Growth task force considers dwindling space, higher prices

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2004 | 9:34 a.m.

The question of how much room is needed for growth and how fast the growing population of Southern Nevada should use that land dominated the meeting of the Clark County Growth Management Task Force Tuesday.

The issue is central to some of the issues before the task force, which was charged early last year with finding ways to better manage the rapid pace of population growth and its impact on the region's quality of life.

New housing prices have gone up 26 percent in the past year alone, and developers blame a scarcity of land available for building large master-planned communities as a significant factor in the housing prices.

Analyst Jeremy Aguero told the task force members that while the rapid pace of increases may ease, the function of limited supply and sustained demand will likely keep prices up.

"We still have a lot of people moving into the valley," he said. The impact is particularly hard on lower and middle income working families and residents, Aguero said.

"The ability for that group to own or lease an average home just doesn't exist," he said.

Hal Rothman, UNLV history professor and task force member, said Las Vegas is beginning to resemble other resort communities in which "people cannot afford to live in the communities they work in."

Former Clark County Commissioner Jay Bingham, a developer, suggested that local governments should pressure the federal Bureau of Land Management, which controls nearly all of the land on the edges and outside the urban area, to release land more quickly.

Bingham's comment and the discussion generally focused on some of the limits to growth that have always been a part of Las Vegas and the surrounding urban areas.

Rob Mrowka, a Clark County planning manager, told the group that under an existing agreement between the county, Southern Nevada's cities and the federal government to protect endangered and threatened plants and animals, only about 101,000 acres of new land can be disturbed in the Las Vegas Valley. That gives room for perhaps 575,000 more people, a number that could be reached quickly as the region grows by about 70,000 people annually.

The habitat-conservation cap is on top of another limit, called the disposal boundary, in which the federal government can release about 400,000 acres throughout Clark County, including large tracts along Interstate 15 south of Las Vegas.

Steve Hill, president of Silver State Materials Corp., a company that sells concrete and other building materials, said the limit to available land has an impact on housing prices.

"The more land you have available, the less that land is going to cost," he said.

Sue Allen, chairwoman of the South West Action Network, a neighborhood-preservation group, challenged the idea.

"Many areas have been able to get obtainable, affordable housing by building up and not out," she said. "If we just try to expand the disposal boundary willy-nilly, all we are doing is pushing back the day of reckoning."

Jane Feldman, an activist with the Sierra Club, said one of the prime causes of increased housing prices was not being addressed.

"If we're really worried about the price of housing, shouldn't we also be talking about speculator buying?" Feldman asked.

Guy Hobbs, a financial analyst and task force member, agreed.

"The fact that out-of-state investment has created a price impetus is something we have to address," he said. But it could be a long, difficult process to create disincentives to absentee ownership of available housing, including a yearslong process to amend the state Constitution, which now requires all land owners to be treated in a "uniform and equal" manner.

Still, "You have all of the examples in the world to justify doing that," Hobbs said.

"If it requires a four or six-year initiative to change the Constitution, than that's what we need to do," Feldman agreed.

In other discussion at the task force, the director of Clark County's Air Quality and Environmental Management Department said the county will work to avoid some of the air-quality problems that have plagued the central urban area as new areas are developed.

Clark County is under a federal mandate to clean up carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone and fine airborne dust in the Las Vegas Valley. Christine Robinson, air quality director, told the task force that her department is working to include land-use and development planning components that would keep those problems from rising to the level of federal oversight as areas such as thousands of acres along I-15 south of Las Vegas are developed.