Laying the groundwork

Tuesday, March 21, 2006 | 8:17 a.m.

One of the nation's leading experts on urban sprawl says Las Vegas, blessed with expansive miles of undeveloped land and the potential to learn from other cities' mistakes, could become a cornerstone of "the century of the West."

As Bruce Katz gazed Monday at a panoramic view of the Las Vegas Valley, he marveled aloud at the region's potential to grow smartly by investing in rail transportation and education.

He talked enthusiastically about the valley's opportunity to establish mixed-use corridors of homes, retail outlets and offices to keep sprawl in check.

And he spoke passionately of the need for Las Vegas and other Western cities to partner regionally by informing the federal government about shared urban problems.

As vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank, Katz is a much-in-demand expert on urban sprawl.

"This place has the potential to be well-planned," Katz said of Las Vegas. "Unlike Charlotte (N.C.) and Atlanta, you haven't ruined yourself yet.

"Flying into Las Vegas is like flying to Europe. Las Vegas is very compact for a metropolitan area its size."

In town for a community development conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Katz said Las Vegas is experiencing something new in urban metropolitan growth.

"It's what we call dense sprawl," Katz said. "You're spreading out, but you're also densifying. The density gradient is flat throughout the entire area.

"Part of that is that you have certain environmental constraints that you don't have in places such as Atlanta. In traditional cities you start with a dense urban core and you have less density as it spreads out."

Chief among those constraints is the fact that the land surrounding the valley is owned primarily by the federal government. To a certain extent, that keeps sprawl in check, he said.

"Your cities in the West will be the 21st century cities and confound conventional wisdom," Katz said. "You're very urbanized. Out here there's a certain sense of opportunity."

In addition to growing faster than the rest of the country, the West possesses 15 of the nation's top 20 "hot spots" for entrepreneurship, according to research quoted by the Brookings Institution.

The West also has added clout in Congress because, as the nation's population has shifted to this part of the country, it has siphoned congressional seats from the Northeast and Midwest.

At the same time, Katz said, Las Vegas and other Western cities must do a better job making the case that they deserve increased federal funding for infrastructure such as commuter rail transportation because of the urban problems that they face.

He said a commuter rail system would enable Las Vegas to support higher density populations in designated corridors, keeping them economically viable rather than weakening them financially, as has occurred in several older suburbs around the country. Some of those older suburbs have suffered from aging populations and an insufficient tax base.

"If you look at communities in Europe and Asia, they're all investing heavily in high-speed rail," he said. "The United States is nearing the end of a transportation system that was put in place in the 1950s.

"At the national level we have to be willing to make investments in infrastructure. If the Bush tax cuts are extended, we'll be robbing ourselves of the ability to make the investments we need to make in infrastructure and higher education."

But the West also had the nation's highest gains in high school dropouts in the 1990s, Katz said.

In addition, only 18.7 percent of adults in the Las Vegas area had a four-year college degree as of 2002, ranking it a dismal 58th among the nation's 70 largest cities.

"There's a question about educational ethics in Las Vegas because people see that there's so much money that can be made without needing an education," Katz said. "It's a question of the community's expectations. What is expected of the youth?"

Another challenge that Las Vegas faces, Katz said, is how to handle immigration. Outside of California and New York, Nevada has one of the nation's highest concentrations of foreign-born residents.

"In a way, you're the growing part of the country that should be flexing its muscles," Katz said. "You have fiscal and environmental challenges you're facing because of growth."

An opportune time to make that sales pitch, he said, will be during the 2008 presidential campaign, the first time since 1952 that an incumbent president or vice president will not be seeking the White House.

Katz is optimistic that Las Vegas' economy, now heavily dependent on the gaming industry, will diversify because of its proximity to California.

That diversification will be tied to improvements in the state's system of higher education, which will allow Las Vegas to "move up the knowledge chain" and support higher quality jobs, he said.

Should Las Vegas ever run out of land to grow, Katz predicted there would be rapid "reinvestment" in older core neighborhoods that have been subject to decay.