By Alicia Barber
Two meetings I watched last week made me question precisely how the City of Reno is addressing the continued challenge of inactivity in the old downtown casino core—and more specifically, how they’re not.
As the Virginia Street Placemaking Study documented, 70% of Virginia Street through the downtown core is inactive, the result of multiple block-length casino walls with few entrances, empty public plazas, parking garages, and vacant lots and storefronts.
And of course, it’s not just Virginia Street. A vast swath of the city center east and west of the Reno Arch is inactive most of the time. When you factor in Jacobs Entertainment’s ever-expanding parkingpalooza over on the west side, that band of urban dysfunction runs right through the center of town, practically all the way from the Glow Plaza to Greater Nevada Field.
The zoning code calls much of this the “Entertainment District,” but that’s really a misnomer. There is entertainment all over the city; this area doesn’t have a monopoly on that. It would be more accurate to call it a “special events” district, dominated by spaces that are active when something is scheduled there—a baseball game, a bowling tournament, a roller skating party, a concert, a convention, a haunted house—but empty and still when they’re not, which statistically speaking is most of the time. And that’s a problem. There’s a reason, after all, that fairgrounds are traditionally located on the edges of town—when the crowds disperse, their emptiness poses no ongoing detriment. Not so when that void is smack dab in the city center.
The resort casinos of The ROW and the J Resort may be busy little hives of activity inside, but the days when tourists buzzed up and down Virginia Street from casino to club to showroom are long gone and The ROW’s own slogan “the city within a city” is an apt reflection of its “we have everything you need right here” mentality.
When you have a relatively small urban area dominated by insular resort casinos and spaces that rely on a steady stream of programming to generate visible activity, the strategy to secure more activation might seem clear: program more special events. After all, events bring motion to a normally inactive space. A critical mass of people brought together for a shared experience can bring an exhilarating but temporary surge of energy, and for a short time things feel bustling, dynamic, and safe.
There’s nothing particularly wrong or unusual about that strategy. Every city strives to populate its downtown with special events when weather allows. And this summer, Reno has plunged headfirst into special event mode. You can’t watch the new downtown status updates presented to City Council each month without marveling at the sheer amount of time and energy devoted to activating a very small segment of downtown space through programmed activities (as part of its “Activation Pilot Program,” the City has initiated more than 20 events on its downtown plazas alone).
A second downtown revitalization strategy clearly being championed by the city is the attempt to attract and nurture private investment. In truth, this has been a focus for years now. You might recall this video from 2021 in which Mayor Schieve says, “We want to work with great developers with great vision, but the city cannot afford to pay for that and that’s how you do create a quality of life. They’re called private-public partnerships, and those are essential.”
The approach here is, apparently, to foreground the City’s own lack of funds in hopes of attracting monetary infusions from elsewhere. The unexpected windfall of ARPA funds has been one recent source, supplying millions of dollars that the City has dedicated in part to revitalization efforts—not just City-sponsored special events and various commissioned plans, reports, and initiatives (Lear Theater, Truckee River, Virginia Street Placemaking), but also to “ReStore” grants for interior and exterior improvements for some centrally-located private businesses, as outlined on the City’s Economic Development webpage.
At the same time, we have similar initiatives being pursued by the Downtown Reno Partnership, which recently produced a 2023 “State of Downtown” report that actually looks more like an EDAWN marketing package, highlighting institutions, attractions, and amenities found within a one-mile radius of the Reno Arch (Dickerson Road? Wells Avenue? The Renown Medical Center?) rather than providing a baseline of comparison for the area within its actual jurisdiction. If you read through it, you’d be hard-pressed to understand that there are casinos anywhere in the vicinity.
In any case, it’s safe to say that the activation-oriented strategies of producing special events and wooing private investment are humming away.
What we aren’t hearing about—and haven’t heard about in a very long time—is what the City is planning to do to leverage its own properties—of which there are a considerable number in this central area—in the pursuit of permanent activation.
And that’s a problem. The full extent of that problem becomes crystal clear when you watch the proceedings of the Capital Projects Surcharge Advisory Committee, as I’ve been doing for more than a year now. This committee sings one constant refrain: they’re running out of dough, and as a result, the City will soon be unable to fund the upkeep of its own downtown facilities like the National Bowling Stadium and Reno Events Center, since funds from the special mechanism (the surcharge) created just for them by the 2011 state legislature will be practically depleted by 2028.
I watched last week’s meeting of this committee online with Mike Van Houten of Downtown Makeover, who wrote up a great report about it here, so please read that for some background and specifics on that committee, those numbers, and that fee.
As we noted, the solutions this committee has discussed follow one line: charge visitors more, either by raising the surcharge on rooms at The ROW and J Resort (which those properties don’t want to do) or persuading more downtown hotels to add that surcharge to their own rooms (which seems unlikely). For her part, Mayor Schieve seems to want the RSCVA to keep pouring funds that they receive from other room taxes into these facilities, but I’ll get to the RSCVA’s role in a bit.
What I see here is a lot of passing the buck—to visitors, to the casinos, to other hotels, to the RSCVA. What I don’t see is an acknowledgment of the actual problem: that these properties, which were specifically envisioned and constructed to be self-sustaining catalysts for downtown revitalization, are failing in that mission. And they have been failing us in some cases for decades.
You can of course keep raising or expanding that surcharge fee to support their escalating maintenance needs until someone yells uncle. But like the scheduling of endless special events to resuscitate languishing public spaces, that’s just another temporary lifeline, the iron lung of urban development. The goal of revitalization—its holy grail and the sign of its ultimate success—is permanent, self-sustaining activation, infusing places with the ability to thrive on their own.
So why aren’t we discussing what the City itself can do to create a realistic, long-term plan to leverage these properties as major players in the activation of the downtown core?
Let’s call it Reno’s “Physician, heal thyself” moment.
What’s particularly frustrating is that we’ve actually been in this moment for a very long time. The failure of these facilities to do what they were intended to do isn’t news. But in some ways, the City has not just failed to come up with a strategy to fix the situation, but in some respects has actually drifted backwards, making these places more and more dependent on ongoing life support rather than less.
I’d like to explain what I mean by providing a little historical context, to help illuminate how we got here and hopefully inspire our City leadership—and all of us—to consider how to turn the tide.
Read more 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.
