Las Vegas is betting on significant investment in public transportation to help generate thousands of new real estate developments along major city streets such as Maryland Parkway, one of the city’s most important corridors outside of the Las Vegas Strip.
No large casinos line this busy commercial street, which runs from downtown to the Harry Reid International Airport. With three lanes traveling in each direction, Maryland Parkway passes through several low-income and minority neighborhoods. It is mostly lined with parking lots, strip malls, and larger retail stores. It also passes the Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, the main campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and the aging Boulevard Mall, once the largest mall in Southern Nevada.
In August 2024, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined a line of local officials with shovels to break ground on a $378 million project to improve basic bus service along Maryland Parkway. It’s the first of several bus rapid transit (BRT) projects planned for the metro area to help residents move around easier.
Upgrading the city’s daily bus service along this street isn’t as dramatic as the 1.7 miles [2.7 km] of underground tunnels for electric cars that snake beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center—hollowed out by Elon Musk’s The Boring Company. Nor is it like the sleek, elevated monorail that connects a number of giant resort casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Both of those systems are largely designed to get visitors from one major attraction to another.
For the rest of the city—more than 650,000 people who live and work in Las Vegas—reliable public transportation is often a necessity. With the exception of the Strip, metro Las Vegas can be very difficult to get around without a vehicle. Smart Growth America calls it “the least-walkable metro area in the U.S.,” based on its ranking of the largest 35 cities in the nation. However, most of the metro area is too thinly developed to support transit systems other than cars and buses.
“You have pockets of density on the Strip, on Las Vegas Boulevard, and in downtown—but everywhere else is kind of medium density,” says Andrew Kjellman, senior director for the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC). “It’s really not concentrated well enough to serve effectively with light rail.”
Boosting bus service as a stimulus to redevelopment
Maryland Parkway already had enough daily bus riders to justify the investment in BRT. “It’s one of the top routes in the system for residential users,” says Marco Velotta, the city’s Planning Project Manager and Chief Sustainability Officer. “There are people walking, crossing the street. It’s a very activated corridor.”
By improving the parkway with widened sidewalks, more frequent bus service, and larger, more comfortable bus shelters, the city anticipates it will bring more riders. The BRT project will also take into account the searing heat of the summer months and its effect on passengers. According to RTC surveys, a significant proportion of transit riders say they are impacted by the heat because there is little to no shade at the bus stops.
“Maryland Parkway is in one of the hottest parts of town based on our mapping,” Kjellman says, adding that the hottest parts of the metro area are about 11 degrees hotter than the coolest areas.
To provide some shade relief, BRT will plant trees along the street and build up to 50 larger bus shelters, with the sidewalks widened from five to 10 feet. More frequent bus service will also cut down on wait times. The project further envisions a lane of traffic in each direction for buses and bicyclists. Kjellman says that cyclists currently must ride on the narrow, five-foot sidewalks.
“The design of the road is not suited to how people are using it already,” he says. “Just creating a design that really suits what’s already happening will cause this kind of use to redouble and grow quickly.”
Focus on potential infill projects
More pedestrian activity along Maryland Parkway, as well as new rules for land use, should stimulate new development, which is the city’s ultimate goal. New land use designations have been created to allow mixed-use, transit-oriented zoning for more than 3,000 parcels of land along the planned BRT lines, including Maryland Parkway.
Metro planning officials have good reason to encourage infill developments along these major corridors. Despite being surrounded by miles of open desert, Las Vegas itself is literally running out of land to build on.
“The federal land that surrounds us is under management by the Bureau of Land Management, and we have more or less a de facto urban growth boundary that was established by Congress,” Velotta says. “We have to be focusing on infill and redevelopment.”
As Buttigieg put it at the Maryland Parkway groundbreaking: “When public investments happen, private investments follow.”
High demand for luxury downtown condos
By contrast with the larger, car-dependent metro area, downtown Las Vegas ranks as a “walker’s paradise,” according to WalkScore.com. Residents and visitors can easily get around without a vehicle. Highly successful, mixed-use condominium towers in the historic downtown earn their high price tags by offering all of the benefits of city living—restaurants, museums, and the Smith Center for the Performing Arts at Symphony Park—without the hassle and expense of driving.
“There’s a yearning for people who want to live like that in Las Vegas,” says Uri Vaknin, partner at KRE Capital, a private equity firm in Beverly Hills, California. “They are sick of driving on the highway.”
In April 2024, KRE sold the last condominiums at Juhl, its 15-story, luxury residential tower in downtown Las Vegas. The 341 condos sold, on average, for more than $350 per square foot. The Juhl’s penthouse condo sold for more than $1,000 per square foot.
“We got the highest price-per-square foot in all of downtown Las Vegas,” Vaknin says.
Juhl is as close to a transit-oriented, residential development as exists in Las Vegas today. It is just one block from the 20,000-square-foot [1,858 sq m] Bonneville Transit Center, a modern regional bus depot that boasts impressive vaulted ceilings and natural light.
Demand for luxury residences remains high. Another tower now under construction has already broken Juhl’s record. Prices at Red Ridge Development’s 32-story Cello Tower, designed by architecture firm Perkins Eastman, start at $700,000 for a one-bedroom condo—or around $750 per square foot—while penthouses start at $6.5 million, or more than $1,000 per square foot.
