Casinos in Context
The importance of recognizing where we are
New Year’s Greetings! I hope this finds you all safe and well. City meetings resumed last week and step up in earnest this week, with the first City Council meeting of 2023 on tap this Wednesday, January 11 (agenda here). Before development cranks back up again, I’d like to discuss one of last year’s most pressing topics: the relationship between Reno’s casino resorts and the community. Sometimes when discussing issues of urban development, we can get so consumed with the details of individual actions and applications that we don’t take the time to consider the big picture. In this case, it seems beyond time to devote some undivided attention to the role of the gaming resorts that continue to loom so large in our city’s economy and on its skyline.
In the months to come, the City will be making major decisions involving three existing or proposed casino resorts:
The Firecreek Crossing Resort-Casino, an all-new casino project being proposed for a site across from the Convention Center on South Virginia Street.
The ROW, the combined Eldorado, Silver Legacy, and Circus Circus owned by Caesars Entertainment, a major player in the future of downtown’s revitalization.
The Sands Regency on West 4th Street, currently undergoing renovation by Jacobs Entertainment, back this month with a request involving signage.
One of my primary motivations for writing the Brief is to provide context to help our city leaders and residents better understand and evaluate the development decisions we face. There’s a policy context, of course—the whole universe of zoning, master plans, and ordinances—but also a historical context that helps to put these actions in a broader perspective. Then there’s the context of urban development, keeping an eye on how other jurisdictions face similar decisions, recognizing that Reno can always benefit from learning what others have done. Lastly, there’s the physical context. Each structure occupies a unique setting, a specific, tangible context that warrants examination at the most granular level, to understand how each project relates to what’s around it, and what impact various actions are likely to produce.
Casino resorts are so familiar to us here in Reno that I think we can forget how peculiar an urban form they really are. There is truly nothing like them in terms of their massive physical stature, their disparate array of interior functions, and their purposeful departure from the everyday. These are multi-block-sized edifices that strive to keep their patrons fully occupied and satiated with an all-inclusive environment replete with lodging, restaurants, gaming and entertainment, and amenities ranging from spas and shops to meeting rooms and even wedding chapels.
Over time, as the number of casino properties in Reno has decreased, the physical (and political) presence of those that remain has only intensified. That makes this the perfect time to scrutinize the impact of these massive structures on the environment around them. Only by doing so can we ensure that that as they expand, they do not hinder or even harm the surrounding businesses, residences, services, scenic vistas, and overall quality of life that we so desperately need to nurture, particularly in our city center. If we fail to conduct that rigorous analysis, there’s a very real danger that Reno will not only fall behind the scores of other cities that have successfully acknowledged and addressed those impacts, but will continue even further along the same path that led our troubled downtown where it is today.
Some National Context
Before we get to the specifics of these three properties, a little national context. In most cities, the potential impact of casinos is a topic of widespread public debate and discussion for months or even years, not just the subject of fleeting headlines and social media chatter. Detailed plans for proposed gaming facilities are both demanded and provided, to allow communities to accurately evaluate their potential impact.
An overview of the expansion of gaming across the country published last June by Smart Cities discusses the introduction of casinos to New Orleans (1999), Columbus (2012), Baltimore (2014) and other locales, often undertaken with revitalization in mind. And as pointed out by the Urban Institute’s Brett Theodos, the relationship of these developments to their physical contexts is a constant concern:
“Another consideration is whether the neighborhoods surrounding a casino receive spillover benefits, or if those go to the city as a whole…. For example, some casinos are designed to be self-contained fortresses, whereas others are pedestrian- and transit-friendly destinations that connect to other businesses within the community. It all depends on how much a casino integrates into the neighborhood.”
Reno, of course, began its venture into gaming long ago with small clubs operating on the same scale as surrounding businesses, a fluid integration that gradually evolved over a period of nearly a century to the “self-contained fortresses” of the modern corporate era. Today, those fortresses have little hope of integrating into their surroundings due to their sheer scale and form. And sometimes that’s okay, if the area in question is not pedestrian-oriented in either reality or aspiration. But in other cases, the fortress is the outlier, stubbornly anti-urban, an obstacle to desired vitality.
The form of the modern casino resort originated on the Las Vegas Strip, as David G. Schwartz explains in his history, Suburban Xanadu. In evaluating the future of the form, he concludes, “Casino resorts become yet another suburban node in a metropolitan area, but they cannot become centers of thriving urban development. This is directly linked to the ways that the casino resort developed on the Strip in the postwar period. The mixed results of the casino resort as an urban redeveloper are the legacy of its suburban genesis”—as a place of safe, contained, and removed escape.
Municipalities where gaming is new to the market undertake diligent and thorough analysis to ensure that the entities they are welcoming into their communities won’t damage or degrade them. In April of 2021, Chicago issued an RFP for its very first casino, evaluating each applicant for the prized contract on the basis of its adherence to a list of “Core Goals” including economic and financial benefits to the City; job creation; equity; and design, planning, amenities, and transportation. The city selected Bally’s in the spring of 2022 and you can view/drool over the corresponding Casino Recommendation Report that outlines what Chicago is getting in return.
Gaming already operates in the NYC metropolitan area at the Resorts World Casino NYC in Queens, but as gaming companies set their sights on Manhattan, similar scrutiny is underway. As a New York Times article titled “If New York City Gets Las Vegas-Style Casinos, What Else Will It Get?”) states, “The extent to which casinos truly enhance local economies has been debated by officials for decades. And the full cost to communities where casinos are built—including the impact on existing businesses, crime and gambling addiction—can be hard to measure.”
As the article points out, locating new casinos in the middle of urban areas is rare—largely, once would imagine, because infill sites of the required dimensions are hard to come by, but also because they generate understandable wariness. Philadelphia’s casinos are located on the city’s edge and surrounded by parking lots. The Encore Boston Harbor (operated by Wynn Resorts) in the heart of the metropolitan area, was subject to a full array of “Surrounding Community/Neighboring Agreements" to attempt to mitigate any detrimental impact.
Reading through these articles, I had a jolt of recognition. When a completely new casino resort is being proposed, here or elsewhere, a full evaluation of its potential impact is conducted. Its parameters are made entirely clear, from physical form to planned operations. But that’s not what often happens here in Reno, where gambling has been continuously legal since 1931. Here, very often the pattern has been one of gradual expansion, as the physical footprints of individual properties develop over time from small casinos or hotel-casinos to full-blown casino resorts—a pattern common to Harrah’s, the Eldorado, Atlantis, Peppermill, and now the Sands.
The gradual pace of those expansions and additions has taken these properties so far from their original form that there would clearly have been no way to assess their future impact at the moment of origin. But times have changed. Today, some of the largest gaming properties in the City, initially licensed long ago, continue to engage in property acquisition with no explicitly stated intent or plan, even when the sheer scale of their operations means their potential impact on the surrounding environment can be greater than ever. And that’s where Reno is falling behind, in our inability (or unwillingness) to demand transparency from these powerful corporate entities, leaving those in their shadow uninformed, unprepared, and vulnerable.
So let’s get to those local examples.
Firecreek Crossing Resort-Casino (Elevation Entertainment)
Our first example is the entirely new resort-casino being proposed for the large, mostly-empty expanse of land across South Virginia Street from the Convention Center. News of the proposed Firecreek Crossing Resort-Casino broke in November prompting a burst of coverage from the Reno Gazette-Journal and Downtown Makeover.
The applicant is Elevation Entertainment, based in California, where they opened Stones Gambling Hall in Citrus Heights in 2014. You can read more about the opening of that property here and view more images on the architect’s website. Their Reno project would include a 13-story hotel, casino, restaurants, bar, pool, parking garage, convention space, and more. (You may not know that California’s gaming offerings now extend far beyond tribal casinos, which were first authorized in 1988. You can find a current list of California gaming operations here and a map here.)
The prospective Reno site is part of the former University Farm, which was purchased by LaVere Redfield in 1955 amid speculation that Reno’s gaming interests might construct the city’s own casino strip along South Virginia Street. Today it’s in a Gaming Overlay District, but requires a Conditional Use Permit from the Planning Commission, which will address issues of compatibility with surrounding development and public health, safety, and welfare, and because the project exceeds certain thresholds for employees and projected traffic, it is a "Project of Regional Significance" and needs approval by the Regional Planning Commission.
The context here is clearly suburban, a landscape of big box stores, strip malls, and drive-up shopping centers served by giant parking lots. Most of the project site itself has never been developed, making this primarily an infill project on a fully circumscribed site including two long-vacant big box stores. Although it’s entirely possible to cross Virginia Street from the convention center to shop and dine in the area’s existing commercial centers, it’s never been considered a pedestrian-oriented area, although the need for pedestrian safety is of course paramount.
The City is holding a Virtual Town Hall meeting to discuss the proposed development of the Firecreek Crossing Resort and Casino this Thursday, January 12th at 6pm. Click here for more info and the Zoom link. The project is scheduled for review by the Planning Commission on February 15.
The ROW (Caesars Entertainment)
Although Caesars Entertainment has not announced any planned expansions to The ROW, the property’s massive downtown footprint has been looming large in discussions of the ongoing Micromobility and Virginia Street Placemaking Studies.
However, the community’s discussion is more about The ROW than with it. Caesars’ engagement with these ongoing efforts is certainly not occurring in public, if indeed it is occurring at all. The Reno News & Review’s Frank Mullen reached out multiple times to the company when writing his excellent new piece, “Things ain’t so great when you’re downtown: Can ‘Placemaking’ revitalize Reno?” with no response. Neither, Mullen reports, did the company send any representatives to November’s focus group session conducted for downtown businesses by the City’s placemaking consultant, Gehl Studios, despite being Virginia Street’s largest property owner.
The public has only gleaned information related to Caesars’ corporate plans indirectly, when their attorney’s letters to the RTC about the Center Street Cycle Track are made public or when the company’s affiliates or partners put in a formal request to acquire the old CitiCenter bus site across from the National Bowling Stadium (they didn’t get it, and the developer that did doesn’t appear to be moving forward) or acquire historic properties on Virginia Street solely to demolish them.
Although surely not the intention of the City and RTC Washoe when initiating the Placemaking Study, the observations and survey results compiled by Gehl Studios have finally made it okay to say out loud what we’ve all known for some time: that the fortress-like facades of The ROW, in combination with their internally-focused operations, are not just part of downtown’s problems; they exacerbate them. As the Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance’s Ky Plaskon states in the News & Review, “The casinos have succeeded in making the heart of our city a ghost town, and the fact that they aren’t at these placemaking meetings shows that they have no intention of changing that.” The public and our local businesses should recognize that one company is being allowed to ruin our city and demand that they come to the table.”
The physical context here has of course changed greatly over time, and our expectations for pedestrian activity have come full circle to where it began. Reno’s casinos first emerged in the most walkable of contexts, after all, amid commercial blocks interspersed with hotels and apartments, surrounded by churches, civic buildings, and the university. I’ve just started to put together a virtual tour of Historic Gambling Clubs and Casinos on Reno Historical, where you can get a sense of that environment, one perfectly captured by the Reno News & Review article, “From thriving to dying: As gaming spread across the county, Reno’s core devolved into a ghost town.”
When the Silver Legacy was first proposed back in 1993, it was fully aligned with the city’s stated goals for downtown. Competition from out-of-state gaming, particularly in California, was causing great concern that Reno was losing its competitive edge. The prospect of creating a “mega-resort” by connecting the newly-constructed Silver Legacy to the adjacent Eldorado (built in 1973) and Circus Circus (1978) was fully embraced by City leaders, in no small part because its developers predicted that “it would help create not just a ‘pedestrian atmosphere’ but a ‘world-class walking city,’ returning Reno to its earlier glory.” And a lot was at stake. Then-City Councilmember Jim Pilzner said before it opened that if the project didn’t ‘jumpstart’ downtown, “we’re going to have terrible problems.” Even the prospect of connecting all three resorts with skyways didn’t seem to faze city officials. As the paper reported, “Tourists will be able to walk in any door—Eldorado, Project C [as it was then known] or Circus Circus—and not come out for a night, a day, a weekend, or longer. Or, they can come and go in large numbers—increasing foot traffic between downtown casinos.” Gaming analyst Ken Adams said, “It will also produce a larger mass of people that are out on the street. I don’t think it’s going to hold them inside.”
But that’s the funny thing about context, whether physical or political; it keeps on changing. In the mid-1990s, Virginia Street still harbored enough activity to keep foot traffic fairly steady. Since then, the closure of Fitzgerald’s, Harolds Club, and finally Harrah’s, not to mention the slew of smaller casinos and hotel casinos both on Virginia and beyond, have made it clear that the pedestrian revival promised by the “mega-resort” only continues within its walls. Today, we have a whole new Master Plan prioritizing street-level activation, and it’s more important than ever for all entities along Virginia Street (and surrounding blocks) to work together to generate it. Caesars clearly has plans for downtown Reno, so what are they, and why isn’t the City of Reno pushing them to reveal them publicly so we can grapple with their potential impact together? Do they still want the former site of the bus station? Are they planning to purchase more buildings? Our representatives should help us find out. As I told Frank Mullen, Caesars’ failure to openly engage with these community efforts makes it impossible to determine the role they can play in downtown’s revitalization.
Gehl Studios is scheduled to return in February with an array of placemaking options for Council to consider for Virginia Street, and we’ll be getting results of the Micromobility Pilot Project sometime this spring. In the meantime, there’s a Downtown Reno Partnership Town Hall this Thursday, January 12 that you can RSVP for here.
The Sands Regency (Jacobs Entertainment)
That brings us to our final example, Jacobs Entertainment. Jacobs’ actions on the west side of downtown Reno are a classic case of piecemeal development. Since the company first began demolishing motels in 2017, the public has only gained a sense of the company’s plans in incremental bits, as its representatives come to the City with separate asks, an approach that makes it impossible to determine the potential overall impact of whatever Jeff Jacobs has in mind—even though he has admitted that he has a complete Master Plan, a disconnect that I wrote about last March.
Of course, the entire scope of the company’s plans, from top to bottom, should rightfully have been fully outlined in the highly-touted but practically pointless (for the City, anyway) Development Agreement approved by City Council in October of 2021 (and as of November 7, 2022 still unfinalized, as reported by Mark Robison). Each approval Jacobs seeks is not just significant in itself, whether it’s an alley abandonment or conditional use permit, but cumulatively have a much broader potential impact that we can’t properly assess because they’re undertaken in isolation.
And we’re now being faced with another one. On December 16 news broke through the City’s Development Projects memo that Jacobs is planning to install massive (presumably digital) signage (one looks to be at least eight stories high, facing north) advertising the Glow Plaza on the exterior of the Sands. The mechanism by which they want to do this is by amending the conditional use permit that they received last year for the Glow Plaza (analyzed here) to include the entire Sands Regency parcel. Doing so would allow the Glow Plaza to benefit from the generous signage allowances only available on-site to casinos. At the same time, the company has continued its pattern of acquisition and demolition, purchasing the Rancho Sierra Motel across West 4th Street from the Sands tower last October. And just this week, they completed demolition of the perfectly usable Nelson building on West 2nd Street, with no explanation. Is this the intended site of Jacobs’ rumored amphitheater, are they just clearing the land to sell it, or do they have something else in mind? Meanwhile, despite holding a groundbreaking last May, the apartments they pledged to construct on the corner of West 2nd Street and Arlington are still not underway.
The physical context in this case is largely undetermined because Jacobs Entertainment has eliminated so much of it. That means that the question we need to ask is whether these independent actions will make it more or less difficult for anyone to reconstruct that surrounding context with development that aligns with the City’s goals. Is Jacobs creating conditions that will be conducive to further development? How can we know if we’re not shown the plans that Jacobs is guarding so closely?
The ultimate implications of these sequential approvals are hard to predict. How would a massive multi-story digital sign impact the ability to construct anything on the vacant lots north of it, much less affect existing properties (including St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center)? Would Jacobs follow that up with additional signage anywhere else on their property? Would roping The Sands into the conditional use permit for the Glow Plaza allow The Sands to benefit from the same unlimited decibel levels that the Council granted the festival space? Would it pave the way for Jacobs to secure the abandonment of the block of Ralston Street located between the Glow Plaza and Sands Regency, as they previously voiced interest in doing? Does the company ultimately hope to extend the City’s Entertainment District zone all the way to the Glow Plaza? Do they truly plan to construct an outdoor amphitheater, and if so, where? Jacobs either doesn’t actually have a Master Plan or just doesn’t want the public to know what it is. Either scenario should be unacceptable.
The amendment to the Glow Plaza and Festival Space conditional use permit (adding the Sands parcel to enable massive digital signage) is being discussed at the Ward 1 NAB meeting tonight (Monday, January 9, with a virtual link here) and at the Ward 5 NAB tomorrow (Tuesday, January 10, with a virtual link here) before heading to the Planning Commission on February 1.
More than perhaps any other community in the United States, Reno should know that the needs and desires of corporate gaming do not necessarily align with the components of a functional neighborhood. In any city that truly values its residents and their quality of life, the desires of any commercial entity must defer to the City’s stated needs and goals, not the other way around. And that means holding fast to well-conceived Master Plans, demanding their participation in the planning of critical central areas, and subjecting every proposed resort expansion to the same scrutiny and regulation as we would new construction—in a form that allows it to be thoroughly and accurately evaluated.
The emergence and growth of corporate resort casinos over the past 50 years has had an enormous impact on Reno—physically, economically, socially, and culturally. That impact has been positive in innumerable ways, but not in all. And if we don’t acknowledge the negative aspects of that impact, if we fail to use all the tools at our disposal to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes rather than relinquishing control over our physical environment to private interests, then our city and those who inhabit it will suffer the consequences for generations to come.
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.