A tenant with sewage coming out of their sink, and the landlord only coming by two weeks later to fix it. Another dealing with bed bugs. Motels, often the first and last resort out of homelessness being torn down, with former residents struggling to find new housing. Rent increasing astronomically within a single year.
A dozen concerned Reno residents recently started the Reno Sparks Tenant Union and will hold a public town hall at the downtown library Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to address such concerns they are all too familiar with.
One of them is Holly, a renter herself, who sells vintage clothing and wanted to go just by her first name for the purposes of this article.
“At my last apartment, whenever I asked my landlord to fix something, he told me I was not allowed to email him,” she told Our Town Reno during a recent interview. “There was no way to fight that because I don't make very much money as many people who are renters are. I don't have money for a lawyer. So while we're told we have these protections, they're only as good as they are able to be enforced, and many of them aren't enforced unless you have access to money to actually push back in the court system.”
The group started in July with the observation that local wage increases aren’t following the skyrocketing trend of higher rents. Similar organizations exist in bigger cities such as Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but none were established here in Reno.
“We’ve actually been speaking to other tenants unions just to kind of get an understanding of how they got started and what their process has been and what has been most effective for their groups. So we've spoken to people from the Los Angeles Tenants Union. I actually lived in LA for a bit and was a part of [it]. We’ve talked to people from the Kansas City Tenants Union and Tucson Tenants Union. We’re definitely drawing on inspiration from other tenants unions that have been really successful in pushing for either policy changes or grassroot efforts to improve the conditions of tenants.”
Responding to one social media comment fearing this effort would be all talk, Holly had this to say: “We’re not politicians. We are community members. We're people who also have a stake in this, so we're not just going to sit here and not do anything. We all have a motivation to make things happen. We're not just people who are in power looking at other people's suffering and deciding to do the bare minimum.”
Holly says other tenant unions have been able to create change, such as helping to have rent control passed in Pasadena, where following pressure from the Pasadena for Rent Control group, from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024, rent increases are being capped at 2.75%, .
In Los Angeles, rent strikes have been used as a method to force landlord to go back on rent increases.
“They've also been able to push through renter protections such as relocation assistance,” Holly added. “In Kansas City, they were able to push through legislation that mandated that anyone facing eviction would have access to free legal services. So there's a lot of things that tenant unions can do, and because basically right now with no sort of organization that's organizing on behalf of tenants for tenants in Reno, we're all kind of left on our own to deal with things individually. But if we come together as a group, and exercise solidarity and are able to leverage collective bargaining, there's a lot that we can accomplish.”
Tenants forming a union makes sense to Holly. “The renter class is its own specific class, and it's oppressed in its own specific ways,” she explained.
“Those of us who are renters definitely have reason to come together and work towards our common interests. If we're just on our own dealing with these things, then landlords, developers, et cetera, can basically get away with pushing things as far as they possibly can to get as much profit out of us. But since we all do have a common interest in trying to maintain affordability, have safe access to homes that are habitable and comfortable, we definitely all should be coming together and speaking to each other and sharing our experiences and making sure that no one's going through things alone. Because if we do work to improve the conditions of tenants, I think it's like over 50% of people in Reno are tenants, so it's a huge swath of people that if we work to improve conditions of tenants, we're going to be increasing the quality of life for over half of the population in Reno, which to me feels like a very important thing.”
Holly says there are particularities in Reno and the Silver State working against tenants.
“We just have a lot less protections in Nevada than most states do. We have one of the most intense eviction processes that can get people out of their home within five days, whereas most states have much longer eviction periods that give people time to land on their feet. Overall this is a very pro landlord state, and there hasn't been any resistance to it. We would actually be the first tenant’s union in Nevada in general, which is exciting, but also sad that there's no other tenant unions.”
Holly concluded they want to make sure first and foremost tenants facing challenges shouldn’t feel like they are alone. “If people are dealing with difficult landlord rent increases, et cetera, they're not the only person dealing with it. [The town hall] is an opportunity for us to come together so that we're no longer suffering in silence or dealing with these things as individuals, but we can work to create a more equitable Reno for all of us.”