Housing Ideas Percolating Locally
Over on our Twitter, there have been productive back and forth threads over housing ideas. Prompted by one of our tweets this week, Councilman Devon Reese replied in part: “City of Reno allocated 53% of the first 25M from ARPA dollars to affordable housing in yesterday’s meeting. We will have another 25M to allocate in a future second tranche… Yesterday’s meeting also revealed some information regarding a 200-400M investment in new low-income housing in partnership with RHA, RTC, State, Feds, AFL-CIO, County, private developer, non-profit…. Where there is a will there is a way…”
Over on KUNR, Mike Kazmierski, CEO of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, was critical of local authorities though: “A lot of issues, prices certainly are a factor, but our local governments are not doing their job either,” he was quoted as saying.
“For example, auxiliary dwelling units, if the city council said, ‘OK, we're comfortable with that,’ we'd add 2,000 housing units to the market tomorrow. And there are a lot of people that are struggling, they're homeless, they're living in trailers—that would help take some of the pressure off,” Kazmierski said in rare opposition to Reno’s elected officials.
The ADU idea was shot down by a very similar City Council after extended discussions in 2018, and the clarion of NIMBYism coming from old southwest Reno.
At least the urgent conversations and new ideas are swirling around, including for the future of the Bonanza Inn. Reese has mentioned several times that now that Washoe County is running homeless services, Reno can put more work into housing breakthroughs.
There’s been repeated talk of the need for workforce housing recently, whatever that means exactly. We also stress the need for accessible housing, not just affordable, whereby those with poor credit, records or no money for down payments can also get easier access to having their own private place to call home.
Our podcast this week (above in screengrab) is with JP Harvey a member of Helping Hands Loving Hearts which recently opened a new storage space for all the donations it’s collecting and then handing out.
A local comedian who was at The Polo Lounge last night gave us warnings about fentanyl, and our weekly recommended read is Maid.