Columnist Susan Snyder: Growing pains hit Summerlin

Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2002 | 8:22 a.m.

Well, at least one East Coast newspaper columnist grew bored with poking fun at Utah and Mormons and leveled his pointy pen at us last week.

Well, not all of us. Just Summerlin.

The Boston Globe's Alex Beam wrote about the planned community that's spreading like kudzu over the valley's west side. A dozen years from now it will have crawled all the way to the edge of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

Actually, it's not so much like kudzu. More like a rash.

Oh, put down the phone. I live there. And some of what he said was funny.

"Wow! This makes Southern California look authentic!" Beam wrote of his first glimpse inside Summerlin's pearly gates.

He says the Trails Village Center was the first thing he "happened upon," which can't possibly be true. You can't "happen upon" the Trails Village Center. People who live there have a hard time finding it on purpose.

A colleague who used to sit on a Summerlin homeowners association board suggested Beam shove his opinion into a Beantown blowhole.

"People who don't live there just don't understand," she said.

I'm not sure I understand. I picked the area because it's an eight-mile bicycle ride to the Red Rock Canyon entrance. Good warm-up for riding the Scenic Loop Road. I'd live in an outhouse, if it's good for the bike.

It's all about priorities.

"All I want to do is buy groceries. I don't care if it's fake," my colleague added.

Beam readily admitted he doesn't like "planned communities." He likened Summerlin to Disney's Celebration, a Florida town where the sterile facades fit idyllic versions of real architectural styles.

Cripes, my brother works for Disney. The whole family is steeped in fakery hell.

Beam's friend called Summerlin "a community of the future." Beam says it's the wave of the present.

But it misses the shoreline, says Dan Burden, a national community design expert and director of Walkable Communities Inc.

"Summerlin had the concepts down, but it didn't have the details down," said Burden, who worked on a pedestrian safety project in the valley last week. He has visited Las Vegas 12 times in 10 years.

"Things aren't truly compact (in Summerlin). Things are a long distance from each other," Burden said.

The huge swaths of asphalt that pass for roads look more suitable for McCarran International Airport, and they encourage people to drive 60 mph through a "neighborhood."

Planned communities can create cultural hubs in sprawling cities built for automobiles, Burden says. They are necessary in creating livable towns.

But add walls that shove sidewalks against the road and gates that separate people from each other, and the sense of community gives way to isolation.

Beam said Summerlin spokespeople told him the place has no crime. But Burden says that valleywide, speeding traffic, walls, gates and roads to nowhere are thieves stealing our sense of place.

"You got built quick, unfortunately," he said, likening Las Vegas to Topsy, a character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

"They asked where she came from and she said, 'I don't know. I just growed.' "