Reviving downtown could ease traffic woes

Sunday, Sept. 5, 1999 | 10:16 a.m.

Like Petula Clark's pop hit from the 1960s, environmentalists, policy makers and private developers want people to "go downtown."

But while Clark was asking people to visit the bright lights, the up-to-date crowd wants people to move downtown to work and live.

It could be a way to reduce the need for long commutes from planned communities on the perimeter to jobs in the central valley, cutting air pollution and reducing the need for new housing on the fringes of the metropolitan region.

For Las Vegas itself, planners say redirecting housing development from the perimeter and back to the city's core isn't just a good idea -- it's a necessity.

"We're starting to approach build-out within the city," says Tom Perrigo, a city planner. "We're looking more at in-fill, at downtown redevelopment."

With about 480,000 people, Las Vegas is the largest municipality in the region and state. For the last two decades, it has consistently added another 15,000 to 20,000 people per year. But the city is flanked by townships, other cities and environmentally sensitive federal land, effectively barring any more substantial annexations to increase its geographic size.

That means more people will get squeezed into the existing land. That's what environmentalists, by and large, would like to see. Bringing the people closer to downtown means shorter commutes and less air pollution, less grading of virgin desert and fewer impacts on the surrounding environment.

"We've got to start focusing on the center of the city," agrees Mark Fine, a consultant who has helped some of the largest master-planned communities in the valley get built. "As sprawl, as development, moves farther and farther outside the city, it compounds the traffic problem...So there's a real demand for housing that gets us back to the center of the city."

That doesn't mean that in-town developments will spell the end of master-planned communities. But Fine believes that bringing development back to downtown could ease development pressure on the perimeter by 25 percent.

Redevelopment, re-urbanization or rural homesteading are not just a local phenomenon. The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, recently surveyed 25 major U.S. cities and found without exception that population is growing in their urban centers.

That movement is being driven by several factors. Younger professionals without children are finding the city centers comfortable places to live, in part because the high crime rates of the 1970s and 1980s now appear to be under control. And seniors, "empty-nesters" in the parlance of urban planners, are moving into city centers as their need for larger homes and access to schools is eliminated.

One of the obstacles to large-scale development in the center of Las Vegas is that adult-oriented businesses dominate the commercial activity in many neighborhoods. The City Council and Mayor Oscar Goodman have made changing those neighborhoods a priority.

"Nothing is more important to me and my new administration than revitalizing downtown Las Vegas," Goodman said in a July speech to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. "We will strive to build a new downtown that includes entertainment, shops, cafes and new residential neighborhoods.

"This is a fact: We are landlocked. We must now begin to incorporate new residential opportunities within the older, urban core of our city."

Goodman is aware that one of the primary reasons why people don't want to move to the downtown area is the lack of amenities, amenities that are routinely provided, even required, in the master-planned communities on the perimeter. He has made putting a large park downtown one of his core goals.

"We must encourage young families and professionals to return to our urban neighborhoods," he said in July. "This will...lessen our dependence upon building more new infrastructure. This will help free up our capital budgets for building parks, playgrounds, community centers and walkable streetscapes lined with trees."

"There's definitely a change in the wind," Perrigo says. But it will be a long, and likely contentious, process to get adult businesses -- strip clubs, movie theaters and book stores -- out of downtown for a "family-friendly environment," he adds.

The city recently passed an ordinance to prohibit new adult businesses from coming into downtown. But old ones cannot be closed, so are likely to be there for years to come.

Unlike older cities, Las Vegas doesn't talk in terms of a rebirth of downtown, because there has never been the kind of downtown that people could call a historic or core urban neighborhood. However, a few projects have moved forward that indicates a birth of a traditional downtown may come.

Several large office towers have been proposed and gotten approval from the Center City Development Corp.

The corporation also has given the green light to the first recent residential project for downtown, a 47-unit apartment complex, targeted at young professionals, to be built at Las Vegas Boulevard and Gass Street. The complex, Goodman hopes, will signal the beginning of a residential rebuilding of the downtown area.