Hawah Ahmad, a “Reno born, Washoe raised” 29-year-old candidate for Washoe County Commission District 3, recently hosted an Our Community, Our Culture event at the Holland Project, which was supposed to have a public discussion on homelessness.
However, expected representatives from mutual aid groups didn’t show up, so instead our reporter Matthew Berrey caught up with her to get a variety of insights from the candidate directly, from her young age as a candidate, to her ideas on the affordability crisis and passion for helping.
A comedy and live music show did go ahead as planned. “It’s just to celebrate some comedy and some music and just to kinda let off some steam, just because the election cycle's been pretty rough already,” she said.
Another motivating factor was to reach out to younger voters.
“I am a millennial, I'm 29, but I'm on the older side of the spectrum now, regardless of what people try to say. When it comes down to it, [millennials] they don't normally vote in midterm elections and we have a lot of seats, not just mine, but, you know, we have the governor and we also have the Senator up, so we have to get people out and get them excited.”
She was willing to talk about the unhoused situation as well, saying District 3 encompasses many of the motels now being torn down.
“One of the biggest things that has happened is with the development of the Cares Campus, we have homeless people that don't want to necessarily use it, and we don't have the services to be able to provide to the people that need them. So we have kind of a mass diaspora … everyone's spreading out kind of into the neighborhoods and into the suburbs. It's making our situation, especially like in Sparks, surrounding the university and just around where the shelters are not as safe as it could be. So we want to make sure that we can support the people in our community, right. Because we are putting money into it, but it's clear that our money is not having a return on our investment, but we also want to make sure that we support the needs of the residents, the homeless population, and just really like even our public safety infrastructure. So the farther out you have homeless people go, I mean, like who's going to respond. It's going to be cops and I have nothing against cops, but they're not social workers. “
She says getting everyone immediately off the streets is not realistic and that another frame of mind, where emphasis is on empowering people, could make for better results. Ahmad also sees too much of a gap between different groups helping the unhoused and authorities. “No one's actually talking to each other, but that's definitely a statewide issue where we silo ourselves off very easily and we don't actually work together and strategically plan our problems,” she said.
She also prefers the term attainable housing as part of the solution than the more common term affordable housing.
“I am the chair of the Washoe County Senior Advisory Board. I have a lot of seniors that are renters that, you know, they're on fixed incomes and same with the folks on disability. That stuff does not change, but their housing prices are increasing and we're seeing trends where they're increasing every six months.”
More work on reducing rising rents would be part of her strategy.
“We have to incentivize the good landlords that are not increasing rents. We have to hire case managers to negotiate long-term leases. If you can't force a developer or a landlord to do a certain behavior, we have to incentivize it because we're trying to change a culture.”
Ahmad says she started volunteering on the Fourth Street corridor as a teenager, and has continued to do so, as helping others is part of her DNA.
“I’ve done everything from running school buses to, from motel to motel, to pick up kids, to take them to a free lunch program, to delivering soap to single parent transient households. And when it comes down to this area is just so important to me. I feel like it's been really forgotten. There are parts of it that haven't, but there are parts of it that have. You have this mass development where you have the folks that live there that are not happy. And so we have to find that magical balance and I do believe it's possible just whether or not we're willing to put in the elbow grease to do it.”
Ahmad loves her hometown, and understands many others are starting to appreciate it, while others who grew up here have had to move because of higher and higher prices. “If we have the audacity to continue to seek out companies to move here, then we have to make sure that we have the services and infrastructure necessary to support our current residents. Absolutely. I just love this place and grew up here and I want to see this place really just do well. We have to make sure that we make this place a good place for all young people for every background. And that's also something that we have not done.”
Ahmad sees her background going to a local mosque and Indian stores as a strength of needed diversity, as well as her youth.
“If we as young people, don't stand up now, then it's going to be too late. We have to talk about sustainability. We have to talk about public transportation, we have to talk about supporting our unions.”