Storytelling: Building
Local Storytelling: Affordable Housing
Affordable Housing: Claire McHugh Story
Claire McHugh’s search for affordable housing in the Truckee Meadows may come as a surprise to many. She’s not homeless. She’s not even a low-income wage earner. In fact, she is a passionate emergency room nurse who makes $70,000 annually after 20 years in the field. She comes from a family of clinicians; her great grandfather was a physician in Ireland, her father was a neurologist in Reno, her mother is a nurse with a Ph.D. in pharmacology, her sister is a physician, and the list goes on. So why is she having trouble finding a rental house for five people that she can afford?
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Affordable Housing: Derek Southworth
One of the consequences of living in an area where housing costs have skyrocketed is that people move elsewhere. That’s what Derek Southworth and his wife, Sunny, felt was the best choice for them. They moved to Las Vegas in early September 2019.
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Marshall Liddle Housing Story
Marshall Liddle’s first introduction to Reno from the Bay Area came in January 2005 when he was seeking a master’s degree in atmospheric science. It had snowed four feet. But that didn’t stop him from getting his degree and pursuing a Ph.D. in the same subject. Seven years of subsequent health challenges hampered his studies, yet his dedication never wavered. He is finally in the last stages of defending his dissertation, a big issue that played into his decision to stay in his two-bedroom duplex in Midtown despite a whopping 60 percent rent increase from his new landlord.
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Affordable Housing: Meri Naney
“It’s scary to be a renter, but at the same time we can’t afford to buy a house,” according to Meri Naney. She and her husband, Rodney Thompson, and their two girls are lucky enough to rent a darling three-bedroom, two-bath house at a very reasonable price from a landlord she calls amazing, but she knows clearly they have a sweet deal and the landlord could choose to sell at any time.They would like to buy the house, and eventually hope to, but don’t have savings for the down payment to make it happen. Rodney just took a new job that offers a retirement plan which he hopes to tap into as a first-time home buyer after he’s vested in five years, but that's a ways off.
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