#StayHomeforNevada but What if You Don’t Have a Home?
For social distancing measures, the Reno Events Center was converted into an emergency overnight shelter. Photos/ Nico Colombant.
An account on reporting about emergency sheltering and living in tents during a pandemic, by Nico Colombant, the coordinator of the Our Town Reno street reporting collective.
Listen to the audio documentary below which includes live reporting and interviews from encampments and emergency shelters.
It was March 21, three days after the shutdown of all so-called non-essential businesses in Nevada, as part of too little, too late, government efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the downtown Reno shelter, workers in HAZMAT suits with the COIT cleaning company, contracted by the City of Reno, were moving out mattresses, taking them to the Reno Events Center.
The goal was to thin out those using the shelter—leaving only veterans, those with service animals or serious medical issues, and families on the Volunteers of America campus—and have over 300 mattresses six feet apart in a repurposed downtown convention hall, with all events cancelled there for the foreseeable future.
As the mattresses were disinfected, and then placed under multicolored lights, city council members raved. “Update: Ready to Go!” Ward 3 councilman Oscar Delgado wrote, getting 37 likes. But was he ready to sleep there himself?
An emergency situation near the Reno Events Center.
The first night was chaotic. There was no social distancing. Hundreds of people jammed along a thin sidewalk waiting to get in. A man in a dark shirt yelled instructions.
“One bag only,” he shouted. “No animals,” he added, as several dogs could be heard barking. “Bullshit,” someone in the crowd responded.
Many people who are homeless have pets, but most shelters refuse them, and the Reno Events Center was following this pattern.
One of those waiting in line was Nick Hardesty, a gruff 62-year-old wearing a Stetson cowboy hat. Hardesty was still trying to make up his mind if he would sleep at the Events Center or not. He’d only arrived from California about a week ago where public bans and shutdowns started earlier than in Reno.
He wanted to find work with day labor, but instead found the novel coronavirus catching up with him geographically.
“The germs are still there and in different cities, they are trying to figure out ways of putting people in abandoned buildings and stuff like that, to where they're separated,” he said.
Hardesty had been staying several nights at Reno’s overflow homeless shelter, where they used to take people by bus from the main shelter whenever it was full. Then he was told to take everything he had with him.
“It’s sad, you know, because we live in one of the richest countries in the world and it's like, they herd us like cattle from place to place. We go to one place, they throw us to another, they close everything.”
Other shelters in Reno were now closed to most homeless, and usual services, such as meals and access to toilets and showers were suspended.
“It seems like every time you ask somebody, they have a different answer for you,” Hardesty said of trying to figure out from shelter and city officials which services were available. “And they all pass the buck, you know, before they shut this town down, the mayor should have taken care of the homeless. You know, she should have made sure the homeless were taken care of before anybody else.”
The check-in at the Reno Events Center only allowed a backpack which was checked for weapons.
Hillary Schieve is Reno’s mayor, a position she’s held since 2014. During campaigns she has made it a priority to address homelessness, but outside of a few initiatives here and there, and some talked about but yet-to-be-realized projects, there remain thousands of homeless in the Biggest Little City. Some go to different shelters, while others sleep along the river and railroad tracks, or in parks and alleyways. It’s a transient population, moving in and out of disappearing motels, taking buses to go across state borders to try their luck elsewhere, not being able to afford or access housing.
“I’m sure the mayor has a nice home and doesn’t have to worry about food,” Hardesty said. “We weren't supposed to congregate. We're supposed to stand six feet apart. Does that look like six feet? No, everybody's going to be together everywhere we go. We aren't six feet apart. So how's it going to stop?”
On her Twitter account, Mayor Schieve was using the hashtag #StayHomeforNevada, but what if you didn’t have a home? What if your home was outside?
Mayor Schieve retweeted a post quoting state epidemiologist Melissa Peek-Bullock, saying it was "frightening" to see the COVID-19 case count in Nevada increasing. Three new cases of COVID-19 were being reported on that day in Washoe County.
We left Hardesty alone to make his decision. That night, we posted a video of our interview. “I know this guy from being homeless in Reno,” a comment by Robert Smith read below our YouTube video titled Homeless in Reno Moved to Events Center due to Coronavirus. “He ended up going to the hospital for pneumonia,” the comment went on. “Nick has had his life threatened by the other homeless people but stands his ground.”
In subsequent days, we searched for him, but never found him. His last public Facebook post is from February 26. It’s a test to reveal your most dominant trait. His concludes “he’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. He would do anything to protect his loved ones.”
A few days later, another Our Town Reno reporter Scott King, caught up with Jon Humbert, a former hard charging reporter, now a Public Information Officer for the City of Reno.
“This isn't a homeless expansion,” Humbert said, starting out the interview when asked about the repurposed Reno Events Center. “It's more of just providing more space. So we're not going to be taking new clients at this time. This is just an area where existing clients can go in the evenings and make sure that the social distancing is happening and that they're safe.”
Homeless who are being helped are called clients, for whatever reason.
“Their temperatures are being taken when they come in,” Humbert explained. “If there's going to be any high fever or other symptoms, they're going to be isolated in an area that we've already got set up at the CAC.” (The CAC is the Community Assistance Center where the main downtown Reno shelter is located.)
“So if they are at the Reno Events Center and have symptoms, they're going to the CAC. If they end up at the CAC, they're going to go in isolation. So we have our clients have a safe place that's warm, comforting, and okay to live in. But we know that this is not a long-term fix or full solution for anybody. We've just got to weather this storm as the community and kind of do what we can with the resources that we have.”
It wasn’t exactly living there, though, as with most shelters. There were hours where the line started and people were allowed to enter, in this case 7 pm, and mornings when they had to leave.
Up to 300 people started sleeping there every night as pandemic numbers kept growing in Reno, Washoe County, Nevada, and the rest of the United States and the world.
Meals for those in need were converted into pack-and-go lunches.
The first person to die in Washoe County was a 47-year-old Sparks resident named Bruce McAllister on March 28.
News reports in early August quoted the Washoe County Health District saying 29 homeless people had contracted COVID-19 with no deaths reported. Most of the testing seems to have taken place at the Reno Events Center, while most homeless in the area sleep outside with their own survival strategies.
One of those trying to find new footing in a mostly shut down city was Allyson Lynch. She remembered the sudden shift of March 21.
“So we were getting up in the morning and then you hear everybody okay, pack all your stuff, then you just only pack your bedding, take a small bag with you,” Lynch said. “Didn't take nothing at all. So it was just really like up in the air, kind of crazy. You know, it's a dead city except for the homeless population. We're all out and about.”
Gradually, meal services started up again, with new social distancing in place. While people started wearing masks in public, the homeless would often tell our reporters they wouldn’t mind getting masks for themselves, but that these weren’t being provided for them.
An encampment along railroad tracks in downtown Reno the night before it was disbanded earlier this summer, during the ongoing pandemic.
For those living in encampments, like Moriah Stovall, sweeps began again in June. During these police operations, tents are taken down and left behind possessions are put in dumpsters. The 20-year-old, who fled abuse as a foster kid and had to give up a daughter to adoption as a teenager, explained to me why despite these repeated sweeps she went back to living in a tent.
“The shelters themselves, they are beyond filthy,” she said. ”You can ask almost anyone that's in there. What type of conditions there are. And there's normally mold, mildew, and all that nastiness. There's also a high rate of bed bugs more specifically because of how close in contact you are with other people.”
And were there fears of the coronavirus inside the shelters too, I asked?
“There was extreme fear,” she responded. She explained outside seemed safer to her, especially if you stayed in your one spot, next to your usual tent neighbors. The sweeps continued throughout the summer, despite health experts warning against these sudden movements of people during a pandemic.
In at least one instance, citations and fines were handed out. During another sweep in June, while I walked on a public street taking pictures, as homeless people were being told to vacate an area alongside railroad tracks, I was forced away by Reno officer Lance Tindell, coffee cup in hand.
It’s not easy to keep tabs on our unsheltered neighbors, pandemic or no pandemic. If it’s not police or shelter workers shooing us away from them, their phone has no power when we try to call them, or they’ve moved away from their previous encampment. Even their best friends or romantic partners don’t always know where they are anymore.
Moriah Stovall stands next to graffiti memorializing a man who was recently killed at an encampment near Reno's downtown baseball stadium.
Statistics about the homeless are unreliable or simply non-existent. When the homeless die, unless it’s related to a crime, there is usually no mention of them in the news, no cause of death, but every year, according to our interviews, dozens die locally in the cold, along the river or on the streets.
During our interview, I promised to give Stovall a bike, but when I went to find her several weeks later at her old tent location, no one could tell me where she was. I found a tent with other bikes plopped up against it and left the one I had promised her there as well.
After driving home, there was a text message on my phone, thanking me for the bike. I was so relieved Stovall was still alive.
Nico Colombant is a former international multimedia journalist who now teaches journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, while also working on documentaries and community websites. He coordinates the Our Town Reno street reporting collective focusing on issues of homelessness, affordable housing, public space and social justice in the Biggest Little City.
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