Driving By Motels and Empty Lots
Motels in Reno, also known as “weeklies,” are going away. Many have already left. They are being replaced by one thing or another, and sometimes little or nothing.
They have been drive-bys for many for such a long time now, for those who drive, have cars, and places to go. The assumptions and assertions abound. “Blight,” demonized managers, recalcitrant owners, the unhoused who ‘just won’t get busy making their lives and ours better.’ Eyesores all; ‘good riddance,’ we say. We keep driving by on our ways home.
But we are noticing now, if not the weeklies’ declining presence then their eventual gaping absence. What’s happening, we wonder; is something new coming, someone investing, something changing?. We can take solace in imagining something new, clean, glimmering in the sun light of bright Nevada skies. And the ‘happy, shiny people’ who will be there. But for those who depend on the weeklies for a few days of indoor living, a shower, a real bed, until the money runs out again, the options just get fewer and farther away. And as long as the thinking is us/them, these trends will continue.
A Last Step or First Step out of Homelessness?
Last summer, I got to hear an Our Town Reno coordinator talk about housing in and around Reno. He told us that, even while most think of the weeklies as a last step before homelessness, few recognize that they are also often a first step out of it. I have been wrestling with a too strong sense of privileged dualistic thinking. The city and its representatives pose on backhoes and bulldozers while inspectors and ambassadors actuate our collective disdain for disrepair and those who inhabit the weeklies. Tax dollars have gone to build and maintain a number of resources designed to aid, support, and improve the lives of the unhoused and the minimally-housed. We have to face the reality that the problem isn’t those places or those people. It’s that the weeklies remind us, I hope, of how vulnerable we all can be, of how good so many of us have it. The weeklies aren’t the problem; it’s what they remind us of. The unhoused aren’t them. They’re us. Dualisms.
Do Our Weeklies Have Value?
The Nevada Museum of Art gift shop is a favorite stop for me. Among the wonderful, beautiful things they have, I was taken deep into nostalgia by a wooden toy station wagon, reminding me of our three family vacations, my having “the way-back” all to myself, and the exhaust fumes that made me car sick each trip.
As I reminisced, I noticed another option among the toys: the “Lone Cactus Motel.” Just as I was reminiscing about the station wagons, the Lone Cactus reminded me of a motor court we stayed in on one vacation trip. I suspect that my dad liked to leave home at about bedtime because it would ensure that no time was wasted and, more importantly, increase the chances of quiet. Only once did we stop at night, to stay at a motor court like the Lone Cactus.
I experienced then and understand better now the symbiotic relationship between the station wagons, vacations, and roadside motels. At a recent Nevada Museum of Art/Reno MOMO lecture, an architect reminded us of the historical value of so many of our motels, naming architects and movements and eras and design epics. There seems to be real value in the weeklies, not just from the past as reminiscences or for the future as where something new will be.
They are valuable in and of themselves, right now, as examples of midcentury modern design and Reno, proper. Can their physical existence and conceptual richness serve our fellow community members?
What are Our Options Besides NIMBYism?
What’s a poor boy to do? Be happy that something better will replace the weeklies? Be frustrated that those in need are being pushed away? Revel in nostalgia? Preserve for austerity? I saw a proposal not long ago that suggested we give the unhoused a bunch of campers and trailers that need repair, ship them all out into the desert somewhere, and let the unhoused work their newfound mobility into shape. Hyper-bootstraps! Maybe it’s a Cliven Bundy move—put them on BLM land and argue that its “our land” even while we want to put “them” on it, probably for free. Reno Quality of Life planned a citizen’s arrest event to remove anyone looking homeless from a local park. The police beat them to it. ‘Not in my backyard’ or, it seems, the park nearby that belongs to all of us.
We have options. We can care about these places and, more importantly, about our unhoused and minimally-housed community members. We might be able to rescue weeklies through historic and architectural preservation.
We can celebrate the role of the weekly, the motel, the divorce cottage as essential parts of Reno identity and history. We can do more for the unhoused who have inhabited those weeklies, who are deserving of our compassion and generosity simply because they are human beings and part of our community.
We can make addressing these concerns a matter of public pride rather than problem-solving, of community identity and priority, even marketable identification and commerce.
“Housing is a challenge for many communities. I imagine reading in the paper and seeing on the news that a group of leaders from . . . looked at what Reno did, and are using Reno’s approach to housing and architectural preservation to . . . ” What I don’t want to imagine is a Reno that keeps driving by. Noticing from the safety of our cars, in the gap between locations and meetings and shopping and . . . requires nothing of us, but neither does it do a thing for any of us.
Maybe a first step is considering other perspectives. From the other side of those tattered curtains, from beneath the wooden staircases and between the buildings, from a seat on the sidewalk, the perspective is very different. Do we have to get there ourselves before we can care?