The battle for Red Rock Canyon is lost. The national conservation area is still there, still breathtaking, still red—but it’s increasingly hemmed in by encroaching urban sprawl.

It’s tempting to pin the blame on developer Jim Rhodes—who, owing to a protracted legal battle and some unforced errors by the Clark County Commission, now has the go-ahead to build 3,500 homes on the site of a former gypsum mine near Blue Diamond, which is just under nine miles away from Red Rock’s visitor center. But the melancholy truth is that we lost Red Rock several years ago, when nearby Bonnie Springs Ranch—seven miles down the road—was leveled to make way for a luxury gated housing development.

No, that’s not right. We lost Red Rock in the early 2000s, when the I-215 Beltway was paved just six miles away from the scenic loop. No, no, wait—we lost Red Rock in the late 1990s, when the runaway growth of the Las Vegas Valley crept so close to Red Rock that a beltway connector became not only desirable, but necessary.

In any case, that spectacular natural beauty is now just another address on State Route 159. Standing among those ancient sandstone peaks and ravines by day, you can hear the traffic whizzing between Summerlin and Blue Diamond Road. At night, the canyon’s once-spectacular blanket of stars is diminished by the pervasive glare of streetlights reflecting off city pavement.

Red Rock Canyon is a good metaphor for Valley sprawl, but it’s far from the only one. The increased strain on our water supply has largely spelled the end of residential lawns and decorative grass. More asphalt and concrete covering the desert floor means intemperately hotter summers and worsening flash floods. Longtime residents used to brag that they could drive the length of the Valley in 20 minutes; today, it takes an hour or more due to increased traffic and the sheer size of our city grid.

Las Vegas has become unwieldy, broiling, borderline impassable. New residents continue to pour in, further straining resources and exacerbating a housing shortfall that, according to recent figures from the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), has risen upward of 78,000 affordable rental units.

And the state-level plan to solve these problems seems to be to make the city even bigger: On March 18 of this year, Governor Joe Lombardo sent a letter to President Biden formally requesting the re-allocation of Nevada’s federally controlled land for private development. “The lack of attainable workforce housing is taking a toll on Nevadans’ quality of life, hurting our ability to expand our workforce,” he wrote. “[We] need to access the land that is within [our] borders.”

So—let’s do it, right? Keep building south toward Jean and the state line; keep building north toward, I guess, Reno. Acres of single-family homes, strip malls and the occasional park or school for variety. And the workforce living in those homes can commute to work, driving 30 miles each way on an I-15 jam-packed with locals and tourists, to a hospitality job that barely covers the essentials.

Sarcasm aside, the answer isn’t out there in untouched desert. It’s within our existing city footprint. It’s in our empty lots, in our foundering strip malls and shopping centers, and especially in our too-large parking lots.

According to a study by 501(c)(3) advocacy group Parking Reform Network, some 33% of Downtown Las Vegas is off-street surface parking. Again: Nearly one-third of our city core is asphalt parking lots. We need to take a critical and pragmatic view of the Vegas we’ve made so far, tear down its wasteful parts and rebuild them with multilevel housing, walkable streets and transportation options that get us out of our cars.

“We must have an effective urban growth boundary. We cannot just simply keep increasing, sprawling more and more into the vulnerable ecosystem of the Mojave Desert, and keep increasing the footprint of the city,” says Steffen Lehmann, professor and former executive director of UNLV’s School of Architecture, and an internationally recognized authority on the kind sustainable urban development Vegas needs. “How big do you want Las Vegas to be? Now you have 20 miles east and west and 30 miles north and south, from North Las Vegas down to Henderson. From one end to the other, you have a huge, huge footprint, and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions come with that. How much bigger do you want to grow?

“I’ve been discussing this with the planning people at Clark County, and they say, ‘No, we have a growth boundary.’ But it’s not effective. The growth boundary is a joke; it’s ridiculous. It’s so large, and so far, away, that we can keep growing, the way we’re doing right now, for another 100 years ... And when you drive around, you find a lot of inner-city parcels sitting there empty, and you wonder, why has nobody built on it? … Why don’t we first densify and build on all those empty, vacant lots inside the city?”

If this metro is to survive its growing pains, our piecemeal town must become a more realistic, more compact city. We’ll do that not just by accessing the land within our borders, but by using the land that’s already within our built footprint. The key is urban infill.

FIRST, ABOUT THAT HOUSING SHORTAGE

“Affordable housing” may not be what you think it is. For a Valley rental property to qualify as “affordable” within someone’s individual means, it needs to cost no more than roughly 30% of your take-home pay, says Aaron Sheets, CEO of HopeLink of Southern Nevada, a resource center dedicated to lifting Valley families out of poverty.

“An average two-bedroom is well over $2,000 a month now. That means you may have to gross over $6,000 [monthly]. We don’t have a lot of those jobs in this town,” he says. “The [National Low Income] Housing Coalition did a study showing what you need to afford a studio, a one, a two, a three or a four-bedroom … and to get a four-bedroom rental for a family, you need to make $98,000 [annually]. Then they show the jobs that we have available, up to a senior engineer position at a casino: $80,000 a year. They’re not matching up. That’s a big, systemic problem.”

It’s a safe bet that a good number of people reading these words fall short of the one-third income window. According to that NLIHC study, only 20% of Nevada’s renter households fall below the 30%-of-income threshold. And while it’s easy to assume that things are the same all over the U.S., the NLIHC further observes that only 16 out of 50 states require an hourly wage above $30 to afford a two-bedroom rental. Nevada is one, as is California, Arizona and Oregon. But Utah, New Mexico, Texas and more than two dozen other states need only a $20-$30 hourly wage for that same apartment. (I count only six states under $20.)

“The pressures on budget, the increase in rents, the increases in basic needs, goods, food and utilities … everything has gone up,” Sheets says. “Incomes have not kept pace, especially when you talk about our seniors and our fixed-income folks; they’re the ones that we think are particularly at risk. We’re trying to devise programming that can pay that gap—the difference between [how much] the rent has gone up and their income hasn’t gone up—until we have a better solution, or until maybe some affordable housing actually gets built.”

A quick side note: Our Valley’s rising population, insufficient housing inventory and idiosyncratic, hospitality-dominated job market aren’t the only factors driving rental prices so far ahead of wages and inflation. Private equity firms are gobbling up Valley residential properties at a brisk rate. For example, Dallas-based firm Invitation Homes bought up 264 Clark County rental properties only last summer. In a market dominated by a steadily dwindling number of landlords, renters can only lose ground.

The good news is that there are good people working on the problem. Organizations like HopeLink and the nonprofit Nevada Housing Coalition are fighting to bridge the divide between housing stability and instability. The NHC is working the problem through advocacy, educating and collaborating with community stakeholders, and making policy recommendations at the state level. And the NHC’s executive director, Maurice Page, says that while Las Vegas’ housing situation is bad, it’s far from hopeless.

“We’re a long way off, but we have made some headway—most notably with the Home Means Nevada Initiative, where the monies from [2021’s American Rescue Plan Act] came into the state, which was about $500 million. That money went towards the development of about 3,000 affordable housing units over the last couple of years,” Page says. “We have also been able to create Assembly Bill 310, the Nevada Supportive Housing Development Fund, which is a one-time fund of $32.2 million which will go towards new [housing] developments and providing supportive services and wraparound services to individuals severely burdened by the housing crisis.”

Given all this, it’s perfectly natural for Nevada to petition the federal government for more land to build on. It’s a rational expectation, at least on paper: More land means we can build more housing, and more housing means lower prices. For the moment, we’ll put aside our concerns about another, Valley-filling building spree—including, but not limited to, gridlock, pollution, our dwindling water supply and our virtually nonexistent mass rapid transit network. Instead, we’ll circle back to the question we started with: Why wait for a federal horse-trade when there are dead strip malls, defunct motels and ocean-size parking lots ready for residential re-use?

“What I’m finding is that it’s not as easy as ‘there’s an old hotel over there, why can’t we repurpose it?’,” Sheets says. “Most of those places are owned by private citizens, not by a jurisdiction or something that could greenlight a project like that. Sometimes they’re out of state, and they’re leaving it empty for a reason. Or the property isn’t zoned for it. Or the neighbors might not want it, you know, the NIMBY ["not in my backyard"] thing. Our best and the brightest are working on it, but it is quite a process. The good thing is that people aren’t in denial that there’s a problem now, so they’re trying.”

“Typically, [rezoning is] fairly easy, provided that the uses that are going in are compatible,” says Marco Velotta, chief sustainability officer for the City of Las Vegas and a project planning manager helping to implement the city’s 2050 master plan (which is online at tinyurl.com/2unj8tk4, if you’re curious.) “You’re not putting in a rendering plant where a convenience store used to be, right? That would not be compatible. The Planning Commission and City Council would probably say no to that. But if you’re talking about ground floor retail plus residential above it, then, yeah, that would be something that would be fairly easy to do.”

“It comes down to three things: land, labor and lumber,” Page says. Meaning: Getting that federal land is important, but so is increasing the labor force that will build that housing, and sourcing the materials needed for construction, which are going up in price. “You have to look at zoning, you have to look at development spaces, and where those opportunities will lay going forward.

“And we have to look at our infrastructure, as well,” Page adds. “Transportation, education, health care, things of that nature. It’s not just a matter of us just building up houses, but it’s also about the infrastructure all the way around.”

And if that infrastructure already exists because you’re building within an existing city footprint, hey, bonus. The good thing about Vegas’ infrastructure is that it, too, can be expanded and re-imagined. The road work that’s consumed Vegas’ city core for several years may be disruptive and infuriating, but it’s resulting in new underground utilities, bus and bike lanes, wider sidewalks … the exact stuff you need to have in place when a developer decides to build within a revitalized neighborhood, or on a maintenance yard formerly used for refueling freight trains.

A REAL-LIFE URBAN INFILL SUCCESS STORY

Several years back, a family declared their intentions to relocate to Las Vegas from the Bay Area. They didn’t have housing to move into, so Clark County government officials, Southern Nevada private enterprise and other local stakeholders vaulted into action—finding them a prime piece of infill land near the resort corridor, securing speedy financing for them through local taxes, incentivizing contractors to build quickly, and using federal monies to improve the infrastructure surrounding the site, a process that continues to this day.

And just like that, the Raiders moved in, bringing a bunch of their Oakland friends. They seem happy enough, though considering what we paid, it’d be nice if they won more often.

Fortunately, there are even better examples of urban infill within the City of Las Vegas. “There are projects that are coming in the Arts District, in Symphony Park and in Fremont East, where really underutilized land [now] has a higher and better use,” says Velotta.

Symphony Park is a prime example, he says. As recently as the late 1990s, the neighborhood was a 61-acre brownfield contaminated with petroleum, solvents and assorted metals. Today, it’s home to the Smith Center, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, World Market Center and a steadily growing number of upscale apartments and townhomes. Soon, a standalone art museum will join the mix.

“Symphony Park could be a phenomenal sort of live-work-play neighborhood in an urban core that Las Vegas really doesn’t have,” said Patrick Brennan of Aspen Heights Partners, the developer who built Symphony Park’s Parc Haven apartments, in a 2022 interview with the Weekly. “We’re such a suburban community at this point. But to have a truly walkable neighborhood and an urban core five minutes from the Strip, but outside of the Strip, would be a wonderful thing.”

More housing is springing up in the city core even now. The land once occupied by the Showboat Hotel and Casino on Boulder Highway is now home to a 344-unit apartment complex, Showboat Park. Southern Land Company, the developer of Symphony Park’s Auric apartments, is currently building a 337-unit midrise on a long-vacant Arts District plot. Midrise housing with ground-floor retail is appearing in Chinatown, in Paradise, around UNLV—and even in predominately suburban Summerlin and Henderson.

“There’s a lot of opportunity sites throughout the community,” Velotta says, noting that a whopping 3,000 sites within the City of Las Vegas have been identified for redevelopment over the next 30 years. And circling back to the statistic I dropped a while back, it’s not at all surprising when he suggests that many of those sites used to have cars parked on them. Considering that we’re on the verge of having electric cars sophisticated enough to park themselves with mathematical precision after dropping us at the front door of Costco, it’s probable that even more parking lots will become obsolete in the next three decades.

“Parking lots themselves are a tremendous waste of space,” Velotta says. “And you know, because we’re such a ‘young city’ that grew up in the auto age and didn’t really have a traditional streetcar system or rail-based transit system … there’s more than enough asphalt to go around.”

THE FUTURE IS COMPACT

UNLV’s Lehmann doesn’t often use the word “density” in describing walkable cities. He prefers the word “compactness,” and now, so do I. “Density is a much-charged topic. If you say the D word, everybody jumps up and says, ‘No! I’m against it,’” Lehmann says, chuckling. “‘Compactness’ sounds more reasonable to people.”

He’s had ample opportunity to think about it. Lehmann has written 24 books about sustainable urbanization. His latest, Designing for the Desert—subtitled Stories of Co-existence, Building and Living in an Extreme Climate—will come out in six months or so, and Lehmann seems moderately amazed at what he’s discovered in the writing of it.

“There is a real knowledge gap,” he says. “Even architects don’t know much about how to design for the desert, and we are here in the middle of the Mojave. … [Designing for the Desert] is picking up on all those things that we have known for millennia—not centuries, but millennia. People have always lived at the edge of the desert, even in the desert; the Bedouins did so, and they were very resourceful, very resilient, and they knew how to survive with very little water in extreme heat. We lost that; we forgot that.”

Lehmann’s ideas for the Las Vegas Valley cover a lot of ground—perhaps not as much ground as our metro’s gargantuan footprint, but enough that I need to summarize, rather than unpack them. He stresses the need for continuous shade on our streets to mollify the heat island effect that’s making our summer days even more dangerous. He quotes the late architect Antoine Predock, who designed the now-shuttered Las Vegas Central Library and children's museum: “If you want to build in the desert, you need three things: shade, shade and shade.”

In Lehmann’s view, paving over the Valley’s permeable soil and favoring shade-poor, water-guzzling palms over thicker native greenery is a recipe for disaster. He also suggests that we try going up one story. Maybe even a few stories, if we’re feeling it.

“We should not build one-story buildings; it’s just a total waste of land,” he says. “And I’m not talking about building 30-story towers; that’s nonsense, that’s not sustainable. But if we increase from one story to two stories, or to three—you know, that’s not outrageously high. If you go to LA, it’s very common. Los Angeles has made space in its building code for densification of the granny flat in their backyard, or building housing on top of garages, parking structures and so on.”

Lehmann also suggests we streamline our building codes (“This huge, inflated bureaucracy … it’s just becoming too expensive to build, too complicated”), employ modular construction techniques that allow for speed and versatility while reducing waste (and coincidentally, modular parts fabricated off-site helps solve the “lumber” portion of Maurice Page’s three-part equation), create many, many more shaded walkable spaces (“Medical research shows that walking is extremely good for your brain”), and take full advantage of our Valley’s relentless sun (see sidebar, page 24).

Implementing these changes, he says, can “occupy us for five to 10 years. And then we do a pulse check. Are we going the right way? Are we becoming more sustainable?”

In the spirit of Lehmann’s “compactness,” I’d like to substitute “sanity” for “sustainability” in imagining the future of this Valley. Imagine the sanity gained by moving a third of Vegas’ commuters onto light rail or bus rapid transit, clearing those cars off our roads. Imagine the sanity and peace of mind in knowing that everyone in the Valley who needs a place to live can have one, and enough money left over from paying rent and bills to support local businesses. Imagine shopping, dining or having fun underneath a canopy of drought-resistant Mesquite, Palo Verde or Desert Willow trees that shave degrees off our insane summertime temperatures.

That sanity is something we can take for ourselves, but not if we build it so far away from us that it may as well not exist at all. Our young city is in a unique position right now: Relative to other, older metros around the U.S., we have ample room in our city core to build, and lots of untouched nature around us. We have it in our power to make the best of both.

“They call this urbanized stretch from LA all the way down to San Diego ‘the 100-mile city,’ because there used to be a landscape break between them, but that’s gone. It’s all built up,” Lehmann says. “I don’t think we want that. I think we really could really do the much better solution—find our own way, learn from other cities, avoid their mistakes and create a next-generation model. The desert city of the future.”

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