At Sahara Decatur Plaza, a once-bustling strip mall, Circuit City’s doors are locked (“Store closing sale,” a sign still says, several years after the retailer shut down) and used-car dealer Charlie Cheap Car hawks vehicles in the parking lot (“No credit? Bad credit? OK!” a banner says).
Meanwhile, an armed security guard hangs out with a guy at the base of a staircase leading to the plaza’s second floor, where the only apparent tenant is an Asian massage parlor.
The strip mall, at the southwest corner of Sahara Avenue and Decatur Boulevard, is by no means empty — tenants include Aloha Kitchen, Mary’s Hash House, GQ Cuts and the Battery Source. But it’s laced with vacancies and, according to some workers there, gets thin foot traffic.
The center used to be “absolutely packed,” but without an anchor tenant, “there’s absolutely zero people coming in,” one worker said.
Asked to gauge the plaza’s health, the worker said: “What health? There is no health. There’s nothing.”
Redevelopment activists, however, want to change that, in an effort to boost commerce and a sense of community in the valley.
Las Vegas is best known as a gambling and party mecca, but outside the Strip, it’s a place with highway-like roadways, sprawling strip malls and, in many cases, disconnected residents. Architect Bob Fielden knows this all too well.
Since he moved to Las Vegas in 1964, people here have “done a great job of building an economy but a lousy job of building a community with any sense of quality of life for the people who live here,” said Fielden, owner of Henderson-based RAFI Architecture.
Sahara Decatur Plaza
As the population moved to the valley’s edges, plenty of people stayed in the inner core, in places that once were considered suburban but now are viewed as urban. Their landscape, however, bears little resemblance to more typical urban neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco or New York that are packed with people, retail, jobs and mass transit, and where it’s easy to live without a car.
Fielden wants to change that. Through his role at the Urban Land Institute — he’s chairman of its Nevada district council’s smart-growth committee — Fielden is working with Hope Home Foundation and real estate group Commercial Alliance on a redevelopment initiative. They want to rejuvenate the valley’s inner rings by spurring new projects — such as filling strip malls’ massive parking lots with housing — and expanding public transit.
To boost awareness of the initiative, they’re holding a series of events at Sahara Decatur Plaza this weekend, including a bicycle parade, a farmers market, dog adoptions and cultural performances.
The goal, according to a news release, is to showcase the “potential for vibrancy” in a “blighted area” and encourage community involvement.
Fielden, a 77-year-old Texas native who lives near the shopping center, spoke with the Sun this week about the project. Edited excerpts:
How did this project start?
This started more than four years ago through the Urban Land Institute-Nevada. We had a program on rebooting Las Vegas. We were in the midst of one of the greatest recessions we had ever been exposed to, and at the same time, we had all of these suburbs pushing farther and farther out. And they’re not neighborhoods; they’re subdivisions. There’s no sense of home or quality of life, other than that they’re new and may be touted as very prestigious. But what about the other people who live here? We started looking into what we could do to help the common guy and looked in our neighborhood.
Las Vegas isn’t the only place where former suburbs now are seen as urban neighborhoods.
These are some of the oldest neighborhoods in the valley, and they’re the ones with declining commercial values. We’ve done very little to reinvest there because we’ve spent our money developing new suburbs. Rather than having everything turn into a ghetto, ULI’s idea was, if we could create a model that the county and the cities could use to attack these arterial crossings, if we could do that on one intersection, you could take that model to others. All we have, along the arterials, are continuous commercials strips, and the housing kind of falls in between. If you’re in a place like Wrigleyville in Chicago, you can walk everywhere. If we can get people into that kind of setting, then they can get rid of their cars. Every car they get rid of, they’re saving $10,000 a year. There’s a lot you can do with $10,000, but you don’t have that car. In order to make that work, you need a public transit system like Chicago’s to get you across the city.
Why start by focusing on Sahara and Decatur?
We looked at 20 or 30 areas that might be able to support more public transit. But at Sahara and Decatur, the northern half of the intersection is in Las Vegas city limits, and the southern half is in Clark County. The city and county have never had a good relationship working together, so we thought if we could get them involved in some pilot project together, we could rework that model for Las Vegas and North Las Vegas; Las Vegas and Henderson; and Clark County and Henderson. That way, we can start thinking of ourselves as more of a metropolitan center, to think more globally than we have in the past.
The valley is filled with strip malls that have huge parking lots, often barely filled with cars. Is the goal to redevelop those properties?
You hit the nail on the head. We were thinking, how do you center a neighborhood? Las Vegas is on a 1-mile-by-1-mile grid. If you take Sahara and Decatur, we want everything within walking distance, a quarter-mile away from where you live. The idea is to repurpose the plazas and have them become more global in nature, in the sense that they provide the goods and services and jobs that can be used by people who live in that neighborhood, so they can walk to the pharmacy, the doctor, church, the park. We’d take those big, empty shopping-center parking lots and revamp them with additional housing. Hopefully if we jump that density 50 to 75 percent greater than what we have, it will adequately support public transit. We’re trying to stop the decay.
How has the Sahara/Decatur intersection changed over the years?
It was a prestigious neighborhood. The best restaurants in town were at the northeast corner, the best bars in town. If you were a single, white-collar guy looking for a date, that’s where all the real estate agents and attorneys accumulated after 5 p.m. It had great food, high-dollar dining. That’s how it was until the mid- to late ’90s, and then it just started declining. Longs Drugs was in there, and when they pulled out, it just started the vacuum and everything else started leaving. Vons left a few years ago. We have a new Mexican market that’s moved in, El Super; they’ve got some of the best produce in town. In the area, we’ve got two Mormon churches, a Baptist church, a Spanish-speaking Baptist church, an Ethiopian church, a Korean Baptist church, a Buddhist temple. It’s really a rich cultural setting. We want to build upon that. I still live in the area. I’ve got the Ethiopian church on one side of me, and the Korean Baptist church on the other. My wife and I giggle all the time; we can go to Capo’s to get loaded, and we’re only 100 yards from praying for forgiveness.
How would you describe the intersection now?
If Summerlin were a B, it would be no better than a C+. It’s empty. Who in the hell wants to go someplace and you’re the only car in the parking lot? There’s so much opportunity there. We have to do something to stop the hemorrhaging. If we don’t, they’ll end up like places in east Las Vegas or North Las Vegas simply because no one has cared enough to try to save it.