Developer advises not to think big downtown
Forum attendees told to go for ‘intimate’ feel
The key to giving downtown Las Vegas residential development a big boost might be thinking small.
Prominent developer Peter Cummings had that advice for a group of Las Vegans on Wednesday.
“Large is the Strip,” Cummings said. “I think there’s an opportunity to create a more intimate, organic, user-friendly kind of environment here.”
A panel of high-profile Las Vegans from real estate and development hashed out challenges and successes of advancing downtown residential development in a forum Wednesday at City Hall staged by the Downtown Vegas Alliance in partnership with the city.
“We couldn’t get lenders down here, we couldn’t get appraisers down here, I couldn’t get my friends down here,” said Sam Cherry, a Las Vegas planning commissioner and CEO of Sam Cherry Development. “That’s really flipped.”
Downtown Las Vegas has seen a lot of changes over the past several years, with The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the Mob Museum and a few residential high-rises going up.
Cummings said he loves developing near health care, educational and cultural institutions. He emphasized programming to partner with real estate, highlighting a halfpipe event inside Detroit’s iconic Fisher Building, an art deco skyscraper. The event showed that skaters, youth and people from any walk of life were welcome in the old building that was being brought back to life.
Several speakers Wednesday emphasized the need for a critical mass of residents living within walking distance of the heart of downtown to reach the level of vitality other city