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The Las Vegas City Council is considering creating a new Revelopment Area 2 along three major corridors west of the downtown in areas that include blighted properties. The designation will help the city revitalize the area with special financing options, such as using tax increment revenue from the area.
By Dave Toplikar (contact) 
Friday, July 20, 2012 | 1:30 p.m.
The Las Vegas City Council will seek public input next week on a plan to slow and prevent blight just west of downtown.
The council on Wednesday will go over a proposal to create a redevelopment area along Sahara Avenue, West Charleston Boulevard and South Decatur Boulevard and a plan for improvements.
About two-thirds of the commercial parcels — 469 of 638 parcels in the area — are deteriorated or dilapidated under blight criteria, according to the city’s Redevelopment Agency.
The proposed redevelopment area would also include three residential neighborhoods: Richfield Village, Las Verdes Heights and Hyde Park Subdivision.
Designating the neighborhood as a redevelopment area would give the Redevelopment Agency the authority to rehabilitate and revitalize the area. That could include helping pay for projects with tax increment revenue or creating public/private partnerships.
The public hearing will begin at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the council chambers at City Hall, 495 S. Main St.
That is a great idea! However, since the property values in these areas are rapidly dropping and not likely to rise for decades, there will be NO tax increment generated in this new Redevopment Area to finance anything. Tax increment is the incremental increase in value of a property after it is added to a redevelopment area. If the city intends to financially link the "old" Redevelopment Area 1 and the "new" Redevelopment Area 2, and "borrow" tax increment from the old area to finance the new area, this will also not be possible for 2 reasons--one is that the old area is also still depreciating and therefore generating less and less taxes each year to the Agency, and two the Council has over leveraged the Agency to pay for redevelopment projects and special Council projects like City Hall.
Why is the Water District main building in the redevelopment zone, but the shopping center on north side of Charleston west of UMC is not?
Why is the building the Health District might move into on Valley View near the Meadows mall in the redevelopment zone?
Why is the Meadows Mall in the development zone? Is there alot of blight in there?
Some interesting choices.
Property values in this area are *not* universally dropping. Unlike the hyper-planned suburbs, these areas have a wide variety of homes and business parcels whose size and value vary widely from block to block.
Why are only some of the properties on Charleston and Jones in the "Proposed Area"? Are there payments that need to be made?
The city can only place "blighted" parcels into a new Redevelopment Area per NRS 279, so the city has determined that all the parcels that they are proposing to add to the plan are dropping in value, vacant, underutililized or misused, ready for replacement, under parked, unable to serve a new retail use, etc. Many of these retail parcels are shallow and hard to use for modern retail or office uses and back up to homeowners who object to expanding those new uses. That is why these areas are now failing. They also lack landscaping, and other amenities.