The Urban Blog

A Somewhat Optimistic Analysis of Gaming in Reno

It's not hard to find reports of Reno's travails and shortcomings as a gaming market, for those who look.

If you keep looking, however, and evaluate the public companies and media reports about Reno's revenues and operators, you find things like this:

MCRI Monarch Casino Reports Record Second Quarter

A further evaluation of the gaming environment in Reno shows a 300-million dollar expansion at one property and ambitious expansion plans at another.

Skies aren't always sunny, of course.  This is indicative of the chronic up-and-down pattern suffered by the market over the past 15 years.

In addition to all that, we can't help noticing plans for new casino projects like this, this, this, and this occurring around the region.

All this private sector activity aside, the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority is working to book more conventions and meetings in the area, increase the average room rate of area hotels, and find new special event opportunities to fill out the slower fall and winter months.  The airport is working to attract nonstop air service from major markets like DC and New York City.  And a portion of visitors' rental car tax revenue is paying in to a fund to construct a new minor league baseball stadium, which will break ground in January, 2008.  That project will include several blocks of shopping filling in a long-empty district downtown.  As if that weren't enough, two key downtown blocks of Reno's below-ground railroad corridor will be covered with a plaza which will also feature 10-12 retailers.  Large numbers of condominiums are coming on-line in downtown in the next few years, and Reno's river corridor, just a few blocks from the major casinos, has never been more vibrant.

Now, Reno's numbers are indeed chump change when compared to Las Vegas, but that is really beside the point.  Almost everyone's numbers are chump change compared to Las Vegas' numbers, and this has been reported before as a detriment even to Las Vegas.  Overcrowding, an overly spread out and uncomfortable urban environment, and rising prices for everything from meals to rooms to shows, introduces the danger of fatigue frequent visitors to Las Vegas might feel.  As casinos become just another part of visitor destinations around the nation and world, those destinations need to compete on their own merits - and a given region must count all its cultural, historic, and outdoor amenities as key elements of its reputation.

The road ahead for Reno is not without challenges.  Sketchy looking individuals are a common sight in many of downtown's districts - districts which are also on the verge of teeming with nightclubs, restaurants, and boutique shops.  Law and order and clean streets will need to be a top priority for Reno's government.  Reno's gaming operators will continue to face their own challenges - those not publicly listed will continue to be an enigma, making it harder for analysts to properly evaluate their performance, but all will have to finance their expansions with large amounts of money from their own bank accounts.  At the margins they're running, the price of credit may be high.

Reno is still, however, in the top 10 gaming destinations in the US, and it is not resting on its laurels.  It will continue to make money on people coming to town to gamble for the foreseeable future, and as the dust settles on its civic and commercial investments, it will be hard not to see what Reno's got going for it.

Seattle's Malls: Northgate Mall & Crossroads Mall

Something great arrived in the email today, a very timely item given the discussion on Park Lane redevelopment.  A roundup of Seattle-area malls, bringing up some I left out.

Crossroads is an old mall situated in Bellevue, a booming city just across Lake Washington from Seattle.  A truly suburban affair, Crossroads is an unassuming sight from the outside and might be easy to pass over.  Once inside, however, you are treated to a bustling scene.  Crossroads has many strengths:  its International food court, drawing on all the different cultures which have located in the Seattle area.  Its stage and regular live music, community theater, and improv performances.  A branch of the library.  A supermarket.  This is a mall, make no mistake:  It has a drive-through Starbucks, a Bed Bath & Beyond, Michaels craft store, Circuit City.  But inside the walls of Crossroads is a sense of community not found replicated in many other malls.

Northgate, the main mall in the story, is the country's oldest mall.  Currently part of Simon Property Group, it is just about done with a major overhaul which has added a bunch of new stores.  The district around Northgate is going through some interesting changes, densing up and becoming more urban.  Just across the street from Northgate is a multi-story complex featuring a Target, Best Buy, and GI Joe's Sports.  It is deviod of "softer", community and cultural features, however.  The author argues that a more successful Northgate expansion would have included cues from Crossroads.

This is a lot of what I mean when I call for "districts not malls".  In the Park Lane plan the soft attractions are the hotel, the fountains and the incorporation of existing neighborhood elements into the corridors - that "reaching out" approach to plug in and expand the neighborhood and strengthen its corridors.  Still, Park Lane as it was could have become a Crossroads, in the right hands.

At the end of the day a mall, like everything else in the property development world, is there to make money for its investors.  When these things truly shine, is when they can do it looking good and serving as model assets for the community.

Reno: Back of the Napkin Park Lane Plan

DMD threw down and asked for suggestions on the Park Lane Mall site - including outlining a few different kinds of developments to draw from.  This was a great impetus for me to toss out an actual back-of-the-napkin sketch of what I think Park Lane Mall could become.  It reinforces a few things I've said here before - so there's some background.

To bring everyone up to speed, I have often thought that what was missing from Park Lane was a Park and a Lane.  I pulled up the site imagery on the internet and was astounded by the amount of room these guys have to work with.  A screengrab later, and I'm in Paint, marking it up.

Park Lane District Plan Map

Reno: Musical Reprise

Let me tell you, I've had my work cut out for me reviewing the music of Reno this year.  So much new material has emerged which is of an unprecedented level of consistent quality, that it is hard to give enough time to any one act.  It's really like that, which is kind of weird.

Recently I have not been able to stop listening to music from:  Cobra Skulls, My Flag is on Fire, Promises Promises, The Touques, The Copied Copied, and a whole host of assorted side-characters which I also have given a few too many listens.  What is it with the word 'the'?  We don't get into that in this series.

It hearkens to a year and a city but I dare not venture a guess as to which other than 2007, Reno.  I intend to review the sum of the above links and at least one "huh" entry before the year is out.

Critical to a city is a good look at the sound being recorded and distributed to the world in a given year - on that vein, if you have something to add, please contribute in comments!

Seattle: Say Goodbye to Prop 1

Proposition 1 was a measure just on the ballot in the Seattle area recently.  Pierce, Snohomish, and King Counties would tax themselves to pay into the RTID, or Regional Transportation Investment District, funds from which would be spent on a number of projects including 50 miles of light rail and widening of some existing freeways.

It was a big plan, it was an expensive plan, it was not loved by either the far left wingnuts or the far right wingnuts, and it went down, one might say, in flames.  The political history of the project is important to the story:  it was put on the ballot by the Legislature, in an effort to broker compromise between proponents of roads and proponents of transit, who are said to be unable to agree on anything.