Updates & Previews: Week of April 29, 2024

City meeting previews, updates, and more thoughts on housing

Hello, readers!

I’ve been meeting more and more of you these days, at poetry readings and historical talks, even at the grocery store.  And we’ve been having some great chats, so if you happen to see me out in the wild, please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself. And remember that subscribers who receive these Briefs as emails can always just hit “reply” to send me a personal message—I promise you won’t inadvertently end up emailing thousands of strangers!

I’m going to start today with this coming week’s meetings, then move on to some newly announced projects and recent articles, and wind up with some more thoughts about those proposed Housing Initiatives that are working their way back to City Council for possible ordinance adoption.

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May 1: City Council & Redevelopment Agency Board

The only City of Reno public meetings this coming week are the Reno City Council, Redevelopment Agency Board, and Reno Planning Commission, all on May 1. You can view the entire Current and Upcoming Meetings page here.

The City Council and the Redevelopment Agency Board (which is comprised of the City Council, just convening for a different role) are holding Special Meetings beginning at 10 am on Wednesday to discuss the fiscal year (FY) 2024/25 budget, fee schedule, and strategic priorities.

If you want to wade into any of that, you can start with the City Council’s Agenda and Staff Report and continue with the Redevelopment Agency Board Agenda and Staff Report. The full Tentative Budgets are linked from those Agendas, as well.

There are several projects at the Planning Commission, so let’s look at those next.

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May 1: Reno Planning Commission

The Planning Commission will meet on Wednesday, May 1 at 6 pm. Here’s that agenda, which you can access for links to all the Staff Reports and materials. There are five items under the Public Hearings section, so here’s a quick rundown of those:

Item 5.1 - Lakeside Crossing Chevron

Item 5.1 involves the Chevron on Lakeside Drive just south of Moana Lane—the one with the popular Deli Towne. Its new owner wants to shift to 24-hour operation (they’re currently closed from 11 pm to 6 am).  Here’s the Google street view and a link to the Staff Report. Attachments include Case Maps and Public Comment.

Item 5.2 - Santerra-Quilici Properties Condition Amendment

Under Item 5.2, the developer wants to amend one of their conditions, deleting the requirement for a temporary residential fire station and replacing it with a requirement to contribute $300,000 to the City of Reno for a fire truck. You can read the reasoning in the Staff Report and staff is recommending approval of the amendment. Attachments include Case Maps, Prior Council and Planning Commission excerpts and minutes, Public Comment, and more.

Item 5.3 - Riverside SPD

Item 5.3 is a request to rezone the parcel at the west end of Riverside Drive (northwest of the Booth Street bridge) to create a Specific Plan District that would enable the construction of a building up to 65 feet in height with up to 180 multi-family units. Primary access would be from Riverside Drive. Here’s an image from the application.

The Staff Report is here and there are a number of attachments including Case Maps, the SPD Handbook, Conceptual Elevations, a Traffic Study, Site Plan, Agency Comments, Public Comments, and more. Staff is recommending approval subject to a condition that the SPD handbook is subject to any modifications made by the Planning Commission and City Council at their respective hearings.

Item 5.4 – Silver Dollar Storage

Item 5.4 is an application for a Conditional Use Permit to allow the construction of a mini-warehouse near the intersection of Silver Dollar Lane and Cloudburst Drive, in Ward 4. The Staff Report is here, and other attachments include Case Maps, a Site and Landscape Plan, Building Elevations, Public Comment, and more. Staff is recommending approval with some proposed conditions.

Item 5.5 – Rancharrah Village 7 Tentative Map

Item 5.5 is a request for a tentative map to allow a 59-lot single family subdivision in Village 7 of the Rancharrah Planned Unit Development (PUD). Here’s the Staff Report.

Village 7 of Rancharrah is designated Urban Residential, the highest density residential village in the PUD. According to the report, this area “is intended to include attached single family and/or multifamily uses and allows for up to 310 units or 26 dwelling units per acre.” However, this tentative map proposes only 59 single-family detached units with a density of approximately 4.9 dwelling units per acre. Attachments include Case Maps, a Tentative Map, Architectural Plans, and a Parking and Parking Lot Plan. Staff is recommending approval with some conditions.

For all of these Planning Commission items, members of the public may hear, observe and provide public comment virtually by pre-registering using the following link: https://links.reno.gov/3U2dX2L.

Instructions to comment on any Planning Commission item are found at the top of the agenda. Individuals not in attendance may provide public comment by: (1) submitting an online public comment form at www.reno.gov/PCPublicComment; (2) sending an email to RenoPlanningCommission@reno.gov; (3) sending a letter to the City of Reno Planning Commission, P.O. Box 1900, Reno, NV 89505; or (4) leaving a voicemail at (775) 393-1776.

Now on to some additional updates.

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Update: LifeChurch Primary School approved

At their April 24 meeting, City Council heard appeals of the decision to allow construction of the LifeChurch Primary School in a residential area just off Rio Wrangler Parkway. Council ultimately approved the permit to construct the school, subject to requirements to build a sidewalk as well as a crosswalk and flashing beacons. LifeChurch will also dedicate land for a roundabout on Rio Wrangler and McCauley Ranch. You can read more about that from This is Reno in “LifeChurch Primary School approved despite Damonte Ranch residents’ concerns.”

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New Toll Brothers housing proposed for Idlewild Drive

The Reno Gazette-Journal reported this week that “Toll Brothers files application for 57-home Riverpoint at Idlewild project in Reno”. The application for 57 single-family housing units (made up of three-plexes and seven-plexes) is about a third of the maximum density allowed at the site (120 condo units were previously approved).

This was the sole project featured in the City of Reno’s Development Projects newsletter last week (see my Citizen Guide for how you can sign up for those). The project should go in front of the Ward One NAB on May 13 (if they can get a quorum—they keep cancelling it) and then to Planning Commission on June 20. Here’s the site plan as included in the application and an elevation of one of the three-plexes.

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“Are Reno-Sparks Apartments Overbuilt?”

That was the title of an article published by Jason Hidalgo in the Reno Gazette-Journal this week, accessible here. As the subhead reads, “With thousands of apartment units in the pipeline, industry watchers are keeping an eye on how they will impact average rent and vacancies.” The article notes that 15 major apartment projects with 80 units or more are currently under construction in Reno-Sparks, with 16 more large apartment projects in the planning stages. Together they would add more than 8,479 units to the market. But is there a demand for that much of that type of housing here? The article states that “new apartments are not filling up as quickly as they used to.”

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Housing Initiatives Update

As I wrote in my last Brief, the additional informational sessions for the proposed Affordable and Infill Housing Initiatives are now completed. You can visit the City of Reno’s Zoning Code Clean-Up web page for links to the recordings of all four virtual meetings, a chart summarizing the most commonly asked questions and staff responses, the redlined document (with suggested changes), a link to the “City of Reno Zoning Code Clean-Up Comment Form” (under “Submit Public Comment”) and more.

City Council will review the draft information and recommend changes or modifications at the May 8, 2024 City Council hearing.  

I have to say that the more I read about how other cities have approached these types of initiatives, the less I understand why the City of Reno is going about it this way. To see what I mean, consult my April 20 Brief for some readings regarding increasing the housing supply elsewhere.

I expect I’ll be writing more about this next week in advance of the May 8 City Council meeting, but for today, I just want to focus for a moment on the initiatives that are intended to add to the housing supply by adding “missing middle” housing to single-family neighborhoods—the duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes that these initiatives are proposing to allow in all single-family zoned neighborhoods, adding the less dense SF-3 and SF-5 districts (they’re already allowed with a conditional use permit in the two denser categories of single-family districts, SF-8 and SF-11).

As I mentioned last time with respect to semantics, what many jurisdictions refer to as “Eliminating Single Family Zoning” or “Eliminating Single-Family-Only Zoning” is very similar to what would be allowed through these initiatives: allowing construction of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in all neighborhoods currently zoned for single-family homes. Staff has so far not recommended allowing them “by right,” but the Planning Commission did, and that may still move forward.

Doing that would eliminate single-family-only zoning without actually using those words. So I think it’s going to have to be made extremely clear as soon as possible whether that’s actually being proposed or not, so we can engage in all the discussions that would then be warranted.

Namely, when other municipalities have allowed duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods “by right,” they have engaged in very detailed discussions of whether those new types of housing would have to meet all the same requirements as single-family homes in those zones—for instance, with the same height, parking, and setback requirements, and maximum building coverage. You’d want to cover all the types of questions that might arise in a public hearing, should those no longer be required—for purposes of standardization and predictability.

Also, were they to be allowed by right, it would seem that you’d have to change much more than a few footnotes in the Land Development Code. Retaining the single-family (SF) designation with their accompanying illustrations could seem both inaccurate and misleading. Here’s the section for SF-3 in the current document:

That SF-3 designation (you can read the code here) currently has a maximum base density of three dwelling units per acre, a minimum lot size of 15,000 square feet, and a minimum lot width of 80 feet. There’s also a maximum building coverage of 40%, meaning that no more than 40% of the lot can be taken up by a building. Would that remain the same were landowners allowed to build fourplexes on those lots? Could larger lots in these neighborhoods be split to accommodate more duplexes through fourplexes on them? If so, would it really make sense to label them “SF” anymore?

That’s not the only issue of semantics that I see. Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, when located on a single parcel, function as rentals—what most typically refer to as “apartments.” And yet under the staff responses to commonly-asked questions, the City states that “the proposed changes do not allow apartments to be built in any new locations or zoning districts. The proposed changes impact where duplex, triplex, and fourplex types of development would be allowed.”

Maybe someone’s going to have to explain to me what makes a “fourplex” of four attached rental units different from a four-unit apartment house. The number of bedrooms in each unit? Whether or not each unit is occupied by members of one family vs. roommates? Also proposed is changing the definition of “Multi-Family Dwelling” from “a building used or designed as two or more dwelling units” to “five or more dwelling units.” Why? How is a fourplex not a “Multi-Family Dwelling”?

Are these proposed changes just engendering more confusion? Could they be reframed for clarity, to more accurately reflect what would be allowed in the zones to which they pertain? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Lastly, in this moment of promoting higher-density infill, I am finding it ironic that in two of the proposed development projects highlighted above (Riverpoint at Idlewild and Rancharrah) the developers have opted to build housing of significantly less density than allowed (and previously approved) for those sites—in both cases, planning single-family homes rather than smaller condos or apartments. What do we make of that?

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Be sure to check out my Citizen Guide for helpful resources and links for anyone hoping to become more informed and engaged in issues related to urban development (& more) in Reno.

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As always, you can view this and prior newsletters on my Substack site, subscribe to receive each new edition in your email inbox, and follow the Brief (and contribute to the ongoing conversation) on X, Facebook & Instagram. If you feel inspired to support my writing and research with a financial contribution, you can sign up for a paid subscription through my Substack site or contribute to my Venmo account at @Dr-Alicia-Barber or via check to Alicia Barber at P.O. Box 11955, Reno, NV 89510. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.