Friday, May 11, 2001 | 9:40 a.m.
Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
IF YOU believe in Las Vegas, buy land.
There are many bits of wisdom I remember my father teaching me as I was growing up. Each lesson came with a story which was age appropriate to make sure that our young and expanding minds could grasp the import of the effort.
One story I will always remember is that of cowboy actor Tom Mix and a Las Vegas Sun columnist and entertainment guru, Ralph Pearl. Both men came to our community before it had any people. Mix showed up around 1940 and Ralph came a few years later. Other than both of the men's keen interest in things entertaining, the comparisons diverge.
My father was always a great believer in the future of Las Vegas. When he didn't have a dime he was finding ways to buy land because he believed what Tom Mix said standing on an empty lot looking out over a lot of empty desert. He opined that Las Vegas would one day become the Entertainment Capital of the World and that people would flock to this valley by the thousands in the years to come.
Hank Greenspun bought into that vision and realized that many of those people would be looking for places to live and would want to do so in communities flush with schools, parks and houses of worship, and in an area free from what would become the hustle and bustle of the Las Vegas Strip. That was in 1946.
My father was not a shy man and he would share his vision with all who would listen. One of those people, of course, was Ralph Pearl, who later became an editor of Las Vegas Life, an entertainment magazine my father started in those very early days and which was the precursor of our award-winning city magazine by the same name.
He implored Ralph to scrape every penny together he could find and invest in this brand-new community. And the way to invest was to buy land. No one had any money in those days so a $50-an-acre price for land on the Strip might as well have been $1 million. But those who could see the light found the ways and means to get in the game.
Mix found his fame and fortune in Hollywood and continued to speak well and often of Las Vegas. Ralph Pearl lived most of the rest of his life in our community and I believe that, up until the day he died, he rented. He never bought one acre of land even though he could well have afforded to do so.
His friend, Hank, bought land whenever he could and often when he couldn't. My mother has often told me that she lived on sand while my father bought all the dirt he could lay his hands on. As we look back on his "craziness" I know everyone in my family and thousands of others associated with us have thanked him for that vision, even though we continued to marvel at its prescience.
There is a reason for this story and it has everything to do with the just completed auction of BLM land in North Las Vegas at which my family and our partners at the Del Webb Corp. committed to a purchase of 1,905 acres for $47.2 million. It is the first step toward a planned community in North Las Vegas that had to escape everyone's vision of this valley except the NLV City Council under the leadership of Mayor Mike Montandon.
The price, while I may readily agree with the others who didn't have the highest bid, is excessive. In fact, we may learn sooner rather than later that we overpaid to the extent that it will be impossible to recover the purchase price, let alone make any reasonable return on the investment. But it was the price of playing and it was the price of vision in the year 2001. And, in that regard, it may turn out to be a stroke of genius.
That remains to be seen as our partnership begins negotiations with North Las Vegas on a development agreement that will determine what the developer can and cannot build and just how much things will cost.
When I learned Wednesday that we were the highest bidder and could, therefore, build the next planned community in Southern Nevada, I thought back just 30 years to another auction of BLM land. This was in Henderson and the city was selling 4,000 acres of desert in the middle of nowhere.
The price in those days was 1/40th of what we have paid just three decades later. But even though in hindsight it seems like we have grossly overpaid this time around, the fact of the matter is that the risk was a hundred times greater back then.
Life is all about risk and reward. In 1970, when my dad bid all he had, all he could borrow and was still hundreds of thousands of dollars short of the selling price, there were no mega hotels being built and none even being drawn, so there was no reason to believe that Las Vegas would grow sufficiently to buy the homes, fill the schools and shop in the retail centers that would eventually be built.
In those days, there was plenty of water but we were lacking in the technology to get it where it had to go efficiently. The same held true for power and other utilities. And, most importantly, there were no banks or other lenders who had the faith in Las Vegas that practically any institution with a dollar to lend has these days. In short, it was uphill all the way to create a place like Green Valley.
That's what I flashed on when the winner was announced for the North Las Vegas property. What I think about now is the fact that the dollars are astronomical, in fact more money than I thought all of Las Vegas might be worth when I was a kid in a town of under 20,000 people. But there are other factors that are far more certain and which make the risk significantly less than in the days when acres sold for hundreds and not tens of thousands of dollars.
With the one big caveat of the nuclear waste dump coming our way, there is no reason to think that this valley will not continue to grow, that utilities will not be readily available and that financial help will not be all too willing to help us build the next part of the Las Vegas dream.
What will make North Las Vegas' dream -- and now ours -- come true is that vision thing and a lot of hard work. Sixty years after Tom Mix saw the future and a half century after Hank Greenspun invested in it, that vision is a lot clearer.
It goes all the way out to North Las Vegas.
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