County commission wants to know how you’d improve Chinatown

Peter Chen is frequently the recipient of the same complaint when customers arrive at his store on the second floor of the Shanghai Plaza on Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas’ Chinatown neighborhood.

Shoppers enter 888 Collectibles — which sells Pokemon cards, figurines and other merchandise for animated shows and video games — annoyed with how long it took to find parking.

Some shoppers have resorted to parking in the “No Parking Zone” along Pioneer Avenue on the backside of Shanghai Plaza. A few have returned to their vehicles to find a parking citation from Metro Police.

In other instances, Chen has watched as pedestrians park in the Chinatown Plaza across Spring Mountain Road and attempt to dart between five lanes of speeding traffic to access the stores.

Of the couple hundred spots in Shanghai Plaza, Chen said at least a third are taken by employees working in the two-story shopping center. Many are forced to park across the road in Chinatown Plaza’s expansive lot, but that requires a 10-minute walk and the dangers of crossing Spring Mountain Road — one of the busiest streets in Southern Nevada.

“A fatal accident, it’s just bound to happen,” Chen, 40, said. “If you talk to any of the owners, I think the No. 1 issue is parking, obviously. There’s just no good options right now, at least not for the foreseeable future.”

It’s not the only problem the rapidly expanding Chinatown district has faced in recent years, said Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones, who wants to bring change to the district he oversees on the commission.

The county launched the Reimagine Spring Mountain website, which has a survey for residents to share their thoughts on the area's future. The survey has drawn more than 250 submissions, but they expect to “receive hundreds of more comments” before it closes this summer, Jones said.

Chinatown’s origins began back in the 1990s with the development of the Chinatown Plaza shopping center, according to the county. On May 7, 1996, the plaza was designated as the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center, marking the “first official recognition of the new district.”

Four years later, Gov. Kenny Guinn established the three-mile district along Spring Mountain Road stretching from Las Vegas Boulevard to Rainbow Boulevard as Chinatown.

Chen, who was not raised in Las Vegas but visited often, said he remembers going to Chinatown in the mid-1990s when “there wasn’t much to do.” Now, it has exploded into a blooming district filled with nationally recognized restaurants, international chain stores and bustling commercial centers.

But the success of the area developed faster than its infrastructure, officials said.

Applied Analysis, the economic analysis company, conducted a county-sponsored study in 2022 to identify blight in six areas of the region. The neighborhoods studied: the Stadium District surrounding Allegiant Stadium; the northeast neighborhood just south of Las Vegas Boulevard; the University District; Spring Mountain Road; Chinatown; and the Whitney community along Boulder Highway.

A blighted area is one with population loss, environmental contamination, unfit or unsafe structures, a lack of proper utilization and economic dislocation, deterioration or disuse, Applied Analysis said in its report.

About 7.2% of the Spring Mountain parcel from Twain Avenue in the south to Desert Inn Road in the north was found to be in distress, with most of it concentrated at an abandoned shopping center on the intersection of Rainbow Boulevard and Spring Mountain Road.

For Chinatown, about 8% of the neighborhood contains blight in various parcels, “with concentrations on the eastern portion,” the report said.

“The area is characterized by socioeconomic challenges such as low educational attainment, high unemployment, crime and poverty rates, and decreased property valuations,” it continued.

Jones held a kickoff event at the Chinatown Plaza last month to gather feedback from the community on what changes they’d like to see in Chinatown. Hundreds of people showed up to share their vision for what the Spring Mountain corridor could become, he said.

“The real issue is to take a look at some of these blighted properties and some of those that are still industrial, and to transform them into something that is more in line with a lot of the investment that has been going on from a national level in the Spring Mountain corridor, for everything from retail to certainly restaurants to apartment complexes, high-end apartment complexes,” Jones said.

Michael Plourde and his wife, Misuzu Ebihara, own Suzuya Patisserie off South Buffalo Drive, serving Japanese-style cakes and pastries, including the ichigo daifuku — a fresh strawberry, red bean paste and Chantilly cream wrapped in mochi.

They will expand this month into Chinatown in the Spring Mountain Plaza on the intersection of Wynn and Spring Mountain roads. They jumped at the opportunity to expand to a more central location closer to the Strip, Plourde said.

They’ve already experienced some of the pitfalls of doing business in that area.

“In that plaza that we’re in, it’s a little bit tight; I have a truck and we have our delivery van, so it’s a little bit harder to kind of navigate sometimes in the parking lot there, but I think parking is definitely an issue,” Plourde said. “I think some of the focus (at the kickoff event) was on building these nice places and these new places, but they didn’t put much of the focus on where the customer is actually going to be and how they’re going to get here.”

Plourde recommended creating more spaces for parking, or erecting a centrally located parking structure, as well as repaving or restriping Spring Mountain Road to reduce traffic for cars trying to turn in or out of shopping centers. Chen and others at Jones’ event had similar suggestions.

Jones additionally said that walkability of the area will be a priority during the redevelopment process.

Because Chinatown was a much different district some 30 years ago, Spring Mountain Road was never intended to be a walkable road, he said. Some “transformational work” to widen sidewalks, plant more foliage and install public art is planned for the near future of Chinatown so people will want to walk around the area.

Jones said his office is looking at the merits of removing one of the three westbound lanes to widen the sidewalks and put in streetscapes. That could be completed as soon as the end of this year, he said.

Chen suggested a pedestrian bridge be built between the shopping centers to reduce the possibility of pedestrian-vehicle crashes.

Having a stop on the Vegas Loop underground transportation system that is expanding from its home base at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and improving accessibility through Regional Transportation Commission bus stops would increase visitation to Chinatown from tourists on the Strip, Jones said. It’s a 1.4-mile trip from Treasure Island up Spring Mountain to Chinatown.

With so many avenues, Jones said the final recommendations and plan approval won’t occur until early 2025 at the earliest. Until then, he’ll meet with community stakeholders and conduct surveys to gather as much input as possible.

“This was an area of town where there really was a road for the mine to the west of there to transport sand and gravel, and now it is really the heart of both tourists and local gatherings for some of the best food in all of Southern Nevada,” Jones said. “I think we’re really in the planning stages because this is so new, but there had been some things that were proposed back in the corridor over the last year or two and most of those developers have shown a lot of interest in moving forward with their projects as a result of these very public efforts to improve the corridor.”

Find the survey online at inspiringspringmountain.com.

[email protected] / 702-948-7854 / @gracedarocha