New Tent Daytime Services Welcome
“I typically come here to take a shower and I eat here. I come here [for] lunch and dinner,” Darius said of the new big tent shelter area on East 4th street. “Currently, I'm homeless. I got my own little camping set up, but here they got places for people to sleep, shower, and food.”
He said he’s thankful for this new sleeping option, with added benefits of daytime use for meals, shade, bathrooms and showers.
“It's a good thing that they are here. It's a lot of people homeless. It's a lot of people who [aren’t] in the right mental state or whatever. And some of them don't know how to take care of themselves. Some of them will sleep anywhere. “
He said he’s found ways to get early morning day labor without needing an ID, which he says was recently stolen.
“My plans is to keep working at this one job that I'm working in. My ID was recently stolen. I just could go there by five in the morning. That's what I'm doing. It's the only place I can work right now because of my ID situation. “
“Reno isn't bad at all. There’s plenty of jobs here. There's helpful resources here that I know of so far,” Darius said of his overall situation, even if he did point out some frustrations with how a recovery program he thought about is seemingly set up.
“Hell to Get a new ID” and Housing
“It's been hard, especially during this COVID-19,” Darius said of trying to get a new ID to replace his stolen one. “The DMV is shut down. When I had a few hundred dollars a few weeks ago that I had saved up and I was online actually trying to figure it out, how I can order my ID for my driver's license from Arizona. And it was just terrible, the website is not user friendly and you know, I'm stuck out here. I can't really do much without my ID, so it's terrible.”
He says he’s been thankful for getting some work, but that' it’s not enough to get his own housing.
”[This guy] paid me on a little debit card thing or whatever, you know, it's been getting me by, but it ain't life changing, it’s not getting me off the streets, but it's money in my pocket. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's better than nothing.”
He says he’s also tried to get into a sobriety program by the downtown shelter but that he disagrees with the way it appears to be set up.
“ I tried to get in there because I just got tired of living in my tent. I drank a lot. I want to quit drinking. I'm only 27. This is ain't my life. This ain't me at all. So I walked in them doors and I asked, ‘Hey ma'am do you guys have any open beds? How can I get in the program? She said, ‘yeah, man, just fill out an application and we'll get back with you.’ But then she told me you have to work 40 hours a week and you don't get paid for that. That basically pays your housing. And I find that kind of weird and it doesn't really make sense that you guys have worked a contract to send people to work 40 hours a week where they don't get paid, but right next door and the buildings are literally connected, right next door, it’s a homeless shelter where people need work and they don't have contracts for work. And I find that a problem right there. I find that kind of weird. And it's like, it's proof that we live in a backwards ass society. Excuse my language.”
Often, city and county officials will talk about “aid-resistant” citizens, or people on social media will say people living in tents refuse services. But what if the services are unclear or don’t feel fair to those thinking about getting them?
Food aid is easily accessible, but many people on the streets such as Darius complain about the complexity or the rules of local recovery programs.
Why not Day Labor Jobs Offered at Homeless Shelters?
“Right next door, these guys got jobs, but they're telling people that the only way you can live here, if you work for 40 hours a week. That's slavery, if you asked me, so that's the only issue,” Darius told us of why he isn’t too sure about signing up yet for the local recovery program he says he thought about getting into.
“I don't even know. It's a bunch of little things just in that same category. If you ask me that’s not really trying to help people out the situation, but it is just basically using them and getting government grants. I mean, I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure. I would like to see a lot of places that have day labor jobs and stuff like that. I would like to see a lot of their contracts go to the homeless shelter. At the homeless shelter where there’s a lot of able bodied, men and women that's in the right state of mind, they just need work and they don't have contracts,” he told us as a way of a simple solution.
“People just only want to keep getting richer. They don’t want to help figure out how to really fix the problem,” he said as we concluded our interview.