Preview of future offered for NLV

A few hundred North Las Vegas business owners got a glimpse into their community’s future Thursday at Directions 2007, an annual economic forum hosted by the city’s Chamber of Commerce at the Texas Station.

The event proved to be a vital look at the community: a downtown area is being developed; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is building a 2,000-acre campus; the median age of the city’s inhabitants is six years below the national average; and, the burst housing bubble is affecting the business climate there in much the same way it is affecting communities throughout the country.

Mike Majewski, the city’s Economic Development Department director, spoke about projects that will reshape the city going into the next decade. A master plan is in the works and should be complete within one year, he said. Some of the dynamic developments the city is helping businesses pursue will involve revitalizing the downtown area, which will be remade into less of an area for shopping and more of a central hub for commerce and entertainment.

Also, a new Silver Nugget project is poised to infuse the city with nearly $1 billion in economic activity. He also discussed the need to develop more acreage for commercial and industrial use. Now, he said, North Las Vegas is ready to take advantage of the higher costs of doing business in metropolitan Las Vegas.

“We are five miles from everything,” he said, explaining how the city’s business community could attract new businesses strictly from a geographic standpoint. For instance, attorneys offices could relocate and take advantage of cheaper office space and still be minutes from the courts complex in downtown Las Vegas.

Jeremy Aguero, principal analyst at Applied Analysis, presented a slide show that broke down the most important aspects of the city into statistical displays. The city, for instance, is more diverse than any other area of Southern Nevada, with nearly 40 percent of its residents being Hispanic.

He said there is a growing need to tap into that group’s spending power.

“If your business isn’t marketing to Hispanics, you are losing 40 percent of your customer base right off,” he said.

Aguero was asked at the end of the event what local businesspeople could do immediately to capitalize on emerging trends.

“Buy every apartment complex you can. That’s first,” he told the audience.

Dennis Smith, president and CEO of Home Builders Research, rounded out the trio and gave chamber members the “bad news.”

“I hate going last because I don’t want all of you leaving here feeling bad,” he told the audience.

The housing market downturn is poised to strain the business community as more and more local homes face foreclosure, some in newer residential developments in the city. Smith said he believed the area wouldn’t dig itself out of the slump until sometime after 2010. When existing home resales rebound, he said, then the market will begin to recover.