Affordable housing didn’t stand a chance

By Sam Skolnik

Friday, July 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

At its simplest, it was a David vs. Goliath story about a band of scrappy Ward 1 neighborhood activists who came together to fight a former U.S. senator and his client’s proposed affordable housing project — and won.

But there’s more to the story behind the beleaguered housing project, which died a quiet death this month when the group’s attorney withdrew the proposal.

There was the controversy over The Tapestry Group’s landing the contract with the city without its first going out to bid. Then there were the activists’ evolving reasons for fighting the proposal. And the conflicting land-use documents — produced at the last minute — that threw the Las Vegas City Council into turmoil as its members were preparing to vote on the matter.

The story began several years ago, when officials of Tapestry, an Arizona-based nonprofit developer, began searching for sites in Las Vegas to develop into affordable, or “workforce,” housing.

They found three potential sites, including one near the corner of Westcliff Drive and Tenaya Way, bordered by Summerlin Parkway to the north. City officials suggested that of the three, that 15.25-acre site would work best.

In November, the City Council approved a draft development agreement with Tapestry to build 274 affordable housing units on that site — but not before a contentious council meeting in which Mayor Oscar Goodman had city staffers state for the council whether they had been pressured to sign off on the project.

What’s more, Ward 1 Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian pounded home the fact that Tapestry had gotten the deal without the city’s having conducted a competitive bidding process — so there was no sure way to know whether the city was striking an equitable deal.

In fact, the city had enacted guidelines that mandate similar projects go through a “request for proposal” bidding process. The Tapestry development was exempted because the company began negotiating with the city before the new guidelines were adopted.

Also at issue was the price Tapestry was set to pay for the land. The land had been appraised at $14.5 million, but the city agreed the group could purchase the site at a 90 percent discount.

But that was because a federal program allows for such discounts if developers use the land to build affordable housing.

In the end, the plan was opposed at the November meeting by Tarkanian and Councilmen Ricki Barlow and Steve Ross. Goodman and Councilmen Larry Brown, Gary Reese and Steve Wolfson voted in favor of the project.

There was more opposition to come.

Community opposition grew in a series of meetings with neighborhood residents. After the first such meeting, 20-year area resident Jim McFadden said, his wife, Phyllis, got hold of the sign-in sheet and began calling their neighbors.

Ultimately, McFadden and other neighbors argued that the project would have added many people and vehicles — too much “density” — to an already crowded neighborhood, making the area less safe for drivers and pedestrians, and overly noisy and polluted.

But he conceded that the fact the new residents would be “low income” was initially their biggest concern.

“Initially, I used that as a tool to rally the neighbors, to get their attention,” McFadden, a small-business man, said. “And it did.”

But after doing some research, he said, he and other residents concluded the density issue would be their biggest rallying point. Within a mile of the site, he said, were more than 3,000 condominiums, town homes and apartments that cost about the same as the units in the Tapestry development would.

“So all they would have added would be congestion,” McFadden said.

McFadden said he was emboldened by the opposition of Tarkanian, whom he spoke to about the matter. One of her community liaisons attended several of the neighborhood meetings to monitor the issue, he said.

According to an associate of former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan, now a Las Vegas lawyer and lobbyist representing Tapestry, the project would have been geared toward people making between $32,000 and $55,000 per year. People such as casino workers and Clark County schoolteachers.

The Tapestry issue came to a boil at the June 18 council meeting, during which the plan was again to be reviewed and voted on. Dozens of neighborhood residents showed up to express their concerns.

Bryan argued that the site was perfect — “If not here, where?” — and that the developers had already compromised by agreeing to scale down the proposal from 274 units to 252. “We have done everything the city has asked us to do,” he said.

Further, the need was clear, he said, citing a study showing 113,000 workers in the region in need of affordable housing.

McFadden and several others from the neighborhood argued against the project. “It’s not a question of the (type of) people it would draw, it’s a question of how many people it would draw,” McFadden said.

Then McFadden produced an unsigned 2002 letter on Las Vegas government letterhead he had discovered in the files of the local Bureau of Land Management office that seemed to promise the site in question would be turned into a park.

Bryan said he had seen a 1998 letter from city officials designating the land not for a park, but for affordable housing. Other letters saying the same thing, but dated more recently, were then brought to the council’s attention by staffers.

The confusion led to increasing calls to delay the issue till the next meeting, on July 2, so council members could digest all they had just seen and heard.

It also prompted Councilman Wolfson to say, especially in reference to the recently disclosed letters, that “this process stinks.”

Eventually, the issue was delayed, or “abeyed,” in councilspeak.

The end of this story is somewhat anticlimactic.

Before another debate could erupt on July 2, Bryan said Tapestry, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the proposed project, had decided to bow out.

He cited intractable neighborhood opposition and a recent letter from federal housing officials calling into question the discount Tapestry would have received on the land.

“I thought we were in a real tough situation,” Bryan said in a recent interview. “Anytime you get 50 or 60 neighbors and the councilwoman against you, you’ve got problems.”

McFadden said he also learned a lesson from his experience, one about small-scale democracy.

“A lot of our neighbors told us we were wasting our time,” he said, noting that the small neighborhood would be going up against a former U.S. senator.

“But we believed in the process,” he said. “The system works.”