Council to consider ordering study about enlarging redevelopment area

Bette Craik has seen better days for the Hyde Park area, a neighborhood she has lived in since her house was built in the early 1960s.

There's the usual reminiscing about knowing your neighbors and leaving your front door unlocked. But there are also specific indicators of change -- what used to be the Hyde Park Market, for instance, on the corner of Charleston Boulevard and Arville Street.

The building is now part of a rundown and hard-to-access strip shopping center that is in serious need of a face-lift but at least has several businesses filling the commercial spaces.

That's not the case on Decatur Boulevard between Charleston and Alta Drive, where empty properties seem to outnumber occupied ones.

There's the huge vacant expanse of what used to be a car dealership and "for lease" signs on what used to be community mainstays: a grocery store, a pizza parlor and national retailers who pulled up stakes in the hard economy.

"It's hard to see the neighborhood, knowing what it was like in the '60s and how it is today," said Craik, who heads the Meadows Neighborhood Preservation Association. "We're apprehensive about it going all the way downhill."

Las Vegas leaders want to know whether the decline can be prevented there and elsewhere by using tools that have brought development to downtown Las Vegas.

Today the City Council could order a study of enlarging the existing redevelopment area, where incentives are available to draw new development. Council members also are looking at establishing a new redevelopment area, mostly including parcels along Decatur from Sahara Avenue to Meadows mall facing U.S. Highway 95.

It's not a quick fix. Any new or expanded redevelopment area must go through a lengthy approval process, and not all of the properties considered for inclusion will qualify.

For those that do, redevelopment offers options to entice development. Streets, sidewalks and landscaping can be improved. Businesses can get help with equipment purchases or with improving signage and facades, provided they show investment in their properties and job growth.

As development increases property values, tax revenue from that increase is used to pay for the improvements and incentives.

"What we're trying to do is stop it before it gets worse," said Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian. "I've been after this for two or three years.

"It's starting to become blighted. Vacant buildings. We have problems with the homeless there. We have problems with crime."

The existing redevelopment area is 3,948 acres. The study calls for looking at adding 690 acres in Wards 3 and 5 and possibly establishing a new redevelopment area totaling 874 acres in Ward 1.

City staff members would assess whether the sites meet requirements for blighted areas, which are defined in state law. Public hearings would be held to discuss the meaning of being added to a redevelopment area.

The property tax rate is the same inside and outside the area, said Bill Arent, director of the city's office of business development.

The funds are allocated differently. Most of the increase in property tax revenues driven by redevelopment goes to infrastructure improvements and future projects, and some of it is allocated for affordable housing.

Public entities such as school districts and library districts get some of the increased revenue, but not as much had the commercial improvements been done outside the redevelopment process.

A redevelopment area can exist as long as 30 years.

Most of the parcels that could be added to the existing redevelopment area are in the residential portion of the West Las Vegas neighborhood, bounded by Martin Luther King Boulevard, Vegas Drive, Interstate 15 and Bonanza Road.

City officials tried to include those parcels in the redevelopment area several years ago, but residents objected because they feared losing their property to eminent domain, said Councilman Ricki Barlow, who represents Ward 5.

That is a process the city could use to force someone to sell a property, but "that's not a clause that we utilize as a council," Barlow said.

Commercial properties in West Las Vegas are already part of the redevelopment area, and now there is interest from the residential quarters that could benefit from the infrastructure improvements and boosted home values that redevelopment can bring.

"They see all these developments taking place outside their neighborhoods, right outside their front doors, and they ask, 'Why aren't you improving our neighborhoods?'" Barlow said. "I have to go back to them and say, 'You asked not to be included.'"

With improved streets, sidewalks and lighting from redevelopment funds, homebuilders could get incentives to construct houses on what are now vacant lots.

One of the identified challenges to business development in West Las Vegas is low population density: The area needs more residents for businesses to see it as a market, but people are loathe to move there because of the lack of businesses and services.

Public meetings on the proposed redevelopment additions should start taking place within the next month, Barlow said.

Recommendations on which properties fit the redevelopment criteria could be ready by early 2011.

Contact reporter Alan Choate at achoate@reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.