on the property.
Nowadays, a maintenance crew of four seems to be constantly making repairs on the 50-year-old-plus buildings. One of the members of the crew, a formerly homeless man named Nathan Walker, used to work selling The Contributor. After Spalding discovered he could do maintenance work, he picked up a full-time job making repairs to the building.
"Selling the paper really helped me get into this place," Walker says. "But because I can do just about everything. Pauline keeps me busy here, and I end up with more than just enough to pay my rent."
Several residents described the hotel as "much quieter" than it was before
Spalding often finds herself caring for tenants’ children at the hotel.
Spalding took over as manager in 2013. A single mother of three who lives on the Casa Blanca side (the efficiency apartments on that side are a bit bigger and typically reserved for families) says, "It's still not a place for kids, really." But for $600 a month, it's a good place for families to get back on their feet.
Two of Spalding's three daughters, Breanna and 14-year-old Melody Cafarella, also work at Casa Blanca Casa Linda. They split their time between a house in Gallatin and an apartment on the property. Because their mother works 12 to 14 hours a day, Breanna and Melody get to see her more by living and working at the hotel. Their dog Ginger — a pudgy, ruddy pit mix with a broad chest — is almost always with her youngest.
Spalding's daughters aren't always 100 percent on board with her plans to help residents, but it's also apparent how much her commitment has rubbed off on them. In addition to working in the office, they've both jumped in to help babysit kids from the hotel and are "always bringing dogs and cats" home to take care of. Her daughters do everything from filing paperwork to answering phones and checking on elderly residents.
Spalding (center) with her daughters Melody Cafarella (Left) and Breanna Cafarella
"That's something I've learned we have to do with a lot of these people," Spalding says. "We have to check on them, because they don't have anybody. I've found six people dead here, one recently. That's what I mean by 'last stop.' "
In general, so much can happen at Casa Blanca Casa Linda in the span of a couple weeks. In the first week of June, Spalding had to file 21 eviction notices. That's about 10 percent of the hotel's 212 rooms. The practice of giving that many people the boot, along with their children, gives Spalding a lot of anxiety. But in another light, it allows her to open up the binder and give someone else on the waiting list a chance.
"The evictions are not like that every month. Most people I have to evict here are at least two or three months behind," Spalding says. "The owners don't really like it when I do that, but sometimes you have to give people a chance, and then maybe a second or third chance, too. It just depends. If I think they're trying, I'll keep working with them, but dammit, they've gotta try."
Because she tends to hold people accountable, Laurie Green, the executive director of Southern Alliance for People and Animal Welfare, brings her toughest clients to Spalding. SAFPAW is a nonprofit that helps people experiencing homelessness care for their pets. Through that work, Green ends up helping a lot of people find housing.
Spalding visits with children playing outside their families’ efficiency units.
"Pauline isn't who you think of when you think of a traditional activist type," Green says. "Some may say she's a little too hard on people, but she holds people to what they say they're going to do, and she is honest with everyone about what the expectations are."
Green is right: You won't find Spalding on the courthouse steps asking Mayor Megan Barry for more money for affordable housing. You won't find her sharing advocacy posts on Facebook or tweeting about felon-friendly housing. She likely wouldn't feel at home at a rally or protest. She doesn't engage heavily in local or national politics, she says.
"To me, it's just about the people, the individual people," Spalding says. "Yes, this [hotel] is a business, and it's not perfect, but I really do want to help every single person who comes in here. Once they live here, I consider them my family — even when I'm mad at them or getting onto them."
Over Memorial Day weekend, Spalding threw a cookout at the hotel, inviting all the residents to come and eat in the courtyard. She said it was a calm time, yet the same weekend, a very pregnant wandering dog showed up on her property in Gallatin.
"I just can't help it," she says as she guides the plump dog away from the constantly swinging front door. "It can be a dog, a fish — whatever — if it needs a place, I'm going to find it a place to go." Less than two weeks after finding the pregnant dog, they decided to keep her. They named her Big Mama and watched her give birth to 10 puppies in a back room of the hotel office.
"God puts them with us for a reason," Spalding says in a text message accompanied by a photo of Big Mama nuzzling her puppies. "He knew we would take care of her."
Some of Spalding's employees worry that she gets taken advantage of, and she concedes that it's happened in the past. One family paid her only twice in one year. She eventually had to evict them, but that doesn't stop Spalding from trying to help the next person coming straight out of a homeless encampment or jail. She's been burned, but she's also seen people pick up and do better for themselves. At times she knows from the get-go that a tenant isn't going to work out.
"But you know what? Some of these people just need that opportunity, and I'll take my chances."
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