Sunday, Oct. 30, 2005 | 9:24 a.m.
"Welcome to the New Old West" reads the sign outside Pahrump as you arrive from the west on the road from Death Valley Junction.
"New Old West" is a funny juxtaposition given the meaning of these two terms. The Old West has always meant open spaces, riding the range, cowboys and gunfire, freedom in the late 20th century sense of the word -- to do what you want, where you want, when you want, however you want, and with whomever you want -- and a thorough and complete lack of regulation.
The New West means something different. Service and leisure have replaced extraction and animal raising, cities dominate, and people sit in traffic in SUVs, with glorious sunsets behind the nearby mountains that most never visit.
So what might the "New Old West" mean? Does it portend a rebirth of the 19th century, with gunfights in the streets like we presume happened in the Dodge Cities of that era? Or might it mean something more innovative, a place with the freedom of the Old West within the structure of the new?
Pahrump has been the butt of jokes for a long time. Portrayed as decidedly downscale, a little bit on the trashy side, and way behind the curve, Pahrump's growth to roughly 40,000 people and its aggressive plan to add 10,000 more homes spells the beginning of the transformation not only of the town, but also of its relationships with the Las Vegas Valley.
Pahrump is likely to become the next Henderson. Some people once referred to Henderson, what is now Nevada's second-largest city, as "Hooterville." They looked down on Henderson for its industrial character, its working-class look and what they perceived as its parochialism.
No more.
Henderson has become "a place to call home," the municipality with the highest household income in the valley, one of the most desirable locations around.
What drew people to Henderson, and started its boom in the 1980s, was affordable housing coupled with an opportunity to shape their own community. If you take a spin past the housing stock of the early 1980s, you'll quickly find that you're not looking at the Anthem of today. Most are small homes, 1,500-1,800 square feet, just the kinds of places that ordinary people who work for a living found really desirable.
Henderson handled the first wave of spillover from the great and ongoing Las Vegas boom and it looks like this round will belong to Pahrump. Already, the outmigration over the hump is considerable and the growing cost of housing in the valley will accelerate the trend. Pahrump will become Las Vegas' first hinterland, whether the people there like it or not.
For a town that fancies itself "The New Old West," this offers a different future. If the patterns of the rest of the West hold true, Pahrump will find itself with dilemmas that parallel those of places such as Aspen, Colo., in the 1960s and 1970s or Jackson, Wyo., in the early 1990s.
Newcomers, people I call "neo-natives," will arrive in droves, most fleeing the valley. They will be different than the people who live in Pahrump now, and they will try to re-create the type of community that makes them comfortable in their new homes.
They'll complain about the lack of services, the condition of the schools, the roads, the traffic and just about everything else, failing to recognize that they themselves are contributing to the very problems they cite.
Old-timers, the people who came to Pahrump before this wave, will chafe at the way these newcomers are changing their town. "It used to be free here," some will mutter, "before ... the subdivisions, the new casino, the last brothel," or whatever else.
Sometimes, this will just be grumbling. Equally often, it will be legitimate social critique of change.
All kinds of tension will soon follow. Neo-natives and natives will struggle over local politics, and new subdivisions will elect representatives that reflect their interests. The town board will change.
There will be battles over services and how to pay for them, about what you can and can't do with your property -- which you can read as a code for whether legalized prostitution can continue -- and ultimately about what the community will feel like.
In the way that Henderson reinvented its identity, so will Pahrump. The Old West town will come to end, but vestiges of it will remain. People will nod to that identity, and the further the town gets from it, the more precious it will become.
In the end, Pahrump will become another of greater Las Vegas' bedroom communities, the first outside the valley. For better or worse, it will take on traits of local neighborhoods at the expense of those of the Pahrump of today.
Of course, a lot of things will have to happen. Highway 160 will have to be expanded to handle the load and some kind of system to convey commuters will become essential.
Late to the Western water derby, Pahrump will have to find its supply. But such issues notwithstanding, the "New Old West" will become a lot more like the New West. And once the hinterland begins, it will spawn its own clones.
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