Rudy Leon, a scholarly book editor, two time burner and Midtown resident, who currently lives on about $30,000 per year, recently launched her campaign website RudyForReno. She says she is the one candidate who understands what it’s like to have most of her income go to her housing. She first moved to Reno in 2012, and moved back after taking a job elsewhere, and realizing the Biggest Little City was home. Leon will greet potential voters following the Women’s March Saturday, January 18th, at the downtown Events Center. In February she will be going to a smart growth conference in Arizona, to get new ideas for her campaign. She sat down this week with Our Town Reno for a one on one interview as she prepares to officially register in March and compete in the June primary, with victory as her objective in November. Note: Part of the interview was trimmed for conciseness and clarity.
Q: What would you like to see Reno’s city council pushing for in terms of making housing more accessible to our city’s residents?
There are two things that come to the top of my mind immediately. The first is … having some tenant protections. I have lived in a number of places and I've never lived someplace that had as few. I'm not sure we have any tenant protections…. So that's one thing they can do is start working on instituting some tenant protections and rent protective issues. The other thing is prioritizing the building of attainable housing. Most people think of it as affordable housing, but in government speak affordable housing is government funded, income capped housing like Section 8… We, the city can help facilitate the supply and demand imbalance so that housing can kind of normalize at the attainable level.
The city also has a lot of vacant land that they own that has nothing built on it. Something that I would like to see happen is a listing of what the city owns and what it intends for it and therefore what land it owns that it has no intention for and how that land can be used. Can those be safe parking places? Can those be places where we can put up tiny homes?
Q: Are there any particularities to Ward 3? Here in your neighborhood, we’ve seen gentrification affecting the Latino community. Any ideas of who your opponents will be and if they include the incumbent Oscar Delgado?
I mean, generally I feel like the housing crisis hits Ward 3 harder than anywhere else. It is the most diverse ward in the city and it is the least affluent ward in the city. If you can't afford to rent or buy in Ward 3, it's very challenging to rent or buy in, let's say Ward 5.
As far as I know, nobody has officially entered. The incumbent has not had an official launch party or an announcement about his running. There has been a lot of gossip back and forth, but I figure I'll find out on March 13th with everybody else, if council member Delgado is in the race or not.
Q: How do you see Council member Delgado’s record generally with what you call attainable housing?
Well, he has a long history. I mean that's part of it and I think it actually makes me a little nervous. He came in very much to the left of where he is now. And I hope that I don't end up moving right. Lately in the three or four years that I've been paying close attention to the council, I have not been excited by the decisions that council member Delgado has made…
Ultimately though, the reason that I'm running isn't specifically because of any votes that any particular council member has made. I am not seeing the kinds of approaches to the problems that we need to take to solve them. We, everyone in Nevada, has a limited amount of money. We can't raise taxes. We can't do anything to increase what we have. So we have to come up with very innovative solutions that are fiscally responsible. And I am not seeing people approaching questions with that kind of creative thinking.
“The city can't spend our way to a solution,” Leon said of the overall homelessness and housing affordability crisis our community faces. “We simply cannot. We need to come up with policy solutions that prevent homelessness, that intervene before people lose their housing, on drug addiction, on mental health, on better jobs. I mean we need to start bringing in more jobs, better jobs. And I want to, I intend to work on that as part of what I will do.” She said recent and ongoing initiatives such as the 1,000 homes in 120 days, the Village on Sage Street or tiny homes projects are good initiatives, but that they should be made to move faster, for more people and at more price ranges.
Q: In terms of residents without any stable shelter, some activists are pushing for safe parking areas and safe campgrounds. What is your view on those possibilities?
The only problem I see with that is that our police force is the same size as it was in 2008 after the crash. So if we are really going to say that we're building safe spaces or that we're designating safe spaces, we have to commit to that safety and that means additional police presence. And I don't know, I just simply don't know if we have the presence to make that happen. Again, the money problem is a big problem.
But I was just reading an article where some neighbors in Oakland actually invited women to bring in their tents and build sort of a permanent tent community in the vacant lot around them and they're able to grow their own food and the neighbors take care of trash. They share their trash bins with the folks who are living in the tents and share some electricity and have bought solar lights and have done things that allow that community to be safe and also acknowledged...
I mean people have dignity and we have to respect that dignity and every solution we go for has got to come from the heart. I feel like we often lack compassion, that that is not our first priority, that we need to treat people that way in actuality, not just intention, like they matter.
Q: There is also a big plan to move women and children away from the main downtown shelter to the Galletti Way area in Sparks. Meanwhile, we are seeing tent encampments forcibly removed from the river and parks. Is all this movement a good idea?
It's on my list of things I have to look into. But folks live where they live for reasons that they choose. Whether those are tents or shelters. And when you start sending women to Sparks and families to Sparks, how are they getting there? How are they getting back to their partners who are in the men's shelter? How are they negotiating that spatial differential? That just seems to be a problem that we don't look at.
Folks choose to camp where they are for reasons. And if we want to, if we as a city want to exert control over where those places are, we have to identify why people are choosing to camp where they camp and make sure that those services are available where we think is more appropriate for people to be. Because if we don't do that, there's no way, I mean not even seeing how the rightness or wrongness of relocating people, but if we want to affect anything, any control over that, we have to know what is leading people to sleep where they sleep.
And the new Sparks shelter, it's a worry to me that that may not succeed because of not being aware of those reasons. And we need that to succeed. We're putting a lot of resources into it.
Leon has adorned her rental with political signs on many windows. She says she was spurred to get into politics herself after the last big election cycle of 2016. “I tend to be a fixer, not in the Paul Manafort sense, but in the sense of I want to fix things. I can't give up on something until I've tried to fix it. And I was very upset about the election, so I got involved with the Democratic Party to try and fix it. And so it was directly because of the political environment changing that I started watching what was happening with city council and I've lobbied the legislature and this is a town where you can make a difference, where anybody can make a difference. And that empowered me to think that, you know, I have a lot of things to offer. I've managed massive budgets, I've managed people, I've managed new programs and services as a career, as a librarian. I meet with a group of people, figure out what their needs are and then with the limited resources we have available, try and meet them. That's kind of how I see city council.”
Q: You are also a burner, having gone twice. Are you a tapping into Burning Man ideas or the local Burning Man community as part of this campaign?
I don’t how you can run in Reno and not tap into the Burning Man community. I think that so much of Reno, especially when you're talking about creative approaches, so much of that is the Burning Man community.
I have plenty of friends who go to Burning Man… You know, whether or not they choose to support me is entirely up to them as is anybody else's decision to support me or not.
The things that draw me to Burning Man are a lot of the same things that draw me to Reno and trying to fix things. The principles of Burning Man … how do you bring that home, how do you bring that week home? I'm not good with the heat, so I really prefer the bring it home part. The party in the desert is fine, but I can't really take it for long. So that creativity, that energy, those approaches to solving things, together, I think a lot of that just informs who I am and how I approach things.
Q: Are there other big issues dear to your heart and important to address as you prepare to go in full campaign mode?
I mean, a big part of why I'm running are all of the issues around housing and homelessness.
But I have over the past year become gravely concerned about law enforcement’s understanding of sexual violence. We need to work to make sure that training is done. We need to figure out why so few rape cases, rape reports, make it to court and where the roadblocks are along the way and get those out of the way.
The other piece that is really important to me is that we need to bring in more jobs and better jobs. I mean, the legislature has worked for several years to bring in really fantastic $15 an hour jobs, which now we're saying that $15 an hour should be the minimum wage. So we need to now be working on that next stage.
How do we bring in a more professional jobs when folks bring in their warehousing and logistics and data center jobs? They're keeping their management elsewhere and we need to work to make sure that we are bringing those jobs here as well.
The Our Town Reno Interview with Rudy Leon was conducted on January 13, 2020. A podcast version of this interview will soon be available on the Biggest Little Streets podcast.