Desert dreams: Developer envisions huge bedroom community for LV in Arizona

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, April 23, 2002 | 11:15 a.m.

WHITE HILLS, Ariz. -- Like most people in this former mining town of 400 people, retired long-haul trucker Richard Hammond has heard rumors for years of big things coming to the long sweep of range that floats from these hills to the south shore of Lake Mead.

But last winter, while turning off U.S. 93 to head up the last stretch of pavement before the dirt road to his double-wide trailer home, Hammond saw something weightier than talk.

"When I see a 12-inch casing dropped for a well and a three-phase above-ground pump, I say, 'Something's coming,' " Hammond said of the industrial-grade pump. "You've got something like that, you need water for something."

That something, if Las Vegas developer Leonard Mardian pulls it off, would be an immense Las Vegas suburb spread over 31,000 acres about 28 miles south of Hoover Dam in Mohave County, Ariz.

The largest private landowner within a commute of Las Vegas, Mardian plans to build a golf course, a gas station and a small motel in the next year. But he is laying the groundwork for the first planned bedroom community of Las Vegas outside the Las Vegas Valley, a neighborhood of at least 12,000 single-family homes up in the breezy saddle of the White Hills, with views of the mountains and Lake Mead.

He's betting that as developers run out of the open land in the Las Vegas Valley and as the median price of homes continues to rise, people will buy in Arizona. Especially after the Hoover Dam bypass bridge, due to open in 2007, makes the commute from his land to the Strip less than an hour one way.

"They've got 48,000 acres left in Las Vegas. I've got 31,000 acres. And there's a bridge going up," said Mardian as he sat at his regular corner table at Circo at the Bellagio. "You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. Ask the big developers what they're going to do in the next five years."

Big developers are running out of raw land, but Mardian faces plenty of his own challenges -- finding enough water, negotiating the exchange of thousands of acres with the Bureau of Land Management, and establishing a market, to name a few. But he sees the future in Mohave County.

He wants to conjure a town from a desert of Joshua trees, mesquite, and bush muley and Indian rice, two wild grasses favored by the longhorn cattle that run here. He owns enough land to do it, holding title on a checkerboard of 640-acre sections mixed with federally owned sections of the same size. In one contiguous piece, his land would stretch one mile wide by 50 miles long.

Even Summerlin, built in the northwest valley on 22,000 acres purchased in 1951 by Howard Hughes -- one of the largest and most successful planned communities in the country -- pales in comparison to the sprawling neighborhoods envisioned by Mardian, even if he is building for the dreams of housekeepers and valets rather than executives.

"It's almost inconceivable," Mardian said. "The only guy who did something like this was Howard Hughes and he never completed it."

As ambitious as Mardian's plan is -- to "build a city from scratch," as one Mohave County planner put it -- several Las Vegas land experts say the increasing scarcity and cost of raw land in the Las Vegas Valley makes the success of a new, more affordable suburb in Arizona a strong likelihood.

A widely accepted land study states that in 12 years the last 48,000 acres of raw land in Las Vegas will be developed. And with the current high price of land in the valley, developers have been building almost anything but affordable single-family homes, said Richard Lee, a land expert for First American Title Co. and the author of the study.

"We have scarcity (of land) and a boom market" in Las Vegas, Lee said. "That's why Mardian might have a distinct advantage."

The rising median price of a Las Vegas home -- this year $179,000, up from $162,000 last year -- has already driven people to settle new bedroom communities in the nearby rural towns of Pahrump, Logandale and Overton, some real estate experts say. The steady exodus suggests that many homeowners are willing to drive a bit farther to save on mortgage payments. Mardian says he'll be able to undersell the Las Vegas market by 30 percent. But some Arizona officials are not entirely comfortable with the idea of helping build a new community in Arizona that will face north to Nevada.

"You could say that we're healthily skeptical. Having been bitten once, we're twice shy," said Karl Taylor of the Mohave County Planning and Zoning Department. "The developer has not demonstrated to a convincing degree that Las Vegas will have any suburbs in Arizona. But he has every opportunity to submit his proposal and we will process it on its own merits."

Other "grandiose" proposals in the 1990s have flopped, Taylor said -- one on 6,000 acres now owned by Mardian and another planned city of 60,000 people between Lake Havasu and Bullhead City. Only Lake Havasu City, proposed in the early 1960s and built through the early 1970s, succeeded with a plan similar to Mardian's, he said.

Boulder City Mayor Bob Ferraro, whose small town of 14,800 straddles U.S. 93 north of White Hills, said the new development would have little to no impact on his town, but he is also skeptical of Mardian's ability to draw the Strip's working class into Arizona, in part because they would lose out on Nevada's favorable tax laws.

"If he can offer them something in the way of social amenities out there, maybe they'd be willing to drive that far," Ferraro said. "But that's still quite a drive."

Sean Patrick, a spokesman for Del Webb, one of the largest developers in the valley, said his company would consider working in Mohave County, but he has been lobbying the BLM to open more federal land inside the valley.

"The future of this valley is in federal land," Patrick said. "The more willing the BLM is to divest itself of land, the better off the Las Vegas Valley is. When a casino goes up and there's 10,000 new jobs, you need some entry-level homes for workers."

But Mike Dwyer, manager of the BLM's state office overseeing land sales and acquisitions in Southern Nevada, said if development continues at its current pace of 23,000 new homes and another 5,000 apartments each year, the valley could run out of water before it runs out of the land available now.

If the remaining 48,000 acres of open land are built out at average densities with average population numbers, the valley would more than double in size, Dwyer said.

"At some point, some people may say, 'Why would I leave Los Angeles to move to Los Angeles?' " Dwyer said. "The answer may be pausing to think about smart growth. Is it all in our best interest to double our population in 12 years?"

Even if the BLM opens more federal land in the Las Vegas Valley, retirees, cattle ranchers and other Arizonans living in the hardscrabble communities near Mardian's project say that rapid growth in their hills will be inevitable once the bypass bridge is complete.

Dave Nicely, a Dolan Springs cattle rancher, lives like many in the area -- he has a generator for household appliances and runs his house lights and stove with solar power because there is little infrastructure in the area.

"All hell is going to break loose down here," he said. "You'll have trouble pulling onto the highway with all the traffic."

Rose Larsen, who has run Rose's Den since 1984, a small, clapboard cafe at the corner of U.S. 93 and White Hills Road, says she is all for Mardian's development.

"We need a neighborhood," she said. "I have a neighborhood bar but we don't have a neighborhood. So I'm looking forward to it. We're grateful for any business around here."

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