Editorial: Pssst, Buddy, want to sell a car?

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005 | 8:05 a.m.

Many people have lived next to, or driven past, the home of someone who has so many vehicles for sale on his property that the place looks like a used car lot.

Well, that should change in some parts of the valley now that the Las Vegas City Council unanimously approved a new law on Nov. 2 that says residents may sell only one motor vehicle at a time from their homes and sell no more than two vehicles total in a year.

State law allows a person to sell up to three vehicles in one year without obtaining a dealer's license. But if you live within the Las Vegas city limits, you now can sell only two of those from your home annually.

It was a brief item tucked among the 12 pages of the council's meeting agenda. But it's a big issue for some older areas of Las Vegas, according to Councilman Gary Reese, whose complaints that some homeowners were basically running unlicensed used car lots from their driveways and yards led to the ordinance.

All homeowners should be able to look upon their neighborhoods with pride. In newer areas of the city, homeowners associations have strict rules that seek to achieve that goal by governing everything from what people can park in their driveways to how large the shrubbery can grow in the front yard.

But in many older neighborhoods residents typically must rely solely on enforcement of municipal codes to keep their communities looking clean and well kept. And unsightly collections of used cars were becoming a problem in some of these communities. They needed a better rule, and the Las Vegas City Council took the right step in passing the ordinance.