Las Vegas public housing complex being redeveloped in high-priced project

A sprawling public housing complex in Las Vegas is being redeveloped, with the high-priced venture set to completely remake a pocket of the Historic Westside.

Work crews recently demolished a portion of Marble Manor as part of a years-long project to transform the 235-unit property along Washington Avenue just east of Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Construction of the first batch of new units could start in January.

According to a Las Vegas city staff report early this year, the decades-old Marble Manor site was in “serious disrepair,” with several recent code-enforcement cases reported for “unsafe building conditions.”

Owned by the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority, the 35.7-acre complex of single-story concrete block homes, many of them duplexes, will be torn down and redeveloped in five phases. Plans call for 627 newly built units — including townhomes and apartment buildings — as well as a community center, retail space, parks and other features, according to housing authority officials and city records.

It will also include a mix of low-income and market-rate units.

The project is scheduled to be finished in 2032, and overall, it’s slated to cost an estimated $350 million to $400 million, said Frank Stafford, director of development and modernization for the housing authority.

‘Mixed-income’ housing

Lewis Jordan, the housing authority’s executive director, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that officials are taking a “very, very, very low-income community” and turning it into a place where mixed-income residents live together.

Unless you’re a Rockefeller or a Getty, he added, “most of us came up in mixed-income communities. And that’s what we’re striving to do.”

Kathi Thomas, the authority’s chief housing officer, said Marble Manor’s existing residents have the right to come back once new units are finished.

Given the redevelopment, they can move to another public housing complex or receive vouchers to rent from a private landlord. The tenants don’t have to pay their moving expenses, as federal grant dollars cover their relocation costs, Thomas said.

According to Thomas, the cost of maintenance at Marble Manor was rising, and the homes are not energy efficient and don’t serve modern families’ needs. As she described it, the units are “constrained” inside.

“They feel like army barracks rather than homes,” Thomas said.

Moreover, the redeveloped complex will not have the “cookie-cutter” style that’s typical of public housing, she said.

‘Concentrated poverty’ and ‘functionally obsolete housing’

Marble Manor was built in phases between the early 1950s and early 1960s and is a “typical example of concentrated poverty, functionally obsolete housing, and underutilized land,” according to a project fact sheet included with a City Council agenda item this past spring.

Las Vegas was once known as the Mississippi of the West, with Black residents all but confined to the west side of the city.

The housing authority, formed in 2010 through a merger of public housing agencies in Southern Nevada, teamed with Brinshore Development on the Marble Manor redevelopment.

Construction firm Metcalf Builders recently announced that it’s working on the project.

“It’s a really exciting project,” said Brian Arbogast, director of pre-construction at Metcalf.

Overall, the redeveloped site will have a mix of housing types and amenities.

“This will not look or be like anything that will remind (people) of public housing,” said Jordan, the executive director.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.