Conditions worsen for tenants

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Jan. 16, 2006 | 8:01 a.m.

Sitting on his mattress in boxer shorts, Richard Salyers covered himself with a blanket, trying to retain some dignity.

But the surroundings worked against him.

The mattress, stacked with six suitcases, filled half the room. The air was heavy with an acrid, damp smell. The carpet was soggy. Roaches filled a trap on the wall. A wheelchair sat opposite the bed.

The scene was, in a word, depressing. But it has been home for the last 18 months, and now the 64-year-old Vietnam veteran has to leave it.

On Friday, the Peter Pan motel's 37 apartments are due to be boarded up because the Las Vegas Neighborhood Services Department and the Clark County Health District have told the owner that there are laws against human beings living in such a place.

And though the city and county agencies are just doing their jobs in protecting public safety, the result is mixed at best for the dozens of tenants now scrambling to find a spot in the increasingly smaller niche available to poor people in the Las Vegas Valley.

"It's like there's a drain all these people are going down," said Linda Lera-Randle El, director of the nonprofit organization Straight from the Streets. She scours the valley for people who have been on the streets for years as part of a seven-agency, first-ever $3 million program to house the chronically homeless.

She finds that affordable apartments are fewer and farther between all of the time, and then there's the problem of whether or not they're livable -- like the Peter Pan.

Lera-Randle El guesses there are about 200 apartments at less than $600 a month that will accept clients from her program.

Jim Shadrick, inspector at the Las Vegas Neighborhood Services Division, says there may be as many as 2,000 left in the downtown area at that price. Still, it's hard to say, since he's seen at least 200 units drop out of the market in the last month alone, after the owners decided they needed to close down in order to correct violations, or to sell the properties.

Shadrick is charged with keeping track of about 55,000 rental apartments by himself, and he responds only to complaints. He hopes that workload will change this spring, when the Las Vegas City Council will consider a new program that would involve hiring more inspectors and inspecting apartments on a regular basis.

Devin Smith, manager of the neighborhood response division in the Neighborhood Services Department, said a program ensuring that all of the city's apartments were inspected would help low-income people.

"A lot of property owners feed on these people," he said.

Shadrick first inspected the Peter Pan in early November. He gave the owner, Sharon Nuno, 30 days to come up with a plan for fixing the property's multiple violations. Some tenants who were stepping in sewage or breathing toxic mold had to be moved to other apartments immediately.

Shadrick said that Nuno decided in December to give tenants a 30-day notice of eviction and close the property down. The deadline is this week.

Though Shadrick said Nuno hadn't told him of her future plans -- and noted that the law gives her 60 days after the Peter Pan is closed to put a plan in writing -- the property's owner said Friday she would hold onto it and "fix it up."

She had no estimates on how long the renovation would take, how much it would cost, or what the rent would be when she reopened the property.

She said she had wanted to work on the property without moving tenants out, but "the problems were bigger than we thought." Her sons, who are at the property more often than she is, had helped one tenant move, she said -- though she didn't know his name or apartment number.

No one else had asked her for help, she said.

As Salyer waits, he said he is "just sitting here being a nervous wreck."

He had a small list of apartments he could afford with $604 in monthly Social Security benefits, plus $77 in food stamps. He paid $400 in monthly rent at the Peter Pan.

Another place he found wanted $500, but it wouldn't accept his Siamese cat, Coco.

He said his cat was "award-winning," and had to go with him.

By about 3 p.m., he had found a place nearby that charged $395 a month, but he couldn't get in touch with the manager on the phone.

Another charged $525 a month, but the manager said tenants have to earn more than $800 a month.

When he found that out, he said, "What do they think in this town -- that everybody's rich?"

Upstairs, in Apartment 36, Gary Gaccione, a 54-year-old man who said he has a job starting Monday cleaning up at the Las Vegas Convention Center, was also at a loss.

"I don't get paid in time to pay for a new place," he said.

Gaccione earns $6 an hour and shared the $450 monthly rent for the room with a friend, Mike Johnson.

His plan: "I'll be honest. I'm probably going to be under a trestle."

Timothy Pratt can be reached at 259-8828 or at timothy@lasvegassun.com.