Commentary
A Carson City judge just nuked the state teachers union’s petition to place the Oakland A’s Gomorrah South corporate welfare stadium to a vote of taxpayers who will get stuck with the tab.
Letting people vote? In Nevada? Outrageous.
At the same time, a new union of sorts for renters was announced.
One outta two ain’t bad.
Said renters’ rights outfit is about half a century too late. Back in northern Nevada’s previous boomtown era c. 1978, even casino execs were living in tents by the river. (I’ve still got the film I shot.)
The coming of the MGM Grand (now the Grand Sierra) spurred a population boom as irritating as anything today. More traffic than small town roads could handle and nowhere for people to live. Rents skyrocketed resulting in skyrocketing fortunes for real estate speculators.
I am not exaggerating when I say California hustlers were driving around town with briefcases full of cash looking to pay whatever the market would bear for housing and “sewer fixture units.”
One sewer fixture unit equals one faucet. NVEnergy nee Sierra Pacific Power was out of water. (This was before Warren Buffet’s outfit dumped a junky, poorly maintained water system onto the public for a premium price, spawning the birth of the Truckee Meadows Water Authority.)
To build something, you have to bring water to get a building permit. I knew a guy named Blackie who ran a dry cleaner and laundromat — with lots of sewer fixtures. A suit walked in one day and asked how much to buy his operation.
Blackie told me he thought about it for a minute, came up with his wildest-dream figure, then doubled it.
The suit said “deal.”
“When I got up off the floor after fainting, I thought I was dreaming,” Blackie said.
Blackie soon retired. His former laundromat is now a bar near downtown with far fewer sewer fixture units.
Then as now, calls for rent control erupted. Reno City Hall actually held a hearing and gave mobile home renters rights leader Barbara Bennett a cold shower. (I was there.) She asked for a “rent justification” ordinance, mandating that landlords justify rent increases with facts and figures until the crisis subsided. That model has been copied many times elsewhere.
A Democratic state senate candidate advocated for temporary rent control until vacancies exceeded five percent. The power company and the Republican establishment, with a little help from city hall and the gambling-industrial complex, saw to it that he lost in an upset to a self-described Republican “slumlord.”
In the aftermath, then as now, the little people were hopeless. In 1979, Reno voters made Barbara Bennett the city’s first woman mayor. She was up against a roiling Red Sea without Moses to help her part the waters.
She called city hall “infested with special interests.” She told me of the curious case of a local construction company that always submitted the low bid on city contracts about five minutes before the deadline.
She suspected a city hall night janitor of opening the locked cabinet containing competitors’ bids and giving them to the outfit in question.
There is justice in the world. The crooks went bankrupt and out of business a few years later. A high city official, who retired rich, was also implicated.
Barbara Bennett was a senior citizen and the fight wore her down. When new Gov. Richard Bryan offered her the position of director of state youth services in 1983, she took it. She remains the only mayor to have a park named after her and the only mayor to make the Reno Gazette-Journal’s 1999 “100 Who Made a Difference in the 20th Century.”
Bennett’s resignation gave Vice-Mayor Pete Sferrazza the gavel but neither he nor a vocal minority on the council could affect the entrenched power.
Into the breach came a Democrat and a Republican, Marshall Schultz and Brent Tyler. Schultz was a renter and Tyler was a sales exec for Young Electric Sign, builders of the current Reno Arch. Brent also had sideline: He was the best political pollster — and the best damned Republican — I ever knew. (I said so when when I wrote his obituary.)
Brent and Marshall started a renters’ rights advocacy organization.
After a few years, it withered as construction caught up and then faded when Mr. Schultz died.
I got an e-mail from an Oregon reader this week with a link to a Nevada Independent story headlined “Group thought to be first tenants union in Nevada seeks to tackle high rents.”
Well, they thought wrong. Also, it’s not a union, which is a workers’ rights organization, but I appreciate their co-opting the name and the spirit of organizing.
Solidarity forever! Rock on.
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN. I tried to use the power of the Internet to start a renters’ rights information exchange a little before the pandemic hit. I launched Rentvolutionv.org and offered to post tenant compliments and complaints. KRNV TV-4 covered the story.
I got lots of interest but no one — not one renter — would participate.
One guy said it all: “If I make a complaint, my landlord will know who I am and evict me.”
As in 1978, renters have no rights save the cosmetic in this no-cause eviction state. It’s the equivalent of fire-at-will for workers without a union. Alas, at least weak federal laws protect union employees, who are today only about 15 percent of Nevada’s workforce.
Renters can only complain. So make rent control an election issue, dammit! Get some enlightened people into office for a change.
As Frederick Douglass advised: Agitate, agitate, agitate.
Organize. Organize. Organize!
DIVINE INSPIRATION DEPT. I was motivated to write the following heresy while watching an episode of “Law & Order Special Victims Unit.”
Intrepid detectives were desperately searching for a woman based on a single clue: a closeup photo of her telegenic upper body cleavage wearing a pseudo-leopardskin halter.
Needless to say, the director of the show displayed the display frequently, the better to increasingly build, er…suspense?
QUESTION: Why do men who are obsessed with large female breasts become Christians?
A: Because they can’t wait to be born again.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com and Rentvolutionv.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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