It’s summer, so that means it’s construction time again. Time for the sounds of earth movers and electric saws to fill the air. But there hasn’t been a whole lot of construction in Carson for the last several years, as this article in Carson Now points out. The housing market has been slow for years, which kept people from building anything new. Now it’s rebounded enough that several new projects have started up all at once. It can’t happen soon enough, since the lack of available housing in town has sent rents and house prices sky high. I hope that all this new inventory can cool things off a bit. Let’s take a look at some of the construction happening around town.

308 N Curry

I took a look at this project not too long ago. But they have made progress since then. The exterior wall treatments are coming along, and several of the facades on the building are painted and looking almost finished. They’ve been working on this for well over a year; time to wrap it up!

Curry Street

Right in front of that building the Curry Street makeover is continuing. They are still working on replacing the utilities beneath the street. Once that is done, they’ll move on to redoing the sidewalks and repaving.

Carson Hills Apartments

Right behind the Galaxy Fandango movie theater a large development is going in. The Carson Hills Apartments is planned to have 370 apartments, just recently bumped up from 300. I think this is by far the largest project being worked on right now, and hopefully they won’t be “luxury” apartments but ones that people can actually afford to live in.

This is a good use of some empty land at the edge of town, but it’s a little scary that there have been two high-profile wildfires in the hills right next to this spot in the last couple of years.

The black scar from a recent wildfire can still be seen in the picture above.

It wraps all the way around on the south, west, and north sides of the movie theater.

Eagle Station

This piece of land on Eagle Station Lane, right behind Kohl’s, has been in the works for over 10 years it feels like. Its extremely on-again/off-again nature makes me reluctant to even say anything about it, but it looks like work has resumed and maybe this time they’ll actually finish it. I’m pretty sure the brick wall is new, anyway. I remember it just being a chain link fence as recent as last year.

Arbor Villas

I covered the groundbreaking of this piece of land on Little Lane in January 2017. They have just now gone vertical on the first building in the complex. So it’s another slow one. But maybe now that construction has started in earnest they’ll pick up the pace a bit.

Linda Kay Court

Off of Fifth Street, just one block east of Roop, they are building two more of these fourplexes. You can see the first two, which were just built a year or two ago, in the background.

Lompa Ranch

This is another one where you have to take the long view. Some years ago there was a lot of controversy when the Lompa Ranch was put up for sale to developers. The Lompa Ranch was a historic cattle ranch that used to be on the outskirts of town, but the city grew to surround it and a freeway was built through it. I wrote about it in 2006, that’s how long this has been going on. The ranch spreads from Fifth Street in the south to the backyard of Carson High in the north, between Saliman and the freeway. This view from Fifth and Saliman looks out over the large expanses of grassy fields that comprise one of the largest remaining open space areas in the Eagle Valley. The plans have already been laid out for single-family housing, multi-family apartments and townhouses, office space, and retail space to be built in this area. So far they’ve only started working on one small area next to the high school (seen below) and full build-out will take many years. It’s coming, but I dare not guess how long it will all take.

Mills Landing

This one is pretty well along already. Mills Landing is an apartment complex being built across the highway from Mills Park, off State Street near the Starbucks. Construction has been going pretty well since it started last year.

Park Place at Silver Oak

We’ve seen a lot of multi-family construction happening, which is good for reasons of density and price. But there are some single-family houses being built in town too, like these next to John Mankins Park near Silver Oak golf course.

Anderson Street

These little townhouses were built last year on an empty lot on Carson City’s east side, at the corner of Robinson and Anderson. They look all ready to be moved into now.

McDonald’s

Not a residential project, but still an interesting remodel is the McDonald’s at the corner of Carson Street and Eagle Station Lane. if you remember, the McDonald’s on Winnie was demolished a few years ago and rebuilt brand new because that apparently was cheaper and easier than refitting the old building. Apparently this McDonald’s didn’t have the same structural problems because they did choose to do a full interior and exterior remodel on this one instead of a tear-down. The outside is done and now they’ve moved on to the inside. They’re serving food in the drive-thru only until it’s all finished.