Project City Center in Las

Project City Center in Las Vegas: Now that's a model home!

Extracted from a larger post at my home base, BloodhoundBlog:

MGM-Mirage has opened a 30,000sf model home for its Project City Center development on The Strip in Las Vegas. Project City Center (we can only hope this clunky name will be changed) is the kind of real estate development I've been waiting to see for more than twenty-five years: Residential, retail and commercial all in one structural footprint.

This is not a brand new idea. Rockefeller Center in New York combined retail and office spaces. Copley Place in Boston is a shopping mall with office towers above it, anchored by two hotels -- all of it built on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike. By now, the mantra "mixed use" is intoned for every new condo project cooked up.

This is not enough. The ideal -- at least my ideal -- would be to create a structure that, at least in principle, one need never leave: Home, work, play, shopping, medical care, education, worship -- every need of your life answered somewhere under that one roof. I'm not talking about an Arcology, a building one is intended not to leave, but simply a comprehensive experience of a city all under one roof.

This Project City Center will not do, but it takes bold strides in that direction. What it really is is a casino-hotel-resort that will make accommodations for semi-permanent residents. In making those accommodations, it becomes -- and actually aspires to become -- a city unto itself.

Not quite paradoxically, there is another such development in the works, the somewhat-less-clunkily-named Echelon Place by Boyd Gaming. This is being built on the site of the soon-to-be-imploded Stardust. As with Project City Center, it will consist of multiple hotels and residential towers built above and connecting to a vast casino.

For reference: Vegas Today and Tomorrow has wonderfully detailed information, some of it based in rumors, about both Project City Center and Echelon Place.

It's no accident that innovative development like this should happen on Las Vegas Boulevard. The dirt is dear -- at least $4 million an acre before demolition costs. But the net profit per square inch of that dirt is potentially astronomical. Many of the properties on The Strip sit on immense parcels of land -- Wynn Las Vegas is over 200 acres in extent -- so, if these first two projects pay off, we can expect to see more, bigger and better.

And who would expect anything less from Las Vegas...?

(Huge thanks to Jessica Swesey for including BloodhoundBlog among the contributors to the Inman weblog. In coming days, we will feature posts from many of our contributors.)

-- Greg Swann

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