“The Las Vegas Medical District has been in existence since the 1990s. We’ve been constantly trying to work to develop it,” says Brian Knudsen. “It’s very common in other cities around the country, to concentrate medical care [like we have]. It makes it easier for patients, makes it easier for healthcare professionals, to be in the same area.”
Knudsen, Mayor Pro Tem of the City of Las Vegas and Councilman for Ward 1 where the Medical District resides, is currently stewarding that district through a period of rapid, expansive growth that began in 2022 with the opening of the Kirk Kerkorian Medical Education Building, a 135,0000-square-foot, state-of-the art home for UNLV’s School of Medicine. Concurrently, the city invested some $75 million in upgrading Charleston Boulevard and the rest of the district’s streets—replacing aged sewer lines and underground utilities, repaving streets, widening sidewalks and adding more shade trees.
“The $75 million investment from the city has leveraged about $500 million in private investment,” Knudsen says. “It makes it more efficient for businesses to come in. It makes it cleaner and makes it more walkable, so people are more willing to spend money and make money.”
Private and state involvement is accelerating, as well. University Medical Center, UNLV’s teaching hospital, is partway through a $55 million renovation that’s remaking the hospital’s facades, adding healing gardens, upgrading the lighting, sidewalks and landscaping, and improving both pedestrian and vehicle access. Local business is turning out: Le Thai’s Charleston location recently added a spacious, airy dining room, and longtime district stalwarts like Frankie’s Tiki Room and the Omelet House continue to pack them in.
Most significantly, high-density housing is coming. Elias George of EPG Law Group represents two developers—Cedar Street and Livco—who will build seven-story apartment buildings near the intersection of Alta and Tonopah Drives. George applauds Knudsen’s drive in developing the area “into a world-class medical community,” and notes that the city gave them leeway on height requirements so that affordable housing units could be included.
“Whenever you have a government like the state of Nevada and its governor investing so much money into an area, I think that gives a lot of national developers not only excitement, but [the confidence] that the community is really behind this,” he says. “I think that’s attributable to Councilman Knudson’s vision.”
The Medical District, like the Arts District and Chinatown, is taking giant steps towards becoming a dense, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, and its growth could have an effect that extends far beyond attracting retail and dining. Like the rest of Nevada, Clark County is suffering a shortage of primary care physicians that’s due in large part to a congressional decision made nearly 30 years ago. In 1997, Congress limited the number of Nevada medical residencies funded through The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
and that number has not increased despite the state’s exploding population. According to a February 2024 report from UnitedHealthcare, Clark County has a ratio of just one primacy care physician to 1,760 residents.
“We have only 403 CMS-funded positions from CMS for [Nevada], compared to California, that has over 9,000,” says Dr. Marc Kahn, dean of Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV. “And there are some specialties and sub-specialties where the state has no training programs, most notably dermatology. We’re a sunny state, but there’s not a dermatology training program in the state. If our graduates want to do dermatology, they must go out of state.”
A walkable Medical District isn’t the sole remedy for that problem, which requires buy-in at both the both state and federal level. In his January 2025 State of the State speech, Gov. Joe Lombardo pledged to invest in state-funded residency programs. This month, Senator Jacky Rosen introduced a pair of Senate bills intended to reapportion those residencies to areas in need, and to ease the student loan burden for graduates serving in medical and dental residencies.
And when these problems are solved, the Medical District will be ready to help facilitate that ramp-up in care, Knudsen says.
“The goal for me right now is to make the Medical District where we train as many healthcare professionals as we can,” he says. “It’s not just the medical school, but you also have UNLV’s dental school there. A lot of the nurses from around the Valley are trained there, and then we’re closely working with Nevada State University right now and College of Southern Nevada to incorporate some of their allied health professional training programs into the Medical District.”
The patient experience in the district has already improved. UNLV’s medical school has a practice of about 180 health care practitioners and provides $7 million in free care annually. The increased capacity has made it easier to carry out that mission, Kahn says: “We have availability, and importantly, we don’t turn anybody away.”
Another new addition to the Medical District could prove transformative for the Valley. Kahn says that the donor group that made the School of Medicine’s main building possible is now working with the state to build a new lab within walking distance of it. The new lab will allow UMC to relocate its testing facilities, freeing up room for more beds—but more significantly, it will address longtime gaps in Vegas’ treatment capacity.
“It’s going to have a sophisticated blood banking operation, which the city needs,” Kahn says, noting that Nevada currently needs to import most of its blood from Phoenix-based Vitalant. “It’ll also be able to take strains of tuberculosis and indicate what antimicrobials they’re most likely to be susceptible to, and it’s likely to have some molecular diagnosis capabilities as well, which is important for cancer, particularly. … We’re going to need sophisticated blood bank testing as we grow in solid organ transplant, and particularly in bone marrow transplant.”
The Las Vegas Medical District still has further to go. Road work continues—it’s now moved onto Rancho Drive—and the apartment buildings likely won’t break ground until this fall. But one key piece of placemaking, a classic Strip neon sign recently restored by the Neon Museum, has been installed on Charleston near UMC, turning what was once a fun bit of tourist reassurance into something of a mission statement for Vegas’ healthcare epicenter. It reads “Free aspirin and tender sympathy,” a fitting slogan for a neighborhood that aspires to deliver both.
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