With several progressives currently running for different Reno city council seats — such as Lily Baran in Ward 1, Tara Webster in Ward 5 and William Mantle in Ward 6 — renters who make up a majority in the Biggest Little City could help turn the tide of local policy making by electing them into office.
If the polls rendered that verdict, what could happen then?
A good example of this is Los Angeles where several elected progressives have turned the big California city into one of the most renter friendly places in the United States.
They’ve all campaigned on promoting renter protections, workers’ rights, campaign finance reform and affordable housing, and scored upsets in recent electoral cycles.
The moneyed political and business elite is fighting back with lavish spending on their own favorite candidates, centrist, pro establishment Democrats or moderate Republicans, as they do here, but 2024 is both a decisive electoral test for Los Angeles and here in Reno: in LA to see if gains can be expanded upon, and in Reno for a new political energy to take hold.
Corporate Democrats and moderate Republicans tend to call themselves reasonable and pragmatic, pro law and order, and their records indicate very much of a status quo orientation. Their campaigns are flooded with money from developers, landlords and business leaders who have succeeded, casinos and their influential lawyers, police and firefighters’ unions, lobbyists, wealthy landowners, political consultants, ad agencies, and unspent funds from other election cycles from other current and former city council members, making them hard to defeat.
As the Nation magazine recently detailed in an excellent article, one LA candidate who surmounted this type of coalesced opposition was an advocate for the unhoused, Nithya Raman.
She appealed to renters, people who don’t usually vote, immigrants, carpenters, teamsters and low paid workers, among others, and with the help of enthusiastic volunteers and first-time donors, in 2020 defeated an establishment candidate, sounding the alarm for a new wave of progressives.
Not surprisingly, following her win, there was vociferous pushback from homeowner groups and landlords trying to mount a recall effort, and then her district was redrawn, bringing in conservative and home owning areas into her current re-election challenges.
Her political opponents were put in a frenzy in 2022, when a union organizer, a progressive activist and a community organizer critical of the police, were all elected to the same L.A. council Raman had started making moves in, on the strength of renters voting for them, while left leaning former US representative Karen Bass was elected mayor, even though she had been outspent by her main opponent ten to one.
Together, as a progressive force on the LA council, despite opposition from the landlord lobby, they helped expand local protection for renters, including just cause eviction protections, and according to the Nation, “a debt threshold for nonpayment evictions, and relocation assistance for rent-gouged tenants.”
They have also expanded funding for mental health services while opposing salary increases for police officers and pushed through ordinances to make all new construction carbon free.
Two years ago, emboldened by these campaigns, LA voters passed “a mansion tax” called Measure ULA on properties selling for over $5 million to help pay for new affordable housing, lawyers to defend renters being evicted unfairly, and rent subsidies for the extremely vulnerable, creating an extremely efficient municipal housing fund.
The 58 percent victory for the measure came even as its proponents were outspent two to one during the campaign.
In this current cycle, in LA the challenge is for progressives to maintain or even expand their base on city council, while in Reno it is to create a new movement, which started with the outgoing Jenny Brekhus not saying yes to every developer request, and being followed by Meghan Ebert who has asked pointed questions and not voting yes on every proposal either, since her election in 2022 for the Ward 4 seat.
Efforts have been made to ease unaffordability crisis here, but these are usually on the fringes and not wholesale like a progressive wave could cause.