Big NLV project down, not out

Steve Marcus

Gary Goett, president of the Olympia Group, developer of Park Highlands, says more than 70 percent of the infrastructure for the project’s first phase is finished. Original plans called for the homes to be completed in late 2008. Home building now is expected to follow completion of the roads by September 2010, Goett says.

By Mike Trask

Friday, Feb. 27, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Elkhorn Road, a sleepy two-lane street cutting alongside a grove of freshly built homes in North Las Vegas, is where the wave of housing development broke.

On one side, a brick wall encases neighborhoods filled with new homes that sold for $500,000 three years ago.

On the other side three hulking yellow earth movers are parked on a 600-acre vacant lot, caged in by a fence.

That’s where — if everything were swell — construction would begin on Park Highlands, an ambitious plan for 15,000 homes by the Olympia Group.

That’s not to say Park Highlands is a dead deal. It is not.

Gary Goett, president of the Olympia Group, said more than 70 percent of the infrastructure is completed for the first phase. Design work has begun for the second part, the 2,000 acres east of Aliante Parkway and north of the Las Vegas Beltway.

But for the moment, like so much else in the Las Vegas Valley, the massive Park Highlands project is idling on the runway. It’s one of the largest visible reminders that, for the first time in many years, few new homes are on the horizon. (Another example: Kyle Canyon Gateway, a proposed 14,000-home project on 1,700 acres that was foreclosed on in November.)

The Clark County School District has delayed plans to build an elementary school in Park Highlands for at least a year and city capital improvement plans place Park Highlands on the back burner.

Last summer the developers declared that work on Park Highlands “continues on despite the downturn in the economy.”

Less than 10 months later the downturn caught up and put a stick in the spokes of the project.

“Obviously we’ve changed our schedule because of the market,” Goett said this week. “We’ve slowed down the project.”

Olympia bid $639 million for the land at a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2005. Work on the project began in January 2007 with the expectation that residents would start moving in by the end of 2008.

The new time line calls for roads to be finished by September 2010, paving the way for home construction, Goett said.

Both Boyd Gaming and Station Casinos own land in the eastern part of Park Highlands, but North Las Vegas will not approve casinos until it completes a gaming market study.

Aliante Station opened late last year about four miles from the Boyd and Station sites.

Maryann Ustick, assistant city manager for development, said the city accounted for the absence of tax revenue from Park Highlands when it projected a nearly $30 million budget shortfall over the next two years.

“It’s a major development,” she said. “When we have big projects it’s a boon for the city. When we don’t have big projects it can mean lean times.”

So for now the city floats on, waiting to catch the next wave.