Las Vegas Form-Based Code

The Las Vegas Form‑Based Code

Since 2018, parts of downtown Las Vegas have been zoned by what buildings look like and how they meet the street, not just by what goes on inside them. This site explains how that code works and where it applies.

The Las Vegas transectA street elevation moving from detached houses in T3, through rowhouses in T4 and mid-rise main-street buildings in T5, to towers in the T6 urban core.T3NeighborhoodT4General urbanT5Urban centerT6Urban core
The code sorts downtown into transect zones, from house-scale streets in T3 to the high-rise core in T6. Simplified elevation, not to scale.

What changed, and why

Most American zoning works by separating uses. Housing goes in one zone, shops in another, offices in a third, and the rules are mostly about what you may do on a lot. That approach does a poor job of producing walkable streets, which is exactly what the city's Vision 2045 Downtown Masterplan asked for when the City Council adopted it in June 2016.

So the city wrote a new chapter of its zoning code, Chapter 19.09 of Title 19, with planning firm Lisa Wise Consulting. It regulates form first and use second: how tall a building is, where it sits on the lot, how its ground floor faces the sidewalk and what kind of street it lines. Uses are still controlled, but they follow from the kind of place each zone is meant to be.

The code was adopted on October 17, 2018. It does not cover all of downtown at once. Each district is rezoned separately, after its own round of public meetings, so the map fills in over time.

Read the full explanation of how the code works

Where it applies today

Downtown's casino core

The Resort & Casino District, along Fremont Street, is where Las Vegas gaming started, and the 2016 masterplan treats it as downtown's entertainment anchor. It is also unusual in who owns it. Several of its casinos are sister properties run by the same company side by side. Boyd Gaming operates the California, the Fremont and Main Street Station. Derek Stevens and his brother Greg own The D and the Golden Gate, and Derek Stevens opened Circa on the same stretch of Fremont Street in 2020.

That matters for planning. When one owner controls several neighbouring properties, choices about parking, skybridges and street frontage play out across whole blocks rather than single lots. The masterplan picked out the Main Street Station surface parking lot as one of the district's best sites for new building.

The sister-property model isn't unique to Fremont Street. In UK online gambling, operators run whole families of sister sites under a single licence, each with its own brand on shared infrastructure. It is the digital version of a downtown casino group.

The Resort & Casino District has not been given its own form-based code yet. See how the masterplan describes it.

Key dates

  1. City Council adopts the Vision 2045 Downtown Masterplan.
  2. Chapter 19.09 Form-Based Code adopted (Ordinance 6649).
  3. Medical District pilot area rezoned, 307 acres.
  4. Fremont East rezoned, 226 acres.
  5. Historic Westside rezoned, 603 acres.

See the full timeline

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