Still hankering for a real downtown

By Mike Trask

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The two largest suburban governments in the region, Henderson and North Las Vegas, have big plans to revitalize, gentrify and redevelop their aging downtowns.

Water Street in Henderson thrived as a center of World War II industry in the era before the city was incorporated.

North Las Vegas, by all accounts, never had anything downtown that could be called thriving. It built a city hall in the 1960s, and Las Vegas Boulevard North at Lake Mead Boulevard was the epicenter of the city.

Today both cities are among the fastest-growing in the country.

Each has more than 200,000 residents and projects to grow to more than 500,000 by 2025. But their downtowns are marked largely by aging casinos and giant government buildings.

Leaders of those cities want more. They want hubs — urban centers of the suburban communities.

They want redevelopment.

“Neighborhoods have focal points, but not a place where residents consider it their collective focal point,” said Larry Bender, redevelopment manager in North Las Vegas. “That’s usually the downtown area.”

Big plans in Henderson have hit snags, however, caused mainly by the slumping economy. Henderson built an amphitheater connected to City Hall a few years ago and started a series of special events to draw people downtown.

This led to a flurry of development activities. A pair of three-story, mixed-use projects were built across the street from City Hall and several art galleries moved into vacant storefronts. A plethora of projects was planned for the area.

Now, however, at least five major mixed-use and condominium projects aimed at modernizing the 60-year-old neighborhood are in limbo. Developers who pledged to spend millions of dollars downtown have delayed or canceled plans.

North Las Vegas hasn’t yet been affected by the slump, if only because its plans to revitalize its downtown are still being conceived. Public money will be at the forefront of the effort by way of a $165 million City Hall.

It’s worth noting that without thriving downtowns to which Henderson and North Las Vegas residents can turn, they have found their own go-to places, whether it’s the softball fields with the chain restaurant across the street, the local casino or a favorite mall.

In other words, the free marketplace is filling the void.

Which raises a question: If the residents are happy, if they have found their own sense of community consistent with their suburban lifestyle, why use public resources to revive old downtowns?

As Robert Parker, a UNLV sociology professor and the author of “Building American Cities,” explains, “there’s no grass-roots draw” to old downtowns.

It’s entirely conceivable that you could live in Green Valley for a decade and have no reason to visit downtown Henderson. The same could be said of a North Las Vegas resident who moved into Aliante in the past five years.

People feel no connections to those old downtowns. They live in manicured neighborhoods built fresh upon the desert. Why should they care about restoring a downtown that was once the historical center of their community?

One answer, which offers hope to downtown revivalists, comes from Katherine Crewe, an urban design professor at Arizona State University: “Sooner or later in a city that’s sprawling so fast, people get thirsty for history.”