Redevelopment shows signs of life

Jeffrey Libby

Monday, Oct. 21, 2002 | 11:06 a.m.

Sitting at the edge of a booth after consulting with her lunch staff, Irene Li, owner of Sam-Pan Chinese restaurant, said it is too early to tell if business will pick up.

But the new neon sign out front, the large, table-to-ceiling windows and the slipstream Moderne design have regulars talking at her downtown Henderson restaurant, she said.

"A lot of customers right now, they say it's beautiful," Li said.

Landlord Leonard Smith, a retiree who is renovating Li's and three other storefronts on Pacific Avenue with about $120,000 in aid from the Henderson Redevelopment Agency, had to agree.

"Oh, it looks good. I can't holler about that," he said. "Particularly at night. With all the neon lit up it looks real nice. It looks like a brand-new shopping center."

After eight years of redevelopment work, the facelift on Pacific Avenue is the most visible return on the investment of public dollars in this small downtown.

Just two months ago, bruised by real estate experts' low opinion of the area, Henderson redevelopment staff was hedging bets on its newest downtown assemblage of 4 1/2 acres. Then-redevelopment manager Bob Wilson put off plans to advertise for proposals on the land the city had worked five years and spent more than $3 million to acquire.

But as Smith's project and two other downtown exterior renovations have taken shape, people have begun to daydream out loud again. "It looks like a little, tiny slice of Scottsdale, Ariz.," Kitty Boeddeker, who is opening an art gallery next door to Sam-Pan, said.

That has led the redevelopment agency, after eight years of planning the rebirth of the old downtown with little material success, to the cusp of significant private investment that could bring new construction, jobs and money to a downtown that starved quietly through the past decade while the rest of Henderson boomed, officials say.

Denna Howell, interim director of the redevelopment agency since late August, says she is encouraged.

"Now that we've nearly completed a couple of improvement projects, there's more interest. We've created expectation and anticipation," she said. "We're creating a synergy."

Letters from the mayor went out to developers late last week seeking proposals for three downtown sites, including the 4 1/2-acre parcel at the southwest corner of Victory Road and Water Street, a half-acre parcel just north of that site and a 3.6-acre site across from City Hall at the southeast corner of Basic Road and Water Street.

Staffers are also putting together a proposal to shift more money into the facade improvement program to accommodate more downtown business owners who say they are ready to invest private money in downtown. Two local developers with good reputations have submitted specific plans, redevelopment planner Cody Walker said, but he declined to name them or the sites of interest.

"We can't say we want a 6,000-square-foot brew pub because we don't know that will work," Walker said. "A lot of it will be up to the developers to propose."

In the past month redevelopment staff also talked in person with several California-based developers with experience building redevelopment projects with a mix of commercial and residential uses, Howell said.

Although he was optimistic about recent developments, Mayor Jim Gibson remained cautious. Gibson served as chairman of the redevelopment agency during the 2 1/2 years local developer Phyllis Thompson struggled to obtain financing for a project proposed on the parcel across from City Hall. The project never got off the ground.

"We're building 150,000 square feet of offices in the new City Hall, so we've made a conscious commitment to the area. We're trying to do our part to build momentum," Gibson said.

"And in the scheme of things, we're talking about probably a $150 million investment, compared to a $1 billion investment in Las Vegas. So it's a relatively small, old downtown, and if we stay the course and are faithful to the plan, in the end it all ought to come back to us."

Along Pacific Avenue the investment has already paid off.

"It's brighter now," said Warren Lee, a waiter at Sam-Pan. "It makes all the old furniture look better, too."