Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Study says Vegas has less sprawl than many big cities

The news may come as a surprise to those living on the edges of Las Vegas' urban footprint, but another national study has found that the region's sprawl problem is much less intense than in other areas.

Smart Growth America, a nationwide coalition, said the Las Vegas area has less sprawl than 47 other urban areas, faring better than such areas as San Bernardino, Calif., Atlanta, Dallas and Washington. The study looked at 83 of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country.

Don Chen, Smart Growth America executive director, cautioned that although Las Vegas did well compared to many other cities, sprawl is still an issue of concern in Southern Nevada.

He noted that the area has an ongoing problem with traffic congestion and air pollution -- two of the biggest problems that the group says come from sprawl.

And the study does not look at the rate of land consumption -- the conversion of rural land to suburban subdivision, Chen said.

"It doesn't really address what new development looks like," he said. "There are different ways to perceive sprawl. ... Las Vegas is not doing that well. It's squarely in the middle of the pack."

Analysts for the group used four criteria to study sprawl: housing density, the mix of homes near jobs and services, the relative strengths of downtown areas, and the accessibility of street networks for commuters.

Las Vegas scored higher than average on the density factor, which was based on Census 2000 data. That result mirrored other recent sprawl studies, including one by the Brookings Institution in July 2001, that found the area has relatively high population densities -- about 20,000 people per square mile.

The metropolitan area also scored higher on the accessibility of the street network.

The area scored just about average on the strength of the urban center, but almost 20 percent below average on the mix of jobs and services with nearby housing. Local observers said that is not surprising given that many of the region's jobs are clustered along the Strip.

Jane Feldman, an activist with the local arm of the Sierra Club, said she fears that the ranking could lead some to believe sprawl is not a local issue.

But she said residential and commercial development that increasingly chews up the open desert and foothills is evidence that the issue is a problem.

"The fact that we're privatizing public lands every two years is an indication of sprawl," Feldman said. "The fact that we have lots of opportunities for infill that we are ignoring is another sign."

Irene Porter, president of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, also takes issue with the study but from a completely different perspective.

"I don't consider us to have a sprawl problem at all," Porter said.

Porter disagreed with Feldman, arguing that there are few infill parcels of undeveloped land inside the urban area left for residential or commercial construction.

And the growth of development is limited by the federal land around the Las Vegas Valley, she said.

"We don't have that much land to sprawl to," Porter said. She noted that relatively compact local home lots mean that more homes can fit into smaller areas than in cities in the East Coast or Midwest, areas where home lots can be measured in acres.

But Porter said sprawl could be an outgrowth of a local but state-mandated, zoning pattern: the use of rural neighborhood preservation areas to keep housing density low. Clark County and the cities of the region use such RNP zones to protect homeowners on half-acre or larger lots from encroachment by high-density housing.

But an unintended consequence of such zoning is to push more housing out from the urban center, Porter said.

"That will, in fact, create sprawl for us if we continue on," she said.

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