“I’m to the point of almost giving up, like ‘no I can’t do this’,” Amy who in her 40s says of trying to survive in a rapidly changing and costlier Reno. She’s been sharing local resources she’s found with Our Town Reno via email to share with the community and now she wanted to share her own story in more detail.
She works as a manager for a self storage company for $16 an hour, while living in a small 325 square feet apartment or what she calls “a glorified hotel room,” for $1,000 near the Row.
She wanted to stay anonymous, not wanting her ex husband to find her or to lose her job. She initially moved to Reno to flee her ex, after traveling non stop with another previous job, to find a place where she could start over.
Initially she worked in a friendly thrift store where there was a sense of community. Then the pandemic rolled around, and she got a slightly higher paying job, but still she struggles.
“I don't have any savings. My car is falling apart, and I don't have enough money to fix it,” she said.
She says she’s in a category that gets little to no help, making too much money to qualify for welfare, able bodied, employed, with health insurance, housed, “sane,” even if dealing with mental health challenges, not addicted, not a veteran, sober, without dependents, but still struggling, not eating healthy enough, always afraid of her car totally breaking down, not being able to afford co pays for proper health care.
“We need just as much help as the next person does,” she says of people in her situation. “There’s a lot of barriers, you have to already be on food stamps, already have to be going through sober living, but none of that applies to me and others struggling.”
She’s tried to enlist in different local assistance programs, but “by the time that you're done with all this rigamarole, you're just ‘well, anyway, I mean, I said to myself, I'm like, my God, I'm giving up.’”
Food banks she says are often closed when she has time to get to them, so she relies on Karma Boxes to have just enough to eat.
Her company offered her on site housing but she says conditions there were “hideous” and probably wouldn’t pass code enforcement, and you can have someone knocking at your window who needs help in the middle of the night, she said of why she decided to avoid that option.
Downtown, where she lives instead, she says she falls asleep to gunfire and people fighting over drugs, she walks around with mace and knives to protect herself, and every morning she’s grateful her car hasn’t been broken into.
She’d like to see more meals on wheels, at more different times, and not just for seniors. She’s worried about worsening traffic, wildfires and earthquakes. She says people have gotten less and less friendly locally in recent years.
“I don't want to, like, go somewhere and lie and say, yeah, well, I'm homeless, you know, and can you give me resources for this? I don't drink, I don't do drugs, but I can’t get ahead here,” she concluded.