Brief Digest: October 31, 2022
A Public Meeting for the Placemaking Study & more
Nevada Day/Halloween greetings to all! Please be safe out there tonight, and if you’re driving a vehicle, take extra care to watch out for pedestrians of all sizes and shapes. Today’s Brief includes a variety of updates and previews to get your week started right.
New Ward 3 City Councilmember
If you live in Ward 3, you likely know that you now have a new City Council representative. On October 26, City Council appointed Miguel Martinez to serve out the remainder of Oscar Delgado’s term. This of course comes close on the heels of Council’s September 7 appointment of Kathleen Taylor to fill the Ward 5 seat, so that’s already quite a bit of change on the dais regardless of what further shuffling we may see after Election Day, now just a week away. Please exercise your right to VOTE!
Placemaking Study Meeting on November 2
We’ve been wondering about the status of the Virginia Street Placemaking Study ever since the online survey closed over the summer, and last Thursday, the City suddenly announced via email and social media that a “public engagement session” will be held this coming Wednesday, November 2 from 5:30-8:00 pm. It was at first slated for Council Chambers but was later changed to the McKinley Arts & Culture Center. You can also participate via Zoom by registering here. A presentation with Q&A is scheduled for the first hour, with “in-person engagement” for the next 90 minutes.
As the City explains, “Gehl will summarize the data collected through the more than 2,700 Virginia Street Placemaking surveys that community members submitted earlier this summer and gather feedback from the public to draft a community-driven vision for Virginia Street and a thriving downtown.” I’m eager to hear what steps—beyond the survey—that Gehl has taken to understand Virginia Street since securing the contract back in February. In advance of Wednesday, I’ve been re-reading their initial proposal to City Council, and I highly recommend you do the same so we can all ask pertinent questions about what phase we’re in and what comes next. I’ll attach it here.
In their proposal, I was especially drawn to their understanding of the project’s overarching question as “How does a city foster inclusive growth in a rapidly changing environment?” (page 6). The project examples, beginning on page 24, show some very exciting and inclusive work in Calgary, Nashville, Denver, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City, and the Strategy & Implementation Plan described on pages 41-48 explains how they analyze and understand places, including use of “Public Space Public Life tools and methods” and a digital field survey app. Since most of what they’ve been doing here has been out of the public eye, this will be a great opportunity to find out what they’ve learned about who actually frequents the street on a daily basis (mostly visitors? downtown residents?), who they’ve been speaking to, how they see key improvements to public spaces like City Plaza playing a role, and how residents can participate from this point forward.
As we all well know, the stretch of Virginia Street extending through the central casino core is plagued by so many problems—block-length casino walls fronting internally-facing casino resorts, vacant storefronts, tacky facades, empty lots, businesses lacking in broad appeal, and literally nowhere to sit—so much depends not just on inclusive City processes but on the desire of its private property owners to make necessary changes to draw people in. And that pressure has to come from us. So please, if you can make it on such short notice, plan to attend the meeting or tune in online since we need as many perspectives as possible contributing to the formulation of a new vision for the area. As the city’s Placemaking Study webpage indicates, a recording will be available following the engagement session with links to a form that the public can use to submit feedback from November 2-16.
The Shifting Context of Virginia Street
One major factor that makes it hard to assess the status of Virginia Street is that the street’s baseline condition is a moving target. The largest revitalization project currently underway, the Reno City Center, seems focused primarily on renovation of the interior, particularly rooms, at this point, as Downtown Makeover revealed in a construction tour posted in January. On the project’s website, images of various amenities are still labeled “coming soon.” They did open a Starbucks in April, but they don’t appear anywhere close to opening the ground floor eateries that are meant to border the large plaza on the Virginia Street side (see below). It’s those street-level amenities that would have the biggest impact on street life, but the Placemaking Study can’t assume that will happen, given the uncertainty of development these days.
The status of the project’s commercial tenants, for instance, is unclear. On October 12, news broke that the real estate tech company Clear Capital had cut its workforce by 25%. A report from TechCrunch provided more details on how that played out. Clear Capital is the project’s first major commercial tenant, and it was at their behest that the project’s developers requested and secured approval to construct a pedestrian skyway from the main building to the adjacent Whitney Peak parking garage. That skyway was given final approval by City Council in May but it is still not underway.
The temporary micromobility infrastructure has been removed from Virginia Street north of the river (remaining in place on the south side) as explained in the City’s October 7th announcement. Data analysis will apparently continue through next spring. In the meantime, to the consternation of many, RTC Washoe’s design of the Center Street Cycle Track remains on hold. I recently noticed that the RTC webpage about the project features new language (since I last checked it in July) regarding “challenges” with Center Street, including “maintaining parking for local businesses and residents, the levels of service at intersections within the design-scope area, loading zones, roadway capacity, maintaining safe parking garage access, and safety concerns about the interaction of the freeway and the cycle track.” Interesting.
In addition, City Plaza is closed again, as the City announced on September 28. The six-week closure was projected to last until about November 10. The plan was apparently to replant some vandalized landscaping, but when I went down there yesterday, I couldn’t really tell what, if anything, was underway behind the fencing.
CARES Campus Expansion under review Nov. 2
In addition to reviewing several items concerning projects in the North Valleys on November 2, the Planning Commission will review a request for a Conditional Use Permit to expand the Washoe County CARES Campus on East 4th Street. Approving this item (5.3) would serve as the master approval for the campus, with a proposed expansion that includes “an intake area, cafeteria, overflow shelter, offices, and improvements to the existing center.” You can view the agenda here along with the staff report, phased footprints and architectural renderings of the projected plan.
More of the same from Jacobs Entertainment
Although it passed without fanfare, last week—October 27, to be exact—marked the one-year anniversary of City Council’s final approval of the ordinance authorizing the City to enter into a Development Agreement (DA) with Jacobs Entertainment. I wrote about that after the first of two required votes in “City Council’s Baffling Approval of the Jacobs Development Agreement” and afterwards, that vote and other City actions inspired me to write “Public Process in Crisis” on November 9, 2021. Re-reading that post now, I was struck by how little has changed, and moreover, how the pattern of unilateral action I identified back then has only intensified over the past 12 months.
That Council vote last October authorized the City Manager to finalize the agreement, but I don’t know that he has. The city’s webpage for the project still links to a document titled “DRAFT – 10/19/21.” The question of whether it was in fact finalized—and if so, when—is important for a number of reasons. First, according to the agreement, the Developer is required to provide a report to City Council no later than 12 months after the Effective Date. So we need to know when the DA became effective (if it has) in order to know the date by which that review needs to happen. Second, I’d like to know precisely what it currently contains, since the agreement has undoubtedly been modified from the draft the public saw last October.
A third reason that it’s important to know whether the DA has been finalized is because the intervening year has provided even more evidence of why it warrants a complete do-over (and that’s aside from the ongoing lawsuit from Scenic Nevada challenging the legality of the whole thing). One of the chief gifts to Jacobs Entertainment written into that agreement was the right to brand a large chunk of the west side of downtown the “Neon Line District” through massive signage and an archway over West 4th Street. But it’s clearer than ever that this assemblage of parcels is not a “district,” that it is no closer to becoming a “district” than it was a year ago, and that there is no indication that it will ever become one. This is a sprawling casino resort accompanied by a heaping dose of real estate speculation utilizing the rhetoric and strategies of urban renewal. As reported in two recent articles by Jason Hidalgo for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Jacobs Entertainment has continued over the past year to do four things: renovate The Sands, purchase yet more property on the west side of downtown, knock down what’s there, and fail to either build on or to sell any of it. Relocating residents from the motels they have demolished has only further taxed the small supply of existing housing for those with limited resources.
As revealed in the October 10 article “Jacobs Entertainment acquires Rancho Sierra Motel in purchase of 3 downtown Reno parcels,” Jacobs is continuing to buy and clear property without plans to construct anything there—a trend that has continued even though Jacobs stated a year ago that he was “99% done with acquisitions.” The long-teased rebranding of The Sands, once slated for this past summer, has now been delayed until the “$300 million remodel” is finished, perhaps because as I have long suspected, the rebranding will further demonstrate how self-serving the “Neon Line” moniker actually is (the Nevada-ish theme continues to become clearer with the exterior now repainted in shades of blue and gray).
The second article, published online on October 24 and in print yesterday, is titled “Jacobs says 1,000-unit workforce housing proposal not dead as land turning into parking lot.” It’s rather generous to call the initial idea a “proposal,” as it consisted solely of Jacobs offering to contribute his parcels toward the construction of a workforce housing project, as long as it could be funded by someone else and also provide him with a 3,300-space parking garage to serve his resort. As the article indicates, Jacobs is now investing more than $1.3 million into turning one of those parcels into a 265-space surface parking lot. The newspaper’s analysis determined that the workforce housing project/parking garage as floated by Jacobs could cost up to $300 million to build.” That’s $300 million that could go a long way toward funding multiple projects untethered to a massive unrelated parking garage adjacent to an outdoor concert venue where Council ignored their own staff recommendations and approved allowing decibel levels higher than anywhere else in town, 365 days a year.
Upon further questioning, Mr. Jacobs also stated that “It will probably be a couple of years before additional development of housing picks up in the district,” and “New housing development downtown most likely will not occur until the next uptick in the national economy.” It’s a perplexing statement, since clearly residential construction is occurring all over Reno, from the RED project at the former Parklane Mall site to the Ballpark Apartments (below), with many more infill projects underway elsewhere.
And yet despite the assertion from Jacobs rep Garrett Gordon last January that “hundreds” of people had been inquiring about the parcels that Jacobs had acquired, they haven’t been able to sell any of them. As for the one project Jacobs committed to build from the ground up, on the corner of West Second Street and Arlington, I visited the site yesterday and aside from some initial grading, there’s nothing—that despite holding a groundbreaking ceremony attended by numerous City officials on May 10th. The view below looks south over the site toward St. Thomas Aquinas Cathedral, with the El Cortez Hotel on the left and another unrelated apartment building under construction to the right. A quick glance at the status of the Jacobs apartment project on the Accela site reveals ongoing delays due to the project’s failure to comply with several aspects of City Code, including required height/setback ratios, pedestrian amenities, and window and door transparency. So that’s something to keep an eye on, to make sure Jacobs is held to the same requirements as everyone else.
Reno in the New York Times
If you missed it, Reno was featured in a New York Times article on October 14 titled “Reno Is Booming. Some Workers Feel Left Behind.” Of course, many of the identified patterns are seen elsewhere as the costs of, well, just about everything, seem to be soaring across the country. But the economics and sprawling breadth of our region's booming warehousing and logistics industry combined with a serious shortage of affordable housing lend these struggles a unique form here. The article is worth a close look, not just for the stories of those who are finding it hard to make ends meet in Reno's "booming" economy, but for the stunning photos of our area's rapidly changing landscape. Coincidentally, Ward 1 City Councilmember Jenny Brekhus had just written about the warehouses in the October 12 edition of her e-newsletter.
Home Gardens
Lastly, you may have noticed some major changes happening to the former site of the Home Gardens neighborhood, just south of the airport along Airway Drive. Longtime residents will recall that Home Gardens (est. 1939) was once a thriving subdivision whose residents were forced to sell their land to the city and move elsewhere in the 1970s when federal regulations deemed that its close proximity to the expanding airport made it unsafe for residences or land uses where large numbers of people congregate. The area retained not just the ghostly outlines where the homes had been, but the many trees that remained there after the houses between them were demolished. A few weeks ago, residents noticed equipment beginning to tear those trees down, and reports soon emerged from the airport and from the Reno Gazette-Journal that the airport has leased the land to a developer to construct a “commerce center.” I don’t know the details of why and when it was deemed safe for development, but some have asked me about it, so I wanted to let people know what was happening.
That’s it for this week. Please consider attending or viewing the Placemaking Study public session on November 2nd so that we can demonstrate our communal commitment to making Virginia Street a place for everyone. And if you’d like to support Nevada authors and a wonderful museum, please join me at the inaugural Sparks Museum Book Fair on Saturday, November 5th from 10-4. I’ll be selling and signing copies of my book, Reno’s Big Gamble at a special price of $25 from 1-3pm.
As always, you can view this and prior newsletters on my Substack site and follow the Brief (and contribute to the ongoing conversation) on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram. If you feel inspired to contribute to my efforts, my Venmo account is @Dr-Alicia-Barber and you can mail checks, if you like, to Alicia Barber at P.O. Box 11955, Reno, NV 89510. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.