In meetings previewing his address, and in his actual "State of the City" speech Feb. 1, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman sketched a glowing vision of a revitalized downtown Las Vegas, replete with a performing arts center and an arena hosting a (to-be-named-later) major league sports franchise.
The mob-lawyer-turned-mayor justified concentrating his efforts on the old downtown (not to be confused with the more touristed Las Vegas Strip, which bristles with sparkling new hotels four miles to the south, but technically lies outside the city limits) with the metaphor that the downtown is "the apple's core, and if you let the core rot, eventually the apple rots."
In fact, downtown renewal of the sort usually envisioned by government "urban planners" -- bulldozing to remove "flophouse" residential hotels and mom-and-pop businesses, and ending with the erection of vast concrete civic centers and other tax-subsidized memorial necropoli -- has had mixed success.
Waterfront cities like Boston and Baltimore have fared best, while many a mid-sized American downtown now looks spiffy enough in the daytime, but transforms into an echoing ghost town after dark.
It's to Mayor Goodman's credit that he seems to have grasped one of the major factors which differentiate between the two. "It's imperative that we get people to live downtown," he said yesterday, setting "new places to live downtown -- places (from which) people will want to walk to work" as his top priority.
Another excellent sign -- providing the city's red-tape bureaucrats get the message -- was the passage last month of the city's new "live-work" ordinance, which both the mayor and City Manager Virginia Valentine say is intended to encourage downtown residents to live and work in the same premises -- precisely the kind of "mom and pop live above the store" model which made American downtowns so vibrant up through the 1950s, when the replacement "bulldozer and monolith" approach took hold.
Finally, Mayor Goodman now explicitly rejects the protectionist premise which has long guided all major downtown Las Vegas redevelopment schemes -- that any new project must be "non-gaming" so as not to compete with the established downtown casinos. Of the vast Union Pacific site to the west of the railroad tracks, Mayor Goodman said yesterday: "I would welcome gaming down there, any development that would bring jobs."
But against these good signs, cautionary signals still flash.
The mayor also includes the downtown extension of a "fixed skyway" monorail -- a billion-dollar white elephant unlikely to be built without huge tax subsidies -- as a major priority.
Of course private entrepreneurs willing to finance sports arenas and performing arts centers should be welcomed -- but how soon will we hear that massive taxpayer "investment" is needed to "compete with other cities offering better deals"?
Particularly curious are the mayor's refusal to obey a years-old court order to return the improperly seized downtown property of the widow Carol Pappas (Mr. Goodman, an attorney, says he has to appeal the decision because the city's attorneys told him to), accompanied by the mayor's new proposal to twist the arms of major retailers -- including grocery stores -- "encouraging" them to site new stores downtown by threatening: "If you want to build your big box in (trendy suburb) Summerlin, you're going to build me a small box downtown."
Everyone would like to see downtown Las Vegas prosper. But bureaucratic central planning has been a dismal failure. And this notion that the mayor aims to "muscle" new retailers into building stores where he wants them indicates he may not have fully grasped the new paradigm, at all.
Is this the kind of "public-private partnership" that starts with the blindfolded businessman being "taken for a ride"?
Nevada changed from a collection of depressed and played-out mining camps to a world entertainment capital because a few visionaries were wise enough, back in the 1930s, to legalize two popular pastimes which the Puritans had banned everywhere else -- gambling and prostitution.
Sixty years have passed. Some form of gaming is now legal in 48 states. The old recipe would easily revitalize downtown Las Vegas again -- would bring in billions -- if anyone had the courage to zone the area for upscale, Victorian bordellos and Amsterdam-style hashish bars.
Instead, the mayor dreams of condos and supermarkets -- of turning cutting-edge Las Vegas into downtown Dubuque.
Private development is rarely "properly balanced," by any bureaucrat's definition. But government must either remove the regulatory yokes that have long stymied a creative private sector, or else continue sketching great monoliths on paper, which will end up as nothing but empty holes in the ground, into which the dump trucks continue to back up and empty our tax dollars.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid from Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html. Credit cards accepted; volume discounts available.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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