While Chinatowns from New York to California fight for survival, one such district in a city known more for its large, glitzy casino hotels and resorts is forging ahead on an expansion with the support of government officials and local business and community leaders.
Las Vegas' Chinatown, located not too far off of the city's famous strip, seeks to lure more tourists, locals and businesses as Nevada's Clark County repositions an area considered the country's first master-planned Chinatown.
The county this month officially launched its Spring Mountain Corridor Redevelopment Plan. Spring Mountain Road is a three-mile corridor about two miles west of the famous Las Vegas Strip, originally built as an industrial pathway to a Wells Cargo facility used in mining, construction and transportation.
Chinatowns long have provided areas for new immigrants to live, work and feel a connection to their homelands, and they remain significant hubs for Asian Americans and people of all backgrounds, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The districts often are located in the heart of cities, in areas ripe for new development.
Cities around the country are discussing how to revitalize and reposition their Chinatowns.
"Many Chinatowns throughout history have been impacted and harmed by development pressure, gentrification, displacement, and inequitable planning practices," the National Trust said in a recent report. Distress from pandemic-related closings and anti-Asian sentiment have "further threatened Chinatowns," the group said,
Efforts to resist gentrification in large Chinatowns in Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco have been the subject of national news stories. The future of Washington's Chinatown became even cloudier when the local professional basketball and hockey teams that play home games at an arena on the edge of the neighborhood said they planned to move to northern Virginia. However, those plans were canceled this year.
Chinatown in Las Vegas differs from Chinatowns in major cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, which feature densely developed areas that grew with residences, restaurants and retail space. Las Vegas' Chinatown has more of an appearance of a suburban strip of shops and restaurants along a former industrial section of Spring Mountain Road.
Creating a Chinatown
In Las Vegas, the redevelopment area is centered on Chinatown Plaza, a 28-year-old shopping center with several Asian restaurants and shops at Spring Mountain and Wynn Roads. When Taiwanese American James Chih-Cheng Chen developed Chinatown Plaza and opened it in 1995, he called the property, designed by Simon Lee in a style inspired by Tang dynasty, "America's first master-planned Chinatown," according to a 2005 Las Vegas Weekly article.
Four years later, the Nevada Legislature agreed. It designated the strip of Spring Mountain from Las Vegas Boulevard to Rainbow Boulevard as the city's official Chinatown.
To revitalize Chinatown in Las Vegas, Clark County has turned to a team of Minjia Yan, RAFI Architecture and the public relations firm Purdue Marion & Associates to lead the effort that's been named Inspiring Spring Mountain. Local commercial real estate professional Yan is serving as a project consultant of the Spring Mountain Redevelopment Plan.
"For this redevelopment plan, our focus is a community-driven redevelopment plan that is centered on placemaking and placekeeping, which includes urban redevelopment, economic development and cultural preservation," Yan said in an interview.
The challenges Chinatowns across the country are facing are being studied by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders Commission. Some 50 Chinatowns exist across the U.S., according to the California Migration Museum.
Las Vegas' Chinatown is beginning to catch the attention of developers, partly because of its proximity to the strip and the number of sites that can be developed. Last year, an affiliate of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Boring Co. bought a 1.36-acre site adjacent to the Chinatown neighborhood, where a stop of Boring's Vegas Loop is planned, according to CoStar data.
Developers Discover Corridor
The properties along the historically industrial Spring Mountain corridor include strip malls and restaurants. In 2018, Fore Property Co. opened Green Leaf Lotus, a luxury apartment complex just over two miles south of Chinatown Plaza.
Colliers is marketing a 10.5-acre site, a future transit-oriented development dubbed Chinatown11, owned by investor HMV. Boring is considering a second Chinatown Vegas Loop hub along Spring Mountain that will bring traffic from the Las Vegas Strip and downtown Las Vegas to the booming Chinatown/Asian District, according to marketing materials for the site.
This winter, Yan addressed members of the White House commission when they visited Las Vegas.
“Chinatowns across the country are facing gentrification and displacement," Yan told the commission. "In places like Philadelphia, D.C., L.A. and New York City, many Chinatowns are going through redevelopment, but in an inequitable way."
During this first phase of the redevelopment process, Yan said feedback from local residents, business owners and visitors will be critical because Chinatown Plaza and other developments, such as Shanghai Plaza in Chinatown, have become a cultural hub for Las Vegas' Asian-American community and a popular tourist destination.
"There's no community center in this corridor yet," Yan said. "So we hope to see whether we can have some opportunities for more community spaces, public spaces, and green spaces and plant more trees so we can have shade that's more walkable."
Attracting More Visitors
For Maya Kwong, owner of Xiao Long Dumplings restaurant in Chinatown Plaza, the decision to pick the retail center for her restaurant, which opened in September 2021, was easy.
"We immediately took it since it’s such an iconic location to present our food and culture," Kwong said in an interview. "Chinese people eat dumplings during major festivals and family reunions, dumpling making is an amazing bonding experience where family members connect, gossip and laugh together."
The plan to revitalize Spring Mountain will "play a huge role in attracting more visitors," and that will help her restaurant and other businesses, she said.
"Vegas is developing every day," Kwong said. "Spring Mountain Road, being one of the busiest streets off the Strip, definitely needs a makeover to showcase Chinatown to the visitors from all over the world."
The formal statutory process to add Spring Mountain into the Clark County Redevelopment Agency should be completed within a month, said Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones.
"That will start the process of collecting the sales tax, the property tax, etc., from the Spring Mountain area and allow for tax increment financing for individual properties, but also just the overall dollars that will be coming into the redevelopment agency to pay for infrastructure," Jones said. "We also have public works dollars that have already been allocated for the street and roadway infrastructure improvements that we're contemplating."
The county plans to wrap up the first phase of the Spring Mountain redevelopment process, that's centered on creating a vision and goals, and to kick off the second phase this summer. That next phase is set to focus on community preferences for development and alternatives, according to the county.