Shawn Patrick Jamie has been living at Desert Rose Inn motel on West 4th street since November 2021. He was a line cook who worked in different restaurants pre-Covid but lost his job when the initial lockdown and shutdowns took place. Complicating matters for him, he’s been dealing with a painful kidney stone for a while now, while he looks for a new job.
As others though, he’s been more selective and patient while re-entering the workforce, looking for kitchen jobs at $19 an hour. Still he figures, he won’t be able to find a place elsewhere even with that kind of salary.
Shawn pays $900 per month to rent a room here and describes getting a room in the motel as a-not-so-easy at it seems task.
“So we hopped around for a couple of different places,” he remembers. “And then luckily got up here. But it's kind of difficult to get in here, vacancies are not like… they don't come up that often.”
He says the $900 payment is cheaper than what he paid at a local Motel 6 for a while: “...that was like 1600 bucks a month for a motel room. And that's just ridiculous.”
He lives in this motel with his girlfriend and a dog and says they barely “squeak by” when it comes to monthly expenses.
The Desert Rose Inn has resisted repeated attempts until now from Jacobs Entertainment which has been buying up other motels and properties, mostly tearing them down and replacing them with fenced off dirt lots. The Colorado-based company says it wants to create a new entertainment district, and has established a usually locked off Glow Plaza, with a row of animal sculptures, green lights and replicas of old motel signs.
“I sell art on the side…I had unemployment that just ran out… I won best mural and best muralist out here or whatever, a couple years ago. I paint pretty good,” he said as he showed us the tattoo he got on his neck after his pitbull Jasmine’s death.
Shawn says there were a couple of times where he did not know where to go and walked around all night. Some of his friends lived in tent last year before the sweeps.
“That was brutal,” he said. “That was bad, as long as gentrification [is] around here, Jacobs Entertainment buying up all the property, downtown Reno doesn't even look like downtown Reno [any]more. You can't push all these people into these areas. And then they go and they wipe out all the places where people are like the broke people are supposed to live, a lot of these motels, where are they supposed to go? People got to go somewhere. You can't go tear down all the low income housing and not replace it with something,” he said.
Shawn says he is pretty happy about living at the Desert Rose Inn. “This one's pretty clean for as far as most of them goes,” he said of the motel experience. “We got no bugs here, mice, nothing like that.”
He says it takes getting used to to wash utensils in a bathroom instead of a sink but says, “ I'm just grateful to have a roof.”
While he’s finally feeling some relief with the pandemic easing, he’s worried about the war between Russia and Ukraine.
“I read the news every day. So I'm like, ‘ oh, man, this kind of looks like the impending threat of World War Three.’ I worry about stuff like that. I'm gonna add to our little family. So I worry about stuff like that and probably shouldn't watch the news. It's not very cheerful.”
He’s concerned about Reno’s direction as well. “I've been here forever and it used to kind of be a nice town. It's gotten real dirty and grimy, especially downtown. Like Jacobs Entertainment and their big jazz, classic textbook gentrification! I used to think gentrification was a myth until it happened in my own community. Like I'd read about it in Chicago or San Francisco or something like that… And then it started happening to us, like around here. So yeah, it's real. They're tearing down places where poor people could be living indoors… like the park across the street. Like we really need a big 40 foot tall polar bear. People probably need places to live better than that.”