Barbara Carter and Myrtle Wilson, longtime residents of Windsor Park in North Las Vegas, speak to the press on the hardship caused by the sinking land their neighborhood is set upon Wed. Oct 4, 2023.
Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023 | 6:27 p.m.
Windsor Park residents are seeking answers from the City of North Las Vegas about how the remaining funds intended to help them relocate from their deteriorating neighborhood 25 years ago have been managed.
According to state Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched an audit in March to determine what happened to those funds.
"It has not been clear to us, as of Oct. 4, what has happened in this process," Neal said at a press conference Wednesday.
The 48-acre, historically Black subdivision near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Carey Avenue was built between in the mid-1960s and had 241 homes during an era of housing segregation. Aggressive groundwater pumping throughout the Las Vegas Valley before 1971 caused the ground to sink, a condition called subsidence, throughout the city.
No area was harder hit than the land beneath the neighborhood, where remaining houses are tilted at extreme angles and foundations, sidewalks and streets are warped and cracked, wreaking havoc with buried gas, water and sewer lines.
In the 1990s, North Las Vegas leveraged community block fund grants and a partnership with Fannie Mae for $14.4 million to cover relocation efforts.
One relocation strategy was to offer families $50,000 to $100,000 for a new beginning. A majority of the neighborhood’s estimated 241 original families took the money and moved. About 90 families elected to stay, and some used relocation money to rehabilitate their homes.
But because some families did not take the money to move out of the area, at least $2.5 million in federal funds remain, said State Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas.
Senate Bill 450, which was signed into law by Gov. Joe Lombardo this year, lays out a $37 million plan to develop a new neighborhood near Windsor Park for the remaining residents to relocate to and requires the city to contribute the remaining federal funds.
Kathleen Richards, a public information officer for the City of North Las Vegas, said the remaining $2.5 million will be transferred to the state after the Nevada Housing Division sets up the new relocation program.
“The city is eager to transfer the remaining federal funds to the state and is merely waiting for the state to establish the program, as required by SB450,” she said.
Neal said the city has dodged her requests for answers about the funding, including in April during a committee meeting at the Nevada Legislature on Senate Bill 450. She noted that in 2015, nobody moved from the neighborhood or used city funding to fix their property, yet the city’s budget showed about $720,000 spent from the Windsor Park allocation.
North Las Vegas Finance Director William Harty said some funding went to demolition costs and delinquent taxes in years that no homeowners received payments.
Neal said the HUD audit is now being handled internally by the city — which Neal says is consulting with Clark County.
Richards contended that’s untrue, and there is no audit underway by HUD, the city or the county.
Leaving is an emotionally fraught prospect for the remaining residents, who helped build or were born into a close-knit community that served as a haven from de facto housing segregation.
Annie Walker, one of the original homeowners, said residents have been asking what happened to the remainder of that funding for the last 25 years.
Myrtle Wilson, who moved to Windsor Park in 1965, said she and her husband were living in a studio apartment with two children before they heard about the new subdivision. With few options available to Black residents and $400 down payments, it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.
“It was like we were suffering some kind of plague or something,” Wilson said. “It was total segregation.”
She said though the neighborhood was originally intended for Black residents, the demographics have shifted over time.
Barbara Carter, who has lived in Windsor Park since 1966, said construction on I-15 cut through what was originally considered Las Vegas’ west side, fracturing the Black community further and eliminating more of their housing options.
“(Windsor Park) was a necessity,” Carter said.
Pamela Neal, who inherited her Windsor Park home from her father, said Wednesday that the city has had 25 years to answer these questions.
“All we are asking for is the money that you owe the people of Windsor Park that came from Fannie Mae,” Pamela Neal said.
