Fremont East is the stretch of Fremont Street east of Las Vegas Boulevard, plus the blocks around it. It grew up beside the casino core and became downtown’s main nightlife strip, known for its bars, restaurants and surviving mid-century motels. The masterplan’s goals for it were practical: improve affordability, safety and amenities, protect historic buildings, and add housing, from live/work units to mid-rise and high-rise workforce apartments, along with clinics, community centres and schools.
It became the second district coded under Chapter 19.09, and the first to need changes to the code itself.
Version 2.0 of the code
The pilot code had been written around conditions in the Medical District. Fremont East has a historic main street, a dense urban core next to the casinos and older neighbourhoods behind it. So the city published a Version 2.0 of the code in February 2019. It kept the general framework and added zones and standards for this district. The three new transect zones were:
- T6 Urban Core (T6-UC) for the most intense blocks next to downtown’s centre
- T4 Main Street (T4-MS) for smaller-scale commercial streets
- T4 Neighborhood (T4-N) for the residential blocks
The draft was posted with every change marked so residents could comment section by section. The Planning Commission recommended the General Plan Amendment on April 9, 2019, and City Council adopted the Version 2.0 text on July 3, 2019.
The rezoning
The regulating plan for Fremont East came out of about seven months of meetings with residents, property owners and businesses. It then went through the full hearing cycle: mailed notices, a neighbourhood meeting, the Planning Commission and City Council. On October 16, 2019, after an eleven-month process, the council approved rezoning 226 acres to the form-based code.
On the same day, the code won the Outstanding Implementation Plan award from the Nevada chapter of the American Planning Association at its state conference.
Still in use
The code is a working tool here, not a museum piece. Rezonings between transect zones still come up. In January 2025, for example, City Council approved moving a Fremont East parcel from a T5 Main Street zone to T6 Urban Core, with a condition requiring construction documents within a year. Requests like this are exactly what the transect system was designed for: moving a property up the scale when the market and the neighbourhood support it.
What it means
For property owners, the rules now depend on where a parcel sits on the regulating plan: main-street frontage, neighbourhood street or core block. Buildings along Fremont itself have to address the street with active ground floors. The neighbourhood zones are meant to keep the residential blocks behind at a lower scale. Historic buildings are not replaced by the code, but new buildings next to them are shaped by the same rules about frontage and placement.
Sources
- City of Las Vegas, Chapter 19.09 Form-Based Code, Ver. 2.0 Fremont East Update
- CNU Public Square, “Las Vegas establishes form-based coding in Nevada”
- Citizen Portal, “Council grants T6 rezoning for Fremont East parcel”
- Archived project updates from the city’s former formbasedcode.vegas site, 2019