What you're referring to is the unfinished St. Regis Residences tower, a casualty of the Great Recession. Had it been completed according to plan, it would have been a $900 million 50-story building containing 400 condo units.
Strange as it might seem today, in 2008 Las Vegas Sands was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy when the company abruptly halted work on the St. Regis tower, leaving a five-story steel skeleton, a broken tooth on the face of the Venetian/Palazzo complex. (By contrast, Boyd Gaming was able to wind down Echelon in an orderly fashion; the land has since been sold and is designated as the site for Resorts World Las Vegas.)
For three years, the St. Regis remained as it was on the day worked stopped. In 2011, then-President Michael Leven ordered a giant ornamental building wrap hung over the steel, giving the illusion of a finished building. Leven toyed with various ideas for dealing with the underlying problem, including simply completing the tower at its truncated height.
Leven's cosmetic fix cost only $1 million and has a trick-of-the-eye effect, at least when viewed from afar.
"I couldn't stand looking at that steel," Leven said, adding that the catalytic moment came when he was out on the pool deck and realized that hotel guests were staring at it too.
Fortunately for Leven, his fears that Clark County would compel Sands to dismantle the eyesore continue to prove groundless (vindicating his temporary fix).
Besides, as he noted at one point, the St. Regis-to-be has "a very expensive foundation": Barney's New York, the luxury retail store underneath it.
Sands also has $180 million committed to the structure to date. That may be walking-around money in Macau (or in Japan, where Adelson has offered $10 billion for a casino concession), but it's a real capital investment on the Las Vegas Strip.
There was a fleeting glimmer of hope in April 2014, when Leven floated the idea of resuming work on the St. Regis. But, he confessed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "We just don't have the answer" to the question of what exactly to do with the building. Conversion of the tower into overflow rooms for the Venetian and Palazzo was put on the table. And the prospect was raised of making it a third discrete hotel-casino in the Venetian-Palazzo orbit, but even that was confessed to be less than likely.
But here we are two years later and the St. Regis tower remains, as you noted, dormant. In the meantime Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson has been much busier on other fronts, whether it is lobbying for a casino in Georgia, finishing a string of megaresorts in Macau (culminating in the Parisian last September), or pushing for expanded gaming in South Korea. The mogul's eyes are firmly fixed on other, mostly international,markets at this time. The Strip has been a comparatively low priority.
Although condos on the Strip is an idea whose time seems to have come and gone, Coldwell Banker Realty Las Vegas CEO Bob Hamrick thinks they might make a comeback. And Sands does have a St. Regis condo tower ... In Macau. It's doing so well in that market, it could probably finish the Vegas version out of cash flow, but again the question presents itself of what iteration a completed St. Regis would take.
Unfortunately, Las Vegas Sands isn't talking. Company spokesman Ron Reese said Sands would not be commenting upon the future of the St. Regis at this time. From this, it's reasonable to infer that no resumption of work is imminent. Given Adelson's intense focus on non-Vegas markets, we can't say that we're surprised.
