Plaza plans to redevelop Greyhound bus station

Main Street location set for revitalization project

The Greyhound bus station at the Plaza hotel in downtown Las Vegas is to be replaced with a new development after being located there for nearly 50 years.

Plaza CEO Jonathan Jossel announced plans Wednesday to redevelop the 48,500-square-foot space that sits on Main Street near the Fremont Street Experience to include new dining, entertainment or retail options.

“We are very excited to usher in this new era on Main Street,” Jossel said in a statement. “Main Street is where downtown started, and today, it remains the heart of downtown, connecting a thriving Arts District, a state-ofthe-art city hall, popular destinations like the Plaza, Fremont Street Experience, our newest neighbor Circa, and much more.”

Jossel said the Plaza will partner with the city of Las Vegas to build a pedestrian friendly pathway leading to a new bridge connecting the hotel-casino on Main Street to Symphony Park.

“We are thrilled to partner with Jonathan and our friends at the Plaza Hotel to link together two vibrant areas of our downtown,” said Mayor Carolyn Goodman

according to the Department of Education, Training and Rehabilitation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Miller said the local economy’s recovery will depend on a widespread COVID-19 vaccine and the return of large visitor volumes.

“I think the recovery could be pretty strong because people have been locked up and not doing a ton of things,” he said. “When we get more normal circumstances, people are going to be looking for ways to get out and have some fun. One of the ways they can do that is to visit Las Vegas. We might see a pretty strong rebound in visitors, I’d say in 2022.”

Thornberg said there is no doubt Las Vegas’ economy was hit harder than other markets, but there are signs of recovery.

“We lost more jobs quicker than ever before, (but) we added more jobs quicker than ever before,” he

said. “We’ve got a ways to go, but there’s no doubt about it. The end of the virus is in sight — so too will the end of pain with the Las Vegas, Reno economies and the Nevada economy overall.”

Thornberg added that he doesn’t anticipate any hiccups with the vaccine’s path to wide-scale distribution. Experts are hopeful that a vaccine will be widely available in the U.S. by the spring of 2021. With that in place, Thornberg believes Las Vegas is going to reach pre-pandemic levels for hotel occupancy and visitation by 2022.

Surpassing expectations

After taking a major dip in March and April, the economy was bouncing back through July.

Then, once summer hit, the recovery began to stall.

“The (recovery) lines are sort of bending over,” Miller said. “There’s a chance, if the coronavirus continues to eat up on the U.S. economy and here locally in Southern Nevada, we could actually see some downturns.”

Miller predicts a “mild but gradual” recovery from August to December 2021 that probably will carry over into 2022, according to his Outlook 2021 report.

“I think that 2022 might be a better year than 2021,” Miller said. “2021 is going to be sort of a mixed bag. Hopefully, we get the virus under control, and then we can start seeing recovery.”

Thornberg doesn’t expect more dips in the economy near term and said that concerns over the economy’s recovery are largely overblown. Consumer spending has seen a

“big bounce-back,” he said, that has helped propel the economy. He expects the last leg of the recovery will take the longest but said the signs of economic resilience are there.

“The economy is improving rapidly,” he said. “Vegas is going to be just fine. In two years, it’s going to be a weird memory.”