Summerlin surpasses promises

Sunday, Feb. 27, 2000 | 9:33 a.m.

Ten years ago it was a giant tract of empty desert on the far western reaches of Las Vegas.

Summerlin was just a promise, a promise of a new kind of development. A promise to change how people lived in the Mojave Desert.

Critics were wary of the concept and skeptical about the sheer enormity of 57,000 homes in a single 22,500-acre development.

Buyers weren't.

Last year, 3,200 homes, or 15 percent, of the homes sold in the Las Vegas Valley were in Summerlin. That volume didn't just top the charts in Las Vegas. The Howard Hughes Corp. development was also the No. 1 selling community in the nation, a distinction it has earned in seven of the last eight years.

The Summerlin concept -- especially the design incorporating desert landscaping that uses little water, with abundant trails and parks -- is now a model for development in the Las Vegas Valley.

"The growth of Summerlin is astounding," Gadi Kaufmann, managing director of Robert Charles Lesser and Co., said. The national real-estate consulting firm recently completed an independent survey of the project.

The only other real estate community that has sold more than 3,000 homes in one year was the Levittown, N.Y., development in the late 1940s.

Summerlin has been a success from its start in the early 1990s. Consumers bought the first homes in the community in 1991. In 1992 Summerlin was ranked as the country's top selling community.

"It's almost as if the community became a household word overnight on both a local and national level," Kaufmann said.

To W. Stewart Gibbons, executive vice president of the Howard Hughes Corp., the success of Summerlin is about promises made -- but more importantly, promises kept.

Members of the very first family to move into Summerlin, the Champlins, agree.

"That's a pretty good way of putting it," said Calvin Champlin, a former Clark County planner, now a planning consultant, who moved into Summerlin in March 1991. Champlin and his wife, Maria, have raised two kids in their house in the Hills.

Champlin said when he moved in, he didn't know if his subdivision would fill out, much less the entire master-planned community. Now it appears that all 22,500 acres of the project will be completed on or before the build-out date of 2015.

Already 22,000 homes have been completed. The north side of the master-planned community is in the city of Las Vegas, while the south is in unincorporated Clark County.

To the west, the Spring Mountains rise dramatically from the Las Vegas Valley floor. Summerlin residents, thanks to the relatively higher elevation of the community, also enjoy a panorama of the Strip and downtown in the heart of the urban area.

For the Champlin family, the nearby schools, green space and neighborhood feel have been a good investment. Schools, parks and a library are all within walking distance -- a design element incorporated into plans from the start.

Champlin said there is also a greater sense of security within his neighborhood than in other parts of the valley. It isn't because of more police, and most neighborhoods are not gated.

"We know our immediate neighbors," Champlin said. Most of his children's friends live within a few blocks, he added.

That means that people feel comfortable going out jogging at night on the "pedestrian friendly" trails, he said.

Summerlin may be the biggest and most visibly successful recent master-planned community in the country, but it is far from the first. Levittown was one of the earliest developments that might be called a master-planned community.

The Long Island experiment, designed to make owning a house affordable for thousands of World War II veterans and their families, became a virtual synonym for suburbia during the post-war boom years.

Summerlin's lineage also includes the then-experimental, designed-from-the-ground-up community of Columbia, Md., which has set the standard for modern master-planned communities since its development in the 1960s.

'New town' principle

Both Summerlin and Columbia were designed on the "new town" principle, in which urban architects built theoretically self-contained villages around independent shopping, living and recreational areas. Miles of trails, parks and schools also are included in the villages.

Like Columbia, Summerlin's designers hoped that the villages would also include employment opportunities, and through that reduce the need for long commutes to work sites in the urban center -- for Columbia, in nearby Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; for Summerlin, the Las Vegas Strip and downtown.

While Summerlin has its antecedents nationally, and locally there have been other master-planned communities, the community represents something new to the region, said Jory Stewart, Clark County planning manager.

Like many of her present and former colleagues, Stewart lives in Summerlin.

The "mixed-use" plan to build a community in which residents can live, play and work in the same small village is what makes it new and unique for the region, she said.

The last goal is one that has eluded the designers' goals in both communities. Most of Columbia's and Summerlin's working men and women still commute to jobs outside their neighborhoods.

And those workers who clean homes and businesses, work in small restaurants and hold other low-paying but critical jobs in Summerlin mostly drive to the community, Stewart said.

"I have the feeling the majority of people have long commutes," Champlin agreed. He said the one thing he'd like to improve in Summerlin is the jobs-to-housing ratio.

Tom Warden, Howard Hughes Corp. vice president for community relations, defended the employment profile of the community. He said Summerlin has 11,000 jobs now, and that will increase as more businesses move into the area.

Stewart and Champlin said a critical test of Summerlin's ultimate success -- at least in terms of the goals of original planners -- will come with the realization of the Town Center development.

With businesses slated to move in within the next year, Town Center is meant to be a true mix of housing, shops and restaurants, and employment areas. Ideally, Town Center will provide a business focus that will provide thousands of jobs to nearby residents.

Stewart said along with more employment opportunities, she'd like to see greater diversity -- in the ethnic makeup of the residents, in the home designs in the villages, and in the prices of the homes.

While the Howard Hughes Corp. points out that homes are available "for under $100,000," most homes available now sell from the low $100,000s to $300,000 or more -- and million-dollar custom homes are available.

Stewart said the Town Center development could bring more mixed, multifamily housing, at lower prices, into Summerlin.

Mark Elison Hoversten, who helped design Summerlin when he worked for the Howard Hughes Corp., shares some of Stewart's concerns. But he believes Summerlin's incorporation of the "new town" concept presents something new for the valley.

Hoversten, now an associate professor of urban planning at UNLV, said Summerlin was something new to the Las Vegas Valley for another reason -- while other large developments in the valley tended to look to large East Coast suburbs for inspiration, Summerlin's design reflected the Mojave Desert environs it was carved from.

"I think the single most important design element in Las Vegas is not a hotel, is not a strip of hotels, it is the Pueblo Park in Summerlin," Hoversten said. "It's hauntingly beautiful ... We need to love the desert, we need to call it home, rather than trying to turn it into the home we left."

Integrating parks

One of the advantages of the attention to the environment from the original plan is that while heavy rains can cause extensive damage in other parts of the valley, integrating the parks and trails into the flood-control system has minimized flooding in Summerlin.

In Pueblo Park, the desert wash is retained. A trail runs through the area, accessible at all but peak flood periods.

"It's a marvelous work of engineering, conservation and recreation," he said.

Protecting the desert environment wasn't easy, Hoversten said. While today low-water landscaping, in which the desert and native plants are incorporated, is widespread through the valley, it wasn't in 1990.

"You can't imagine in this community how difficult it is to preserve desert," Hoversten said. At one point, Hoversten had to stand in front of earth-moving equipment that wanted to take a short cut through Pueblo Park.

Hoversten, who was manager of land planning for Howard Hughes Corp. from 1988 to 1992, said he fears a loss of the old focus on integrating the desert with the home sites. Fewer pieces of open desert are part of the landscaping now, Hoversten said.

"It's a little more business-as-usual," he said. The staff "want to do the right thing, but they're in the business of selling land, and a lot of it as quickly as possible."

That's no different from the rest of the valley, which is growing by about 6,000 souls a month, he said.

"The problems of Summerlin are the problems of Las Vegas. They are the problems of extending massive amounts of infrastructure out from the urban core."

One issue for environmentalists is Summerlin's proximity to fragile archeological sites in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area next door.

Environmentalists credit the Howard Hughes Corp. for helping to create the conservation area in the first place -- the company swapped land it owned in Red Rock for the land that is now Summerlin -- but they say more needs to be done to protect the area.

"It was a great thing they did, but that doesn't mean that's all they ever have to do," said Jessica Hodge, urban issues coordinator for Citizen Alert. "We would have liked to see more of a buffer between the town and Red Rock."

Warden, with the Howard Hughes Corp., agrees that there is a problem.

"Archeological treasures are being destroyed at a greater rate all the time," he said. "We can't wait to protect what's out there. We have to restrict those sites now."

The problem, Warden said, isn't from residents of Summerlin. The area adjacent to Red Rock is in a still undeveloped part of Summerlin's west side.

The company will try to restrict access to that area to legitimate off-road motoring clubs that have an agreement with Howard Hughes Corp. and to students and scientists with research interests, Warden said.

"It's something we've been working on for some time," he said. "We want to protect the petroglyphs that are there. It's been an ongoing challenge."

The lessons learned from Summerlin -- that desert landscaping will not only be accepted by home buyers, but embraced; that the desert environment and topography can be incorporated into the overall design; and that mixed-use communities can work -- is now used as a model for other parts of the valley.

Summerlin model

Champlin said the coming development of 7,500 acres of federal Bureau of Land Management property in North Las Vegas will likely follow the Summerlin model.

"Today, every major builder in the valley offers low-water landscaping for their homes," Hoversten said. "I think through leadership, it simply changed the way that residential home builders think about landscaping.

"I applaud them for that," he said.

New residents of Summerlin don't think about the desert landscaping or the new design concepts. They like it, but accept it as part of the background.

For them, the main draws are new schools and numerous parks.

"I love it," said Kim Taylor, a Pueblo village resident playing with her 2-year-old son, Austin, at a small park. "It's family oriented."

Megan Garvin, a Durango Trails resident playing with her 2-year-old, Sean, agreed. She and her husband, a plumber, moved from the valley's east side.

"We feel safer," she said.

The Garvins have lived in Summerlin for two years. The only complaint from the former teacher is that she'd like to see more schools.

"I think the schools are really good out here, but we need more of them," Taylor said.

The reason that Summerlin needs more schools, she said, is that people are flocking to the community.

"It really is a great area."

Launce Rake covers growth issues for the Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4127 or by e-mail at lrake@lasvegassun.com.

archive