Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

In a perfect world

In a perfect world, Las Vegas schools would be 13 kids to a classroom with textbooks the same in Summerlin as any school in the 'hood.

Interstate 15 would be but one possible way home - and you'd take it only because you absentmindedly forgot to take the light rail, which spans the valley like webbing, to work.

Of course, your work day wouldn't be filled with the mind-numbing dealing of poker hands to tourists. With your high-tech degree from UNLV, you'd work in any number of Silicon Valleyesque business parks supported and supplied by the university.

And after returning home to your redeveloped village in downtown Las Vegas, you'd take a short trip to the concert hall to watch a play - with tickets subsidized by gaming to draw more locals to the arts.

In a perfect world.

Yet the 200 people who talked, ate and brainstormed for 24 hours in UNLV's Architecture Building on Friday and Saturday found that it wasn't perfection they sought. Most of the ideas for making Las Vegas a more livable city weren't pie in the sky. Instead, they were simply things many of the gathered had lived with in other cities and wished for in Las Vegas.

Workable mass transit - with a leaning toward the stability and user-friendly light-rail mode - affordable housing, schools in the 'hood with as much support as in the 'burbs.

Lots of it focused on our slow-moving road system. Not only that it's a tangled mess, but that it's the only way to get anywhere. Ever walk in Las Vegas? One table was asked, "Who here ever took a city bus?" None of them.

"I mean, you can't go get a stick of gum without driving there," one participant said.

Another theme: Ideas are plentiful but unless you're a casino with ideas, nothing outside of the Strip - mass transit ideas, innovative housing ideas, any kind of concerted push for economic diversification - moves fast enough.

The 24-hour charrette was the brainchild of the American Institute of Architects, which is commemorating its 150th anniversary by holding various panels in each state. Because of this state's 24-hour nature, Nevada was the only one to have a daylong event.

It kicked off at 2 p.m. Friday with a speech by San Francisco architect Sim Van der Ryn, who invoked Frank Lloyd Wright and spoke of a Las Vegas "ecotopia" in encouraging the collected architects and civic leaders to reach beyond their normal work-a-day thoughts.

"You're not here to design buildings," he said. "You're here to think about systemic issues ... to see the overlap between ecostructure and infrastructure."

Van der Ryn hadn't been in Las Vegas since driving through in the 1950s from Detroit, but expressed dismay at the sprawl he saw as he flew in Friday morning. He was equally astounded that amid that sprawl, he didn't see a single house affixed with solar panels.

But those are the political realities, most people admitted, of living with a county commission with a history of approving most requested zoning changes, in a city with residents who mostly see themselves as short-timers rather than lifers, with industry such as the power company that isn't proactive about renewable energy and with a state political system that doesn't seem to care.

Asked if there was any hope for Las Vegas, Van der Ryn, whose sister is married to Venetian owner Sheldon Adelson's cousin, smiled warmly. And didn't exactly answer "yes."

"I don't know," he said. "I mean, you know - I write about hope. My first 15 minutes of fame was working with (former California Gov.) Jerry Brown. I was part of his Cabinet. And then after I left that, I got really depressed because we got (Gov. Ronald) Reagan and I saw everything we'd worked on unravel.

"Then I looked up the meaning of hope. Hope is the belief that things can get better. But when? Where's the timetable? Like anything else, some days you're discouraged about things and generally - so is there hope for Vegas? I tried to throw out some ideas, something that can be done."

Within the eight working groups that ended up with a blueprint, of sorts, for what Las Vegas and Clark County need to do to keep people here, to attract educated workers, to make this a place people think of in the long term, hope seemed more tightly defined.

Just give us ways to get around the city. Give us access to the arts. Give us state lawmakers looking toward drawing businesses other than strictly casinos to the desert. Give us a well-funded public education. Give us a system of water that doesn't rely upon multibillion-dollar pipelines to far-flung counties to quench our collective thirst.

By early Saturday, after more than 16 hours of thinking and talking, many were weary but there was an evident sense of hope. If these people, mostly architects, can see a vision, why can't the rest of the state?

Some ideas:

Some of the groups, such as those looking into education and culture, dealt with the more abstract. From the culture group, it was to create a magazine that would inform and educate. From the education group, the main theme to emerge was improved and equal education throughout the county.

"Schools are designed the same, but performance levels are vastly different," education Chairman Wade Simpson said.

Casinos were the elephant in the room that no one ignored. The problem was figuring out ways for the money people to buy into the ideas of school importance. For Simpson, it was easy: Better schools mean a more educated workforce.

"Some of the big employers really value education and some will be really honest," Simpson said. "They'll say, 'We don't really care about it, we'll educate our employees ourselves.' "

At the end of a wearing 24 hours, the 200 who began weren't the 100 who finished. Those who stuck it out were excited - such as school designer Mark McGinty, who said he was "energized" to hear the same commitment he felt from school leaders - to jaded to overwhelmed.

Brett Ewing, president of Marnell Architecture, went home in the middle of the night and drove back Saturday morning. He took the entangled and ever-changing U.S. 95, a road he rarely drives. When he drove it Saturday, he thought a little bit more about what it was and how it represented our city.

"They've spent, I don't know, maybe billions on that 95 intersection, and I was thinking about the fossil fuels and the mileage. And 20 years from now, or more years, what's it going to look like when we have these enormously wide freeways if there are no cars? What are we going to do with them? Reclaim them? Build houses on them?"

The casino designer who has lived in Las Vegas for 25 years raises an eyebrow.

"I hope more people start thinking about it."

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