Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006 | 12:33 p.m.
Fred Maryanski remembers the shock when he took over as Nevada State College president last year.
Maryanski and his wife had sold their 2,100-square-foot house in Storrs, Conn., for $282,000. In Henderson, they paid $656,000 for a 3,100-square-foot house on just a quarter acre.
A bigger house but only one-eighth as much land - for more than twice the price.
"It is a much bigger mortgage than I had planned for," said Maryanski, who had been interim provost for the University of Connecticut.
But at least Maryanski took the job. Increasingly, professors and others recruited for jobs at the college and UNLV are saying no thanks, they can't afford the housing.
Housing costs definitely hurt UNLV's faculty searches over the last two years, said Ray Alden, provost and executive vice president.
In the 2002-2003 school year, UNLV filled 82 percent of its openings with the university's top recruited candidates. In 2004-2005, however, that figure fell to 71 percent, and a big reason was the higher cost of living, Alden said.
UNLV tries to recruit the best professors, regardless of where they live, Alden said. Las Vegas is still a deal in the eyes of candidates from California or New York, Boston and other big East Coast cities. But it invites sticker shock from prospective hires from the rest of the country.
"Five years ago we could recruit from most parts of the country pretty easily because we had a cost of living that was below the national average," Alden said.
Multiple cost of living calculators on the Internet show Las Vegas to be about 20 percent more expensive than the national average, and a good 30 percent more expensive than most other cities.
Housing is the main factor driving up the area's cost of living. In 2003 and 2004, housing values in the Las Vegas area appreciated by more than 30 percent, and Nevada ranked first in the nation for rising housing costs.
Richard Flaherty, UNLV's College of Business dean, felt that effect in his college last year. The college conducted a half-dozen national searches for professors. One took the job, while two top candidates declined specifically because of the cost of living.
That the business college is struggling with the cost of living is especially telling, Flaherty said, because business professors typically make more than others at the university. But they still don't want to give up their life style to move to Las Vegas.
That's especially true for senior professors who may have home equity that won't translate to much in the valley's housing market, Alden said.
As the housing market has cooled this school year, searches are going better, officials said. Housing values rose about 14 percent in the last year, according to the latest data from the Office of the Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight - still high enough for Nevada to rank eighth in the country, but not nearly as bad as the 30 percent increases the state saw in 2004.
But officials expect housing costs to continue to affect searches and are looking to see how East Coast and California universities have dealt with housing crunches.
A cost of living impact committee led by Flaherty found that there isn't much UNLV officials can do in the immediate future to offset housing costs. The university doesn't have the money to offer additional stipends or to help provide down payments on homes, Flaherty said.
What UNLV and Nevada State College can do, however, is set aside land for faculty housing in their future developments. By subsidizing land costs in that way, UNLV could offer reduced-price housing to faculty. The tactic has worked well in California.
"Anywhere where you have acreage and raw land represents that potential," Flaherty said.
Nevada State College is also looking into possible use of the 550 acres of its Henderson land for faculty housing of some sort, Maryanski said. UNLV officials are considering several options for adding faculty housing, including working with private developers on the midtown UNLV redevelopment project to include faculty condos. The William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration will also likely add faculty condos to its proposed INNovation Village project on the northwest side of campus.
Farther away from campus, UNLV is working with other Nevada institutions and the Clark County School District on the possibility of adding low-cost housing for professors and teachers to its proposed North Las Vegas campus, Alden said. UNLV is working to secure about 2,000 acres in the northern valley near the Las Vegas Beltway and Pecos Road from the Bureau of Land Management.
Christina Littlefield can be reached at 259-8813 or at [email protected].
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