A photo essay by Deborah Achtenberg
Some people live on and off the street. Others get to move them around.
The Standard at Reno planned to build high-end student housing in an area with lovely historic homes near UNR. As a result, the buildings were boarded up and the low-income residents were moved out. Then, the Standard changed its mind. The buildings are still there, boarded up and deteriorating.
Here's an elegant one. It once was a boarding house.
Can you imagine conversations around the boarding house dining table?
Here's another. Some people are living there again, as you can see from the signs
Here's a smaller one that looks as though it got a fresh round of paint recently. All the improvement work was for nothing.
And here is another, with its once welcoming porch hard to discern due to the boards.
The properties are for sale, as you can see from the sign on this beautiful pink one. Where will the people allowed in it go? How sad for them to leave a welcoming home.
But the hosts can withdraw their original welcome. They own the house that made the welcome possible--and no law keeps them from taking it back.
Who owns the law, I wonder? You and me??
It doesn't take long for property to deteriorate. The elements take their toll.
And how easily we deprive the young of pasts that stimulate emotion and imagination-- of porches where people sat, talked and watched the world go by. Imagination that could help us change our world.
All will be gone soon. Change and change back. On and off the street. Power and powerlessness.
And we just watch as beauties like this old boarding house deteriorate and pass from the scene.
