Culture to the counter
Developer Winston Fisher shares Area 15’s multidimensional vision
A glowing skull with lips projected over the teeth. A car made of ribbed stainless steel that glows purple.
A robot, bleeding oil, collapsed on its side on vacant land near the intersection of Desert Inn Road and Interstate 15.
On Thursday, developer Winston Fisher showed Las Vegas that his vision for the future of shopping centers has a fantastical feel.
“I go to every comic book movie,” said Fisher, a member of the New York developers ranked on Forbes’ list of America’s richest families. “What used to be counterculture is now part of everyday culture.”
In a darkened leasing office, Fisher showed the earliest concept art and introduced the first anchor tenant to his Area 15 entertainment complex planned within the city.
Dubbing it an “immersive bazaar,” Fisher’s development promises art exhibits, retail and food tenants.
“This is an exciting project for Las Vegas,” Mayor Carolyn Goodman said.
Fisher wants to open the 126,000-square-foot Area 15 in late 2019. He expects 900 free parking spaces, but each attraction will decide its own admission fees.
Art collective Meow Wolf of Santa Fe, New Mexico, will fill a 50,000-square-foot space within Area 15. The complex’s name is
AREA 15
the Raiders’ planned practice facility and headquarters in Henderson have similarly boosted interest in the market, panelists said.
The rise in real estate prices has also contributed to a problem for the Raiders. With land costs exploding, the team has had difficulty finding land for offsite stadium parking necessitated by using acreage that isn’t big enough for the stadium and more than 16,000 parking spaces demanded by Clark County.
Real estate experts also voiced some concern about the sports boom boosting prices to make land for homes, offices and commercial unaffordable.
Another project that has generated interest in Southern Nevada: UNLV’S planned medical school. Panelists said the realization that the region has acknowledged a shortage of doctors and is doing something about it has produced feelers from companies looking to relocate.
But with the opportunity comes new issues.
“A corresponding population growth and wage growth needs to happen,” said Adam Malan, senior director of Logic Commercial Real Estate.
Construction worker shortage?
Panelists said with growth in sports and starting projects in addition to the stadium and Raiders headquarters — the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion, Resorts World and Steve Wynn’s new Paradise Park
project among them — there’s also a growing concern about a potential shortage of construction workers.
There’s little doubt that Southern Nevada’s new sports facilities are transitioning the region, just as they did in Denver in the early 1990s.
Keynote speaker Glenn Mueller, a real estate and construction management professor at the University of Denver, said the arrival of Coors Field, the home of Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies, dramatically changed Denver’s lower downtown.
Mueller said the area, known as Lodo, once was populated with warehouses and homeless people.
“The mayor has said that people now actually walk around down there,” Mueller said.
Denver’s light-rail system has connected downtown with suburbs for easy transit into the city center. The city has turned a commercial strip on 16th Street into a pedestrian mall.
Now, he said, businesses and office workers regularly scheduled open houses on opening day of the baseball season and wear Rockies’ colors at each other’s offices.
New Denver issue
Development has expanded in Denver with new mixed-use properties at or near light-rail stations and a new problem — apartment overbuilding — is the city’s new issue downtown.
Mueller said downtown is transitioning again with the conversion of some warehouse properties into grow houses to support Colorado’s recreational and medicinal marijuana industry that began ahead of Nevada in 2014.
The Big League City panel featured Kerry Bubolz, president of the Vegas Golden Knights; Lawrence Epstein, president and chief operating officer of Zuffa, parent company of UFC; and Terry Jicinsky, senior president of operations for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. UNLV President Len Jessup was the moderator.
Panelists concurred that Las Vegas’ current sports boom has been fed by the success of the Golden Knights, the National Hockey League’s most successful expansion franchise, the expected arrival of the Raiders in 2020, the rise in popularity of UFC, the securing of a second annual NASCAR race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and this year’s arrival of the WNBA Las Vegas Aces, which portends the potential to get an NBA franchise.
Panelists also noted minor-league advancements with this year’s arrival of the Las Vegas Lights FC United Soccer League team and the relocation of the Las Vegas 51s baseball team to a new stadium in Summerlin in 2019.
Epstein said that while Las Vegas has always been home to big-time entertainment, sports offers the opportunity for every game to be broadcast on television, a great marketing tool.
Big events
That type of exposure and the collaboration between UNLV and the LVCVA to bring 2016’s final presidential debate to Las Vegas provided more awareness about the city and could lead to events like a political convention as well as big sports events like the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four basketball games and the NCAA’S Frozen Four finals for collegiate hockey.