Continuing to develop the ERD plan, one small detail that was overlooked in its introduction is the shapes and sizes of the buildings which make up the essentially four blocks in between First Street and Freight House Square. Something as simple as the shapes and sizes of the buildings impacts countless other things, one of them being the business model for getting these 4 large blocks developed.
If you note the diagram above, the proposed towers are themselves smaller individually by footprint than the proposed 4 and 6-up retail bottom buildings.
There is an obvious detail right on the satellite photo which I think will be instructive to what I have to say here, and that is: Look at the size of the Mizpah's building. It occupies roughly a third of the block it sits on. It was a pretty good sized building, and it didn't even reach 4 stories in height.
Interesting, isn't it?
Look at any classical cityscape composed of buildings which are guided by similar patterns, and you will find the same thing, time and again.
The modern era refactored the equation for what commercial developers considered to be acceptable and ideal lot and building sizes. As the prevailing development pattern shifted from compact centers with concentrated activities to disparate single-use islands, the amount of land required to accomplish the same objective grew and grew.
When the redevelopment era began in earnest in Reno, it was being done so not to prevent the spread of this pattern of suburban development but rather to try to bouy the district against inevitable declines in revenue driven by the decline in the downtown gaming sector. Even then, even as the downtown gaming sector was growing, they were predicting its demise, thus creating a self-perpetuating myth which I argue has no basis in reality.
When Reno was platted out by the railroad, it was divvied up into parcels. These parcels were essentially the size of the Mizpah Hotel, and many of them were even smaller. Back then, when cities were built, they were built in the style which we today are trying to recreate, but they were built by a lot of entities doing a lot of activity in a given area. Today we have fewer and fewer entities charged with doing more of this work. I surmise the reason for this is that when you have multiple property owners on a given block, it is hard to get everyone to agree on the direction for the neighborhood.
The fundamental problem is the knee-jerk reaction many will have to my diagram which is that it implies any single entity should be building 4 buildings separated by alleys. That is not what I'm suggesting at all. What I'm suggesting is that the 4 reddish zones should be developed out by a lot of different developers, in buildings of Mizpah size and smaller.
The individual needs that will drive the development of the 12-16 buildings which would arise would create a very interesting mix of structures forming a good building line, and great diversity of uses and occupants. The diversity of ownership of these buildings insulates the long term goal -- a compact, vibrant neighborhood of good urban style buildings -- from any one entity's collapse.
The land must be platted and privately brokered out in an auction, and each buyer must be contractually obligated to build or sell in a fixed amount of time.
My argument here all boils down to the notion that in order to build a new city of yesteryear from dirt, the business models of yesteryear must be used. The pattern cannot replicate otherwise.
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