Par Tolles
My name is Par Tolles, and I am the CEO and founder of Tolles Development Company. I grew up in the Bay Area, Middle Park, and I moved to Reno in 1994. I met a pretty girl and chased her down; I got married and decided to put down roots here. It ended up being a really vibrant place for us to do business with our family, and it’s been a wonderful decision.
I have always wanted to start my own business, and in 2016, I began Tolles Development Company to focus on all real estate product types but with extra effort downtown. We bought a portfolio of office buildings to redevelop them and push downtown Reno to the next level.
We also did that with Midtown; we bought a portfolio of retail buildings and turned that into a very vibrant area. People always ask me if Reno is the next Portland, is it the next Austin? My response has always been, we’re Reno.
We have this fascinating quilt. I love that we’re not trying to turn it into somewhere else but that we’re allowing it to evolve in a unique way. Private investment in downtown, it’s hard but it’s also incredibly important.
Downtown Reno has a nice platform for additional mixed-use development. We have a good foundation of retail, a good foundation of office, a good foundation of residential, arts, and culture, and a river that runs through it.
We must move where the market tells us to go and be more than financially working with it. It’s essential to take a longer-term view when you’re redeveloping and trying to make returns for your investors and more social returns for the community itself.
I think we have a collaborative culture here. We’re part of the fabric of this community. These businesses are our friends. We don’t have big commutes. People want to be together. We’ll never leave Reno.
This office portfolio and the Midtown portfolio provide it right before COVID. I’ve seen the vibrancy of downtown. It hasn’t been hurt as badly as it could. And now we’re prepared to continue to move the floor and move it with good development.
If you work downtown, you’re going to be faced with, yeah, it happens. You can go to your fifth floor and lock the door or lean into the situation. So our company is assisting in these efforts.
We’ve created one of the largest homeless shelters in the country, about the largest during COVID-19. With that has come a number of other E .S. Larry-type developments. We have a tiny home project.
We have a village on Sage Street. HOPES, a federally qualified health center, has built a 50 ,000 square foot clinic next to the CARES campus. We have a safe camp, 50 mod pods, which are all kind of hard tits.
We’ve created the four-door HOPE, which is one of the most unique ecosystems in the country for dealing with this population. We decreased the number of homeless by getting to the city. We’re in the Wall Street Journal, leading the West in our efforts to deal with this problem.
I think we have an appropriate, tough-love approach to helping the homeless. Now, we have the ability to provide them with services with a corridor of hope that’s working. It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career, and I hope to be a model for the West on how to make a difference in the city.
It’s easy to stay in suburbia, but certainly not as fun. If you haven’t come to downtown Reno yet. Please visit us. I promise you, you will make it your Friday night date night. It is one of the most vibrant, unique cities in the West.