The Downtown Reno Partnership has released its first State of Downtown report.
It offers an in-depth measurement of the current state of downtown Reno, covering topics from real estate to outdoor parks and recreation, and even the university.
But one of the things that really stands out is the development lag over the last two decades with building new housing units in downtown.
"When you look at the report, you'll see from 2010 to 2019 around 2% of total units were built and then since 2020 they've increased that number to 8% so less than 10% of the total housing units in the area were built within the last twenty years," said Nathan Digangi, economic development manager for Downtown Reno Partnership.
Digangi says this shows how far behind developers are in creating availability and additional supply while demand continues to increase during this time.
"It also highlights an opportunity for people to come in and build," he said.
The report also includes visitor statistics for the 2023 calendar year which shows about thirty million visits in downtown through three million visitors.
However, people from within the region only represented fifteen percent of the total visitors.
"So it was about 450,000 visitors from within the region and then we had about 2.5 million visitors from outside the region with a total of 12 million visits,"Â Digangi explains. "So that's about an average of about 5 visits per person."
Digangi says this shows people visit Reno multiple times a year compared to other markets where people may only visit once or twice per year.
He tells us they have been working on this report for about two years and have already received a lot of compliments on the balance between the narrative, the commentary, and the statistics.
However, they are asking for people to continue to reach out and share their input so they can work with their partners to further improve it.
"And then we're going to use this as a baseline to launch new efforts too. So, we're going to work with our partners at EDAWN and the city of Reno to really help look at what this means and how it can create a better vision for downtown."
