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Originally Posted by PITairport
I don't see what would have been at all wrong with keeping that lot master planned for the convention center, while being a park in the mean time. In 20-30 years it may be deemed too small, then what?
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You're talking about leaving idle for 20-30 years a large amount of extremely valuable, extremely well-located, land, all for a speculative purpose that may never materialize, in part because a convention center isn't necessarily a great use of such land in the first place.
The total opportunity costs of such a plan in terms of lost land-use value, lost tax revenues, lost transportation efficiencies, lost market-building for other local economic activities, and so on for those 20-30 years would be very, very high, and then you would have the ongoing opportunity costs of using that land for a convention center instead of its other potential uses.
So I highly doubt this plan would be worth it even if you could guarantee me that in 30 years we would somewhat wish we could expand the convention center, and of course there are no such guarantees.
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If there were no other areas to build on and fill in, then it would be a different story, but that's not at all the case.
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This particular area is located along the river directly between Downtown and the Strip, which does not make it any old parcel. And in fact its current state of dramatic underutilization creates an artificial barrier between those two neighborhoods. There may be a few other areas adjacent to Downtown that are as important to infill, but I'm not sure there are any that are more important.