Planners see plenty of missed opportunities

Sunday, Oct. 28, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

The eye-opener wasn't just Robert Fielden's mordant description of how Las Vegas planning, in the 40-plus years that he's lived here, has gone so wrong.

Because living in Clark County among mile upon mile of beige block homes with red clay tiles divided by gates, beige cinder block walls and, if we're lucky, a few feet of grass, we already know it's no Portland. Much of the Las Vegas Valley isn't even a shell of some shadier parts of Los Angeles.

Fielden, a local urban planner, shakes his head at the blocks behind the Stratosphere with dirty, stucco-cracked apartment buildings. Lawns of concrete. Gravel for yards in some places, but most of those overtaken by weeds or dirt. Boarded windows.

"They used to have some of the cutest little houses back here," he said. "They were razed - for this."

But Fielden's view was just a reminder.

The eye-opener came at the Venetian during the fall conference of the Urban Land Institute, an organization dedicated to the proposition that sharing ideas and ideals will lead planners and developers to create more livable communities.

And the eye-opener was this: Turning ugly into beaut iful takes a long, long time. It typically takes decades for structures to lose enough value, or cause enough public disgust, to be torn down.

And even though Vegas is known to glorify the use of the wrecking ball on Strip hotels, the same doesn't happen quite as quickly in the Vegas suburbs - a place someone like Michael Kerski doubts he would ever find appealing enough to live in.

"There's no 'there' there," said Kerski, who works for the Community Investment Division of the city of Flagstaff, Ariz.

He pointed to Green Valley as "interesting , " with pedestrian-oriented streets. But the problem of getting somewhere, such as a grocery store, with ease is the same problem the rest of the valley seems to have.

"It could have been a nice, livable area but , like the Whole Foods, which is beautiful on the inside, you couldn't walk there," he said.

Flagstaff, he said, doesn't "do walls." In fact, a new 42-acre development is being designed around the kind of concepts Vegas planners talk about but never seem to achieve - living close enough to be able to walk to work, or near grocery stores and other retail amenities.

What's happened in Las Vegas - think stucco, beige, homes close enough that you can stick out your arm and almost touch your neighbor's wall - isn't unique. It's happening and has happened across the country. But here, Kerski said, "it's kind of on steroids."

"There was no planning," is his summation of what he's seen in the valley's suburbs. He's not talking about the planning by engineers to create roads or lay down power lines or water pipes. He's talking about where people live.

Kerski brought up the architectural master, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright died in 1959, but his name was invoked many times throughout the dozens of seminars held in the Venetian's convention halls.

"When Frank Lloyd Wright laid out Mason City, Iowa, he made a lot of effort to make sure the overall city had a certain aesthetic," Kerski said.

"Nobody does that anymore. A home is considered just a place you go home and park your head at night. It's not really yours; you're just borrowing it from the bank until you move to your next one."

With so much of Las Vegas having been built in the past 10 years - Hualapai Way was merely a signpost, if that, in 1997, when you could be in the desert after Fort Apache Road if you kept driving west on Charleston Boulevard - Kenneth Puncerelli, who worked on Green Valley, lays some of the onus on the city's boom.

"During the boom time, there have been products built that nobody in their right mind, if they were really examining the product, would buy if they weren't looking at it speculatively," said Puncerelli of Land Architects of Highlands Ranch, Colo.

That's changing, he said, with a number of builders now going beyond that and trying to think of ways to make homes more than just a place to sleep at night.

One conference theme that came through loud and clear was sustainability. That is, creating communities that pay heed to environmental concerns. Not only building homes that are insulated well to minimize energy use, but also maybe figuring out ways to use the tons of waste from building a single home for landscaping or other areas.

Thinking along those lines takes a more regional, even world view. But listening to speakers from Arizona at one seminar, you tend to wonder whether that could ever happen.

The subject was water. And the tendency to think provincially, not regionally, really hit home when a representative of Arizona homebuilders spoke glowingly of all the effort Arizona has put into conservation, and how water shortages won't be a problem for them because they've secured enough water for future needs.

"That's a really scary view," Daniel Williams, who was signing his book, "Sustainable Design: Ecology, Architecture, and Planning ," said Friday.

Not that it surprised him. Despite the growing drought in the Southwest, or even in Atlanta, people continue "to do the wrong thing."

"The culture we have, and it's not just the United States but other developing nations, is we don't need to listen to any of these ideas," he said. "No one talks about it. Have you heard any presidential candidate talk about water shortages?"

Many of the ideas talked about for sustainable housing - solar power, building homes within walking distance of a bakery or a grocery store - are obvious to him. And in the short run, they probably would make more money for a developer than the alternative, the kind of stuccoed living of so many Las Vegas suburbanites.

"Because it's not like any of these changes are going to make our lives more miserable," Williams said. "In fact, it'd probably lead to happier, healthier lives."