By james art 
- Nevada is facing skyrocketing housing costs.
- Reno Mayor Hilary Schieve says city leaders need to reduce regulations that hold back construction.
- Federal funding for affordable housing and an emphasis on reducing homelessness is also key.
The mayor of Reno, Nevada, says the single best thing city leaders can do to help solve one of the nation’s worst housing problems is to loosen housing regulations.
In recent years, Mayor Hilary Scheeve has launched a multi-pronged approach to do just that.
“Sometimes the government has to get out of the way,” she told Business Insider in a recent interview. There is no quick fix, said Sheeve, who is not a member of either major party and has made housing and homelessness a top priority.
As the election approaches, voters in Nevada cite the economy as their top concern. Rising home prices and rents, which have hit the Sunbelt state particularly hard, are a big part of that. Since January 2017, home prices have risen 90 percent and rents have risen 53 percent in Nevada, far outpacing the national growth rate, Alex Horowitz, director of the Pew Housing Policy Project, told Business Insider.
Lubricate the housing wheels
Nevada had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country after the 2008 financial crisis hit the tourism-reliant economy and burst a struggling housing bubble. In the years since, the state has used low taxes and other business-friendly policies to attract big employers like Amazon, Apple and Tesla. The new jobs helped attract hundreds of thousands of new residents.
The pandemic and the rise of telecommuting have reinforced this trend. With the influx of new residents, the demand for housing – and subsequently the price – soared. In Reno, the median single-family home price has increased more than 40% since 2019.
As mayor, Shieve celebrated new jobs and the development of arts and culture in Reno and the surrounding area. But she is also concerned about the housing shortage and rising homelessness. When it comes to promoting affordable housing, she pointed to cutting red tape and making it easier to build, including by loosening zoning laws and burdensome environmental regulations.
Under Schieve’s leadership, Reno loosened some of its regulations, allowing more density, reducing parking requirements and lowering fees. As of 2019, the city says it has waived $11 million in sewer connection fees and $700,000 in building permit fees to help bring more than 2,000 affordable homes to market.
Through a program called “1,000 Homes in 120 Days,” the city deferred sewer and permit fees for five years on market-rate housing developments, which the city says helped create more than 500 new homes between its implementation in late 2019 . and earlier this year.
Schieve, a former chairman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said Reno’s rules on affordable housing are relatively lenient. However, she argued that some county and state regulations are slowing homebuilding, driving up costs and deterring new construction.
She drew particular attention to county health department regulations that require lengthy review processes. “Most developers borrow money,” she said. “So time is money.” Schieve’s chief of staff noted that pool construction, including in apartment complexes and hotels, “takes an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of money” to be approved by the department.
Reno has also made some progress on emergency and temporary housing. Schieve has received national attention for reducing the number of homeless people living on Reno’s streets by nearly 60% between 2022 and 2023. The reduction is largely due to the construction of the Nevada Cares Campus, an emergency shelter that can house up to 600 souls in sleeping pods and a large tent.
Nevada’s housing issues take center stage in the presidential election
President Joe Biden has visited Nevada numerous times to talk about housing, and his administration’s policies have helped strengthen the state’s housing efforts.
Scheeve called the housing funding Reno received through the 2021 US bailout a “godsend.” And she praised the Biden administration for being accessible and responsive to her city’s housing needs. “We can pick up the phone and I can call my HUD secretary, I can call somebody at the White House,” Scheeve said. Acting HUD Secretary Adrian Todman has visited Reno twice in the past year.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign also highlighted Nevada’s housing problems, focusing heavily on his proposal to deport millions of immigrants to free up housing. “We need to build more houses and we need to deport illegal aliens so that American homes go to American citizens,” vice presidential candidate JD Vance told a crowd in Las Vegas in October.
Shive rejected this offer. “We have to be realistic about how we approach housing,” she said. “That won’t solve anything.”
There are aspects of housing policy that Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris seem to agree on, including opening up federal land for additional homes. Nevada became the focus of this particular decision because 85% of the state’s land area is owned by the federal government.
Sheeve says the issue of opening up state land is complex. It depends on factors such as the cost of new infrastructure, including roads and water supply, expansion of services such as law enforcement and environmental concerns. She supports limiting housing development in environmentally sensitive areas, including wetlands and flood-prone regions.
Overall, she wants to see cities like Reno invest in rebuilding their urban cores and increasing density, not sprawl.
“There’s still a lot of mana,” she said. “There is still a lot of work for cities to build, not disappear.”