Area’s growth pushes it past older cities

Tuesday, April 3, 2001 | 11:25 a.m.

With the nation's top growth rate, the metropolitan area that includes Las Vegas is surpassing some of the country's oldest and largest cities.

The U.S. Census Bureau released data Monday that shows all the cities in the metropolitan area -- a tract that stretches from Pahrump in Nye County to Kingman in Mohave County, Ariz. -- have gained rapidly in population. With an 83.3 percent growth rate for the entire metro area, the region is the fastest growing in the country.

The cities that are the population centers in the region also grew rapidly. Las Vegas grew by 85 percent, Henderson by 142 percent, North Las Vegas by 170 percent. Clark County as a whole grew by 85.5 percent.

While the metropolitan area of Southern Nevada and Northwest Arizona is surpassing in size older metro regions in other parts of the country, in other ways this region is unique, say analysts.

Partly that is a result of the speed at which we are growing, said Don Matson, a Clark County demographer.

Development patterns through the region are "all or nothing," he said: Nearly everyone lives in an environment of dense development. Outside the periphery of that development, it is mostly arid desert.

Also, the infrastructure accompanying that growth isn't the old pattern, which crept out as the older cities did. Instead, that infrastructure of roads, hospitals and schools is racing to keep up with development.

"Even though we're the same size as other metro areas, we're really different," Matson said. "We're literally from a different century."

In some ways, the metropolitan area is much like a huge suburb, he said.

Jeff Hardcastle, Nevada State demographer, said he sees the similar pattern repeated in some areas of the West, especially in arid regions. But the biggest and best example is Las Vegas, he said.

Nevada is the "least densely populated, but most urbanized," state in the United States, he said.

Part of the reason is that there just isn't enough rainfall to encourage farming, which helps define the rural atmosphere in most of the rest of the country.

Another factor, Hardcastle said, is that the nature of Las Vegas' principal industry, the casino/resorts, doesn't encourage people to go far from concentrated centers of activity.

Census analysts agreed that Nevada, more than any other area, has a unique pattern of development.

Angela Podila, a census specialist in Denver, pointed out the difference between two adjacent counties in Nevada.

Clark County has 54 to 366 people per square mile, indicating high levels of density in the urban areas, she said.

But in Lincoln County to the north, the situation is far different. There, the county has zero to one person per square mile, the census figures show.