Jacobs Entertainment has announced $128 million in new commercial and residential development around the J Resort over the next four years.
Jeff Jacobs, CEO of Jacobs Entertainment has been involved in the Reno community for about 30 years.
2 News Nevada got an exclusive interview with Jacobs to ask him about the new developments and how he got to where he is today.
Jacobs started his journey in the Biggest Little City about three decades ago when he bought the Gold Dust West Casino in Reno.
However, about ten years ago, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, allowed tribal gaming in California.
Which he says cut Nevada gaming in half, so it was time to look a new venture.
“I was watching that bottom out and I thought perhaps that was the time to come in and make my investment and make my bet on downtown Reno,” Jacobs said.
That’s when he decided to buy up a bunch of land.
“I was familiar with the area and I ended up buying one or two parcels and then a couple more and then 10 more then 20 more and now here we are 80 parcels later and now it’s just time to build it out,” he said.
One of those included, the Sands Regency Casino, now known as the J Resort, but this didn’t come without its controversy.
Jacobs had bought up some motels that low income folks were staying in, leaving them without a home.
However, when we asked Jacobs about this, he said they did the best they could.
“It was handled as well as it could’ve been,” Jacobs said. “We really didn’t beat our chest and talk about it. I spent over a million dollars helping families relocate to better environments and the bad boys the police moved them down the road.”
With this recent development, there are two housing projects coming down the pipeline.
Jacobs claims they are affordable units.
The first will be known as The Breeze, which will take over the Bonanza Inn. It’s a 57 unit affordable workforce housing development.
The second one is 65 housing units that will replace the Reno Housing Authority’s Sarrazin Arms.
“Now we’re taking that dilapidated housing with new housing which is funded in part my tax incriminated financing off the commercial development we do,” he said.
Since a lot of the folks living in those motels were homeless, we also asked Jacobs if he’s doing anything to help with the issue.
“What we do is behind the scenes with the homeless,” he said. “The Cares Campus we were involved with that and bringing that. That was very important, the Cares Campus and there’s more things around it that can happen that we’re participating in. But we like to do that behind the scenes.”
Jacobs says when tackling huge projects like this, it doesn’t always go over smoothly.
“You never really can satisfy your critics as you take that journey through life and redevelop an area. We don’t really pay too much attention to that. We know what we need to do and we just keep going into work every day and do it.”
The most recent development near the resort will be the festival grounds, that are supposed to be coming in May.
It will fit 15,000 people and are looking to bring more festivals and A-list music artists to the area.
Other future projects include additions to the J Resort and Reno Neon Line, such as:
* Rolling Art Banquet Hall featuring a rare public display of all five Ferrari “supercars”
* J Resort’s Festival Grounds, debuting with the Drifters Music Festival (May 10–11), headlined by Walker Hayes and Randy Houser
* wedding and event venue called Glow Gardens
* Two housing developments focused on workforce and community revitalization.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.2news.com ’
