Las Vegas Form-Based Code

Las Vegas Medical District

Form-based code
Adopted
Council approval
January 16, 2019
Area
307 acres (pilot area)
Cases
GPA-78218, ZON-78219 (2020 completion)

The Las Vegas Medical District was where the city tested its form-based code. It is the area around University Medical Center and the UNLV medical school, west of the downtown core, and the 2016 masterplan saw it becoming the centre of health, education and research for Southern Nevada. The plan pictured as much as 19 million square feet of new development there, organised as a walkable, mixed-use neighbourhood rather than a campus of parking lots.

Why a pilot

Rewriting zoning for all of downtown in one go would have been slow and contentious. Instead, the city wrote the general rules of Chapter 19.09 and applied them first to a single district, so it could see how the code behaved with real applications before rolling it out further. The Medical District was a good test because it was expected to grow and had a mix of conditions, from busy corridors like Charleston Boulevard to quieter residential streets.

How the code got here

  • November 2017. The Public Review Draft of the code was released and presented to City Council on November 15.
  • February 13, 2018. Two community meetings, morning and evening, at the Las Vegas Valley Water District.
  • Spring 2018. The planning department held weekly open-house hours so residents could walk in with questions.
  • June 27, 2018. The Final Draft was published, followed by two public presentations the next day.
  • July 10, 2018. The code was introduced to the Planning Commission. Based on the feedback, the city added a month of review and published a public spreadsheet tracking every proposed change.
  • August 2018. The pilot was narrowed to the district’s core area, north of Charleston Boulevard and east of Rancho Drive, leaving out the south side of Charleston between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Rancho.
  • October 17, 2018. City Council adopted Chapter 19.09 (Ordinance 6649). It took effect on October 22.
  • January 16, 2019. City Council approved rezoning 307 acres of the pilot area to the new transect zones.

Adopting the text did not change anyone’s zoning by itself. The January 2019 rezoning is what put properties under the code.

Finishing the pilot

In 2020 the city returned to complete the rezoning of the district through a General Plan Amendment and rezoning (cases GPA-78218 and ZON-78219). These covered parcels that were then zoned for low-density residential, office and service commercial use, among others, and moved them to transect zones including T3 Neighborhood, T4 Corridor, T5 Corridor and T5 Main Street. Neighbourhood meetings were held on March 9 and June 11, 2020, the second at City Hall and online.

What changed on the ground

Inside the pilot area, new projects are now reviewed against the transect zone mapped on their parcel rather than a conventional use district. The 2020 completion cases show the pattern: corridor zones (T4-C, T5-C) along the bigger roads, written with future transit in mind, a main-street zone (T5-MS), and a neighbourhood zone (T3-N) for the residential edges. When the city moved on to Fremont East, Version 2.0 of the code built on the framework first written for this pilot.

Sources

Other districts