How Reno City Council threw planning out the window for Jacobs Entertainment
Happy July to all. I’d hoped to publish before the July 4th holiday, but hadn’t quite finished a post before heading out of town, so I decided to add a few videos and dive back in today with an intensive look at how City Council jettisoned its urban planning principles for the sake of the J Resort. But first, a few words on the primaries.
By now you’re likely aware that a recount of the Ward 1 vote count was requested and then withdrawn, making the results I wrote about on June 24th the final tally. The results of my (very informal) poll about the low voter turnout indicate that most respondents feel registered voters didn’t participate in the local primaries out of apathy/sense of irrelevance or, in second place, unfamiliarity with the candidates.
If true, both are troubling—first of all, because the decisions made by City Council affect each and every resident; and secondly, because learning what candidates stand for (and have done) is the key to electing representatives who truly represent the needs and desires of their constituents. We generally rely on local media or other trustworthy organizations to help us distinguish between candidates, but the perception of low stakes and limited coverage of local races heightens the challenge. I’ve done my best to amplify available resources and information, but clearly much more is needed. If you have ideas, please let me know in the comments.
Obviously one of the most important considerations to me is how seriously (and how consistently) City Councilmembers treat their responsibilities regarding urban planning (of which they have many). After all, I didn’t start writing The Barber Briefback in 2021 because I thought that was going particularly well.
So today, I want to focus on Council actions toward an entity that has received the support of many former and seated Councilmembers: Jacobs Entertainment.
Planning and Anti-Planning
My critique of City actions regarding Jacobs Entertainment’s acquisitions and activities on the west side of downtown Reno is no secret. I’ve been skeptical of the company’s claims and promises from the very beginning and even more baffled that a City Council majority has continued to swallow them hook, line, and sinker.
A few weeks ago, Downtown Makeover reported that J Resort has filed a $16 million permit to start their next phase. What they’re building next is not news. They showed this image at their 12-month review in November—it’s an expansion of the existing structure with a huge porte-cochère for vehicle entry and drop off at the corner of West 4th and Ralston, plus a new lobby, more gaming, a restaurant, and meeting space.
There’s nothing new about the basic concept here, either. It’s the same pattern we’ve seen all of Reno’s major gaming properties follow as they expand. And as a result, it looks like exactly what it is: a resort casino.
What it doesn’t look like is a downtown.
What’s been most striking to me about Jacobs’ excruciatingly drawn out promise to reveal some grand “master plan” isn’t what they’ve actually done; it’s how they’ve sold what they’re doing as something completely different than what it actually is, as though the company is somehow breaking the mold for gaming properties by transforming the scores of parcels they’ve acquired into the “dynamic mixed-use entertainment district” described in their Development Agreement, with “an array of…commercial, retail, plaza, green space, convention and entertainment venues.”
If you turn your head sideways and squint, you might be able to identify examples of each of those claimed components, as long as you understand that all of those things they list are just part of the same monolithic, corporate-owned resort, and may even already have existed. Commercial? Well, they bought the Gold ‘N Silver. Retail? There’s a casino boutique inside the J Resort for all your souvenir and snacking needs and supposedly a coffee shop is coming to their apartment building on West 2nd Street. Plaza and green space? There’s the private Glow Plaza festival grounds and apparently something called “Glow Gardens” that will incorporate the two historic houses that they moved from their original spots on Ralston Street to a parcel behind Chapel of the Bells. Whatever venue or attraction it is to become, Jacobs owns it, too.
Back in January of 2023 I wrote a Brief called “Casinos in Context,” in which I laid out the importance of context to the development of Reno’s hotel casinos and to their consequences for urban revitalization. And I explained how the physical location of centrally-located gaming properties like Caesars Entertainment’s tri-property behemoth known as The ROW warrants a completely different orientation to its context in order to contribute to the walkable, dense, and diverse environment that Council claims to want downtown to become. And yet, Caesars continues to flagrantly ignore any entreaties to do so, while still retaining favored status and basically getting everything they want from the City (bike lanes on Virginia Street, use of public streets and plazas for casino events, partial control of City-owned facilities like the Reno Events Center, Downtown Reno Ballroom, National Bowling Stadium, etc.).
What’s now clear is that the sprawling resort Jacobs Entertainment is developing on the west side of downtown replicates all the same problems exhibited by The ROW, only covering an even larger area, catering even more to vehicles over pedestrians, and making a mockery of the whole notion of “master planning” and urban revitalization.
And City Council not only allowed but encouraged and enabled them to do it.
And here’s what’s so maddening about the whole thing: the City of Reno could have been a world innovator in demonstrating how casinos might seamlessly integrate into a dense urban landscape. As gaming proliferates across the country, more and more urban areas might welcome an example of how to activate languishing downtowns while embracing the economic engine of large-scale gaming—showing how casinos could become outward-facing contributors to street activity, utilize a city’s unique historic fabric to strengthen a sense of place, and promote a walkable and sustainable environment by embracing dense development over excess parking.
As a city whose original downtown was practically destroyed by the massive introduction and then closure of dozens of casinos, Reno’s achievement of such a feat would be the ultimate success story.
And our City’s leaders had the leverage to do it, too, because, in a rare example of gaming interests actually needing something from local government, Jacobs Entertainment wanted a whole slew of benefits and incentives ranging from sewer connection fee and pedestrian amenity credits to special lighting, signage, and generous noise allowances, exclusive agreements to purchase City property, and more.
The City also had in its pocket its publicly stated commitment to creating a walkable downtown, activating dead street frontage, and prioritizing sustainability, density, and placemaking, which they continue to attempt to implement just blocks away.
Instead, they blew it, following the same pattern I identified in my book, Reno’s Big Gamble, and throwing deliberate and thoughtful planning out the window to accommodate the desires of moneyed interests promising grand transformations. You may recall that back in February of 2022, I dedicated an entire Brief titled “Reno’s Next Big Gamble” to how Reno pushed planning aside for Jacobs Entertainment.
Read the rest at The Barber Brief.
The Barber Brief is an independent e-newsletter and blog written by Dr. Alicia Barber on the Substack platform. It is reposted by This Is Reno with her permission.
