Wednesday, April 15, 1998 | 10:04 a.m.
The head of the Clark County Department of Comprehensive Planning says if Las Vegas wanted to adopt the standards of a man critical of this area's urban development, voters would have to surrender a lot of their freedom.
"That's certainly not Las Vegas," Director Rick Holmes said Wednesday. "We have a hands-off attitude. We want limited government. Many people like the entrepreneurial spirit (of local developers).
"The government is here to help support and make things work, but we're not going to tell anyone what color they can color their house."
Holmes was reacting to comments made Monday to a group of students at UNLV's Paul B. Sogg School of Architecture by James Howard Kunstler.
Though the former Rolling Stone magazine editor is not an architect nor an urban planner, he is a self-styled expert on urban planning who has written numerous articles on those issues as well as two books -- "The Geography of Nowhere" and "Home From Nowhere."
Kunstler is critical of America's urban planning in general, but was especially severe in his critique of conditions in Las Vegas, where he said "the American spirit crawls to die."
Kunstler called Las Vegas the most "depressing, demoralizing town in the United States."
Kunstler was particularly critical of the homes being built here.
"In general, the houses are not only monotonous and demoralizing, they are not well built. They seem designed to fall apart in 20 years," he said. "Basically, they are a time bomb of a monumental urban slum problem."
He said when "the current orgy of profits ends, you are going to have a gigantic automobile slum."
But Holmes disputed Kunstler's statements about home construction.
"We have less of the standardized tract homes. They are almost semi-custom," he said. "With advances in technology, buyers can walk into a home builder's sales office, crank up a computer and select the features they want -- they can add extra rooms, redesign a kitchen and do almost anything else."
Holmes said houses in Las Vegas are going to be around 50 to 70 years and longer.
"People will make repairs, they will upgrade," he said, rejecting Kunstler's statement that the homes won't stand the test of time.
As to Kunstler's criticism of wide streets, Holmes said developers now are requesting narrower streets for their neighborhoods and more attention is being paid to how streets look.
Kunstler had high praise for European cities, where people take preference over automobiles and the streets and buildings promote interaction among people and create a feeling of value. American cities -- because of their poor design and architecture -- are becoming places no once really cares about, he said.
Holmes said a lot of people probably agree with what Kunstler says.
"He seems to be critical of everything, and I'm not sure that's an uncommon feeling among many people," he said.
He said the lack of uniqueness among some of the shopping malls here may be because Las Vegas has so many national chain stores.
"It's not that every shopping mall looks the same, but we seem to have so many more national chains," he noted.
Outside of chain stores, Holmes said, there is in fact a lot of specialty stores and shops.
"There is lots of diversity, but he seems to have skipped over it," he said.
Holmes said when Kunstler lavished so much praise on European cities and their urban planning, he apparently didn't mention how highly regulated everything is there.
"What would it take for the world to turn out the way he likes?" Holmes asked. "Lots of controls and rules. If communities want that, fine. But that isn't Las Vegas."
Holmes said South-ern Nevadans, and much of the rest of the country in general, don't trust local government.
"People want to make their private choice," he said. "It lets people have a little more freedom.
"I wouldn't say he (Kunstler) was off base on everything, but he is on a lot."
While Holmes learned of Kunstler's comments through the media, UNLV professor of architecture Attila Lawrence attended the lecture -- at least he was there for the first 25 minutes of the two-hour presentation before he walked out in disgust.
"It was an un-informed, low-level associational commentary -- as opposed o reasoned architectural criticism," Lawrence said Tuesday.
Offended by Kunstler's occasional use of curse words, Lawrence noted that the lecture was "punctuated with vulgarity on randomly selected urban form.
"Economic and cultural factors fundamental to the generation of urban form were not even peripherally considered."
Lawrence felt Kunstler went too far with personal value judgments which were both unfounded and unsupported.
"That's typical of early modernist design critics," he said.
Lawrence criticized the critic for "dispensing disconnected, home-spun philosophies recycling social-environmental issues that were current in the 1960s."
From what Kunstler said, according to Lawrence, he "is neither interested in nor has a comprehension of basic issues unique and relevant to commentary made with reference to Las Vegas and Nevada architects and architecture."
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