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O P I N I O N
A massive redevelopment along West 2nd Street in Reno, Nevada, will be a showcase for design, personnel, and financing.
Reno reboot Complex redevelopment of a blighted area prompts team to be creative across the board – design, personnel, technology, and funding.
W hile having a glass of wine with colleagues from New York, we reflected on the scale and complexity of the projects each of us has underway today. These are exciting times in the design professions, as many of the cities in which we are working were built out a long time ago, leading to redevelopment, often in severely blighted areas.
Ed Friedrichs
As an architect, funding was always the developer’s problem. The only way it affected me and my firm was that we frequently found ourselves being used for free financing for the developer through our unpaid invoices for service. Don and Susan Clark of the Don J Clark Group , the developer of the District, invited me to “play” with them about a year and a half ago. They have been incredibly responsible as developer/ architects, seeking local investors to help us with cash flow to pay our bills until the major funding was in place. Since we knew this would take a considerable amount of time, and as I came to know the Clarks’ ambitions for the project – to truly become an exemplar for how development could be done, to be environmentally and socially responsible, and to reduce the cost of ownership and occupancy for the people and companies for whom we’re building West 2nd District – it became apparent that we needed a world-class team to guide design,
Many redevelopment agencies and districts around the country have exceeded their bonding capacity, making it impossible to bond against future tax revenues to fund needed infrastructure necessary to move beyond blight. We certainly have that problem in Reno. The site we’re developing, West Second District, is seven large city blocks comprising 17 acres. Some parcels are vacant, and several properties hold run-down weekly motels filled with traditionally disenfranchised people, who are also burdened by, in some properties, a criminal element. There’s an old Greyhound bus station, the toilet rooms of which have become a haven for the homeless, and a former printing plant, currently owned and used by the University of Nevada for continuing education programs. First, we’re securing enough investment capital to fund the purchase of the land and for working capital as we begin construction. Properties are being acquired, and we expect to start construction on our first building within weeks.
See ED FRIEDRICHS, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER October 3, 2016, ISSUE 1170
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