Your city may have a head start on mine. It may have a giant financial district, a respected fine art museum and a giant light-rail network. But Las Vegas has something your city doesn’t: more than 35 acres of development-ready land, right at its center. And with one key change to its master plan, Symphony Park is now poised to level the field.
“The recession really hurt us” in developing Symphony Park, says Bill Arent, the city’s Economic & Urban Development Director. The neighborhood’s most prominent developments—the Smith Center, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, World Market Center and Molasky Corporate Center—should have had company by now: medical offices, retail, apartment buildings. Now, the City has dissolved a pre-recession site development agreement it made with San Diego-based real estate company Newland Communities, effectively opening the door to other developers, many of them local.
And they’re stepping up. Arent says a group of local investors is moving forward with plans to build a medical campus on a “horseshoe” of parcels to the south of Smith Center, which will be served by a new parking garage already paid for by tourist-improvement district funds. But that’s only the start, says Deputy City Manager Scott Adams: “We want to reset with a more market-based master plan,” he says.
That means Symphony Park will become what it should have been from the beginning. Forget that soccer stadium foolishness of a couple years back. Developers can now build market-rate housing on Promenade Place, the street that runs parallel to Smith Center’s front doors. (There’s a need for it: Arent notes that Downtown apartment vacancy is currently running at 5 percent or less, a result of Juhl and the Ogden converting from rentals to sales.) Retail and dining will fill the bottom floors of the new apartment buildings, creating an instant Symphony Park “district.”
Other plans include more office space, additional auto and pedestrian bridges connecting the railroad- and-freeway-locked neighborhood to the rest of Downtown, and yes, the Art Museum at Symphony Park, whose fundraising efforts are moving along apace. In other words, it’ll be a brand-new Downtown Vegas, built from the ground up on previously unused land. Your city may have some cool stuff, but we win.
