Revitalizing North Las Vegas: Where do we start?

By Megan Messerly

Monday, Oct. 12, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Lydia Garrett doesn’t like waiting for answers — not when people in her neighborhood are struggling to pay their bills and find jobs. Yet Garrett, president of the North Valley Leadership Team, a community group, says all that seems to come from the city of North Las Vegas are delays.

The city is in the midst of developing a plan to revitalize older parts of North Las Vegas, including North Valley, while at the same time expand — namely with housing at the Villages at Tule Springs and with a production facility for electric car maker Faraday Future at the Apex Industrial Complex.

But some residents worry that by chasing new economic development, the city won’t move fast enough on problems that plague residents today. The city’s response: Be patient.

Meantime, city officials turned to residents to gather input on how to balance the competing interests.

On a recent Saturday morning, Teresa and Kyle Paxton completed a survey asking what they think about their neighborhood, an area riddled with vacant lots and without enough access to basic services.

“It’s hard to find a living-wage job,” Teresa Paxton said. “I hope my responses will be addressed.”

The Paxtons were two of 100 residents who attended a farmers market hosted by Lutheran Social Services of Nevada and the city of North Las Vegas. In exchange for filling out the 70-question survey, residents received free groceries from a food pantry. The Paxtons loaded their cart with fresh tomatoes, onions and carrots.

The survey is phase one for the city’s Choice Neighborhood Initiative planning group, tasked with developing a plan over the next two years to redevelop the city’s urban core, which includes the southernmost portion of the city bordered by Clayton Street to the west and North Fifth Street to the east. The city hopes to collect 1,000 surveys before the end of October.

North Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority received a $485,000 grant from the federal government to develop the plan.

The area has many needs.

“There are no grocery stores of any magnitude,” said Cass Palmer, the city’s director of neighborhood and leisure services. “Our focus is to bring things back to the community so people don’t have to leave.”

Now, the city is trying to figure out what those things are. The survey asks residents about their needs regarding health care, libraries, banks, post offices, public transportation, social services, child care, youth programs and places of worship.

But Garrett and other residents said they are frustrated that the city is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a plan that could take years to come to fruition. Garrett says it feels like the older part of town is on the backburner, while the city focuses its attention on developing newer areas, particularly Apex.

When crime plagued Garrett’s neighborhood, she and a group of residents worked together to tear down an apartment complex they said was the epicenter of the problem. The vacant lot is one of the places the city would like to redevelop. It also was the site of the farmers market.

Garrett’s organization already has plans to develop the lot, and she complained its project is being co-opted by the city. She doesn’t want to wait years to see changes to her neighborhood, she said.

But the grant’s target area comprises more than just that plot, city officials said, and they have to look at the needs of the entire urban core area, not just North Valley. Jim Haye, the city’s lead coordinator on the grant project, said that the large target area has made the project more of a challenge.

The city plans to put out a request for proposals from developers by the end of 2015 and hopes to have a developer selected by the end of the first quarter of 2016. Once the plan is finalized in January 2017, officials will apply for another federal grant of up to $30 million.

“They’ll say, ‘We’re going to get a grant but you have to wait,’” Garrett said. “But I’m saying how long do people have to wait to pay their bills? How long do people have to wait to find jobs?”