Task force: Affordable housing is top issue

Wednesday, March 9, 2005 | 10:51 a.m.

The Clark County Growth Task Force, which convened a year ago to look at the social and economic cost of the region's population boom and to devise strategies for reducing the negative impact of growth, has boiled down dozens of suggestions to five ideas.

The 17-member group on Tuesday formally narrowed its primary recommendations to five, with an "umbrella" recommendation promoting mass transit as a way to ease a number of growth-related problems, including traffic and air quality issues. The groups had 21 core strategies to consider when narrowing their top choices.

The top choice among the 11 members who attended the Tuesday meeting and three who sent in their choices via e-mail was for more affordable housing. The issue of affordability in housing has come to the fore over the last several years as costs for new and older houses have skyrocketed, pushing many would-be homeowners out of the market.

In language already adopted during earlier sessions of the group, Clark County should "develop a variety of strategies aimed at increasing housing affordability and attainability for those who live and work in the Las Vegas Valley. These strategies should consider housing consumers' income levels and ability to afford low-cost and median-cost housing."

Some of the strategies that the group has identified for increasing the amount of affordable housing are:

Discourage housing "speculation" by non-resident home owners;

Encourage local employers to develop workforce housing with rental subsidies or down-payment assistance;

Rebuild deteriorating urban neighborhoods to provide more family housing;

Establish a regional task force to work on such issues as targeting a percentage of federal land going to auction for affordable housing.

Although most of the task force members, chosen from a range of business and community interests, supported the "affordable housing" option, financial analyst Guy Hobbs did not vote for it. He said following the vote that he is sympathetic to the issue but believes affordability of housing may be beyond the control of local governments.

"The importance of it in our community is understandable," Hobbs said. "I thought there were largely market forces that would take care of it."

A second recommendation was to encourage "mixed use" development, bringing together residential and business uses in one unified project, with the goal of bringing jobs closer to homes. Another recommendation would emphasize "infill development" of vacant or deteriorating properties inside the urban area.

A fourth recommendation would be to time Clark County's public infrastructure and government services to meet future population projections, always a tricky effort in a region with such a fast-growing population.

A fifth recommendation would be to "integrate air quality, transportation and land-use planning." Such a move would help keep the air clean while encouraging compact, sensible housing, said Jane Feldman, a task force member and representative of the local arm of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization.

Feldman said many of the group's recommendations involved issues that overlapped.

"Affordable housing makes good use of resources. It's a very efficient use of resources that contributes to quality of life for a lot of people," Feldman said.

Creating more affordable housing within the existing urban footprint -- a move that could target infill development -- would mean more people live comfortably without moving out to the open desert, a goal that helps the environment, she said.

And compact, urban housing helps encourage efficient mass transit, which helps clean up air quality, she noted.

"Transit and clean transportation choices are so important, not just to people who want to be mobile, but for people who want to be healthy too," Feldman said.

Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid said he has not yet seen the recommendations, but has been impressed with the work of the group.

"This has been a significant undertaking by the community," he said. "We've had hours and hours of hearings. We've heard from experts in every field imaginable. I look forward to the recommendations they've provided us."

Reid, commissioners Bruce Woodbury and Chip Maxfield and the rest of the seven-member commission authorized the growth task force a year ago. The recommendations were supposed to come to the commission at the end of December, but the timetable for the work was pushed back.

Reid said the shift in timing was not a negative.

"What we promised was a comprehensive look at a complex set of issues," he said. "It took longer than anticipated, but we thought it was important to give them (the task force members) all the time they needed."

The commission does not have to adopt all or any of the recommendations from the group.

"We need to take a serious look at them, though," Reid said. "We committed to doing that when we began this process. We committed to making this not just another study that sits on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust."