Above two photos from this week on 4th street, just a few yards apart, with branding alongside neighbors struggling.
Advocates for the unhoused faced defeats this week, with widening criminalization of those living on the streets back in the winning column at our City Council.
Meanwhile, our council members felt so impatient to demolish the former Community Assistance Center, rather than saving it for new purposes, they voted to demolish it with city money before their chosen apartment developer for that location even has its money lined up to build anything in its place.
Since we started this independent volunteer driven media initiative, we’ve long warned of gentrification. This is yet another example of the gentrifying churn in our biggest little city, losing charm and gaining apathy by the day.
Some see gentrification as a threatening word, or a misused one. But it’s clear as a crisp northern Nevada sky. Initially, several local corporate Dem types and pr hacks were outraged every time we used the term, bashing us wherever they could.
It’s a repeated cycle in city after city, neighborhood after neighborhood. Murals and the such are painted, public art is added, that’s called artwashing, sidewalks are finally repaired, and people of color with local history and homegrown establishments are pushed out. Initially it’s often better paid workers coming in first, some with their union jobs or new businesses, followed by bougie bohemian artists, burner types and marginalized but financially successful LGBTQ individuals and couples, and then a new “district” is announced, gaudy “luxury” apartments are built with outrageous rents, and the former residents are soon all replaced by soulless high management, technocratic, faux hipster types in search of the next airless trend and buck, while enriched developers donate to politicians who help make it all possible.
What we have now is the branding and development of a Brewery District on 4th street right by the Reno-Sparks Gospel Mission and Catholic Charities, and not far at all from the Cares Campus or the main bus stop, which for some equates to a daytime shelter.
People who go to these locations and use their services or available amenities and who navigate up and down 4th street need all the compassion and help, both for instant survival and for long term rebounding. What if one of those people was your mother, kid, father, grandparent, sister, brother or friend? Would your comments be the same, blaming individuals in need?
There are so many elders on fixed income and broken down young adults and priced out families among them, it just breaks our heart.
Do you expect that these people who go from service to service trying to survive, often under layers and layers of external trauma, should just magically disappear? Should they spend their entire days inside the Cares Campus, feeling even more like they’re in jail, forced to be there in a crowded hyper guarded warehouse like environment with other people struggling even more than themselves?
Meanwhile, many of the newer chichi places in the Brewery District seem mostly out of place, opening slowly and closing quickly, due to a lack of clientele being able to afford their products, and not at all creating a welcoming space, using hostile fencing on the outside, and characterless design on the inside, much like the Cares Campus itself.
Reno is yet again at a transition of how wide the gap is becoming between, economically speaking, the haves and the have nots. Should we listen to the business owners during public comment just trying to make money or reputations for themselves, in the name of “safety” for their patrons, while they took advantage of cheap deals to move there in the first place, or to the advocates for the unhoused trying to make everyone feel like they are a part of a community which helps each other out?
This is a question very much related to gentrification, as those old bygone neighborhoods were places in which people looked out for each other, while these new districts have no character, moral or otherwise.
What say you?