Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

City Council adopts new master plan for downtown Las Vegas

Downtown Las Vegas Master Plan

Artist’s renderings of some neighborhoods as envisioned in the city’s downtown master plan.

The Las Vegas City Council on Wednesday formally adopted a 30-year vision for downtown, setting in motion the most crucial part — implementation.

The new downtown master plan has been nearly two years in the making, involving city planners, community leaders and residents who have offered input along the way. The 355-page document, which offers a blueprint guiding downtown development for the next three decades, replaces the existing master plan that was created in 2000.

“This is a 30-year plan, and so there’s a lot of things called out in this plan,” said Robert Summerfield, who leads the city’s long-range planning efforts. “Not everything is going to happen today or tomorrow.”

The new plan extends the boundaries of the focus area to include the Medical District on Charleston Boulevard, the historic West Las Vegas neighborhood, the area surrounding Cashman Center and a quadrant south of the Fremont East entertainment district.

Essentially, the vision strives to make downtown a better place to live, work and visit by improving economic opportunities, residential options, transportation and overall aesthetics. For instance, the plan harps on making downtown Las Vegas “greener,” with more parks and open spaces where people could congregate.

It also proposes creating mixed-use hubs along possible light rail or bus rapid transit routes. The idea: Foster development around the transit stations, with ground-level amenities such as convenience stores, restaurants, salons, post offices and laundromats.

The formal adoption allows city planners to begin forming an implementation plan, which will be presented to the City Council by the end of the year. The master plan sets the framework for the development of policies and regulations that, city officials hope, will make the proposed concepts become reality in the future.

The City Council also asked for regular updates about progress achieving the plan so that, over the next 30 years, the planning document doesn’t just collect dust on a shelf somewhere.

“While (the plan) is a super aggressive approach, I think it is very doable,” Summerfield said.

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