Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Deciding on a vision for downtown Las Vegas

Las Vegas has the youngest urban core of any city in the country with a population more than 1 million. In a long-view historic sense, our downtown is new, having been founded in 1905 when the railroad needed somewhere to stop for water and created this desert outpost. Every other downtown core in U.S. cities with more than a million residents was created before us. By some appearances, our downtown might seem tired, hodge-podge and a bit confused — as if it’s still trying to find its identity .

The hits and misses have occurred because there has been no overarching development manual in the creation of downtown. It reflects a great deal of happenstance and opportunity, little of it coordinated.

Today’s downtown is a collection of niches, some of which developed organically: the East Fremont district with the bold creations of the Downtown Project and, 10 blocks away, the Arts District straddling Charleston Boulevard, each developing its own character. There’s the blossoming Symphony Park, with its elegant Smith Center for the Performing Arts, and its antithesis, the gritty industrial corridor down the street. And there’s the downtown office core with its buildings sheathed in glass, not far from Fremont Street, anchored by a towering rendition of a slot machine spitting people on a zipline from its coin bin.

It’s these various downtown districts that the Las Vegas City Council now hopes to connect to each other and to the greater region. The guiding tool: a master plan focusing mostly on land use and community development that lays out a general blueprint for what the 5 1/2-square-mile core of the city should look like in 2035.

“We never had a plan that created a vision for where we wanted to go and the kinds of development we wanted to see downtown,” Assistant City Manager Scott Adams said. “Most of downtown happened because that’s where the private sector decided to invest.”

The process of adopting a master plan for downtown began in late 2014, when the city appointed RTKL, a worldwide architecture and planning firm, as consultants, and is scheduled to wrap up early next year. The consultants have interviewed about 100 stakeholders and will have conducted five public workshops by the time the process is completed.

If there’s consensus, it’s the need for more parks. Downtown has precious little parkland.

“Right from its start, New York City planned for its Central Park,” Adams said. “We didn’t plan for any parks, and now we’re having to go back and figure out how to fit open space into our existing downtown.”

This blueprint will encourage developers to choose appropriate parcels when pitching projects, Adams said. Cohesion will follow once the master plan identifies spheres for culture and museum venues, for housing, for offices and for businesses, including, maybe, fashion and design centers, performance and art schools, medical and biotechnology clusters, parks and recreation venues, and merchants to serve downtown residents.

“Right now, it might sound messy, because we’re dealing with lots of ideas,” Adams said. But when completed and adopted, the master plan will bring order to downtown and create confidence among investors, residents, businesses and the civic community, he said. “It’s going to be a business plan for the future.”

The consultants will present their proposal at a public workshop next spring before giving recommendations to the City Council. This will be the first chance to critically examine the specifics and from 30,000 feet the assembled vision in shaping downtown’s future. It is important for the consultants and City Council to allow the rest of us to patiently digest the information, to read the narratives and study the drawings. This is the time to be bold and visionary, and to create something special as our neighbors Phoenix and Denver have with their downtowns. We don’t want to look back at missed opportunities as we shape our future.

We’ve waited 110 years to get to this point. Let’s not rush it now.

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