Raising the Stakes in Vegas

The stigma of living here is starting to wear off.

Built on gambling joints and long personified by the mobsters who ran them, this neon oasis in the desert is gaining legitimacy as a residential destination.

And as the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the nation, it’s taking on the trappings of upscale America.

Who might have imagined: A master-planned community here is selling houses at a faster clip than any other in the United States.

To be sure, the development is safely tucked away at the feet of the Spring Mountains, 12 miles west of the Strip’s casinos, wedding chapels and topless bars. But its success belies the rap given this town and suggests that in search of jobs, lower taxes, housing values and a mostly pleasant climate, newcomers are discovering it is now OK to live in Sin City.

Gambling and its assorted side shows still drive this town, but as casinos have spread nationwide, retirees, families and corporate America are less hesitant to move to Las Vegas--or at least to its suburban edges.

It is there that Las Vegas--the most peculiar and thriving of the 20th century’s “new towns”--has come of age with Summerlin, its newest and largest master-planned community, a development fashioned after similar projects in Southern California.

Spread over about 35 square miles and projected at completion to be home to more than 160,000 people, it is about one-third complete. Summerlin’s population is growing at the rate of a new family every two hours, its executives boast, and accounts for about 15% of all new residential sales in the burgeoning region.

Summerlin’s housing ranges from one-bedroom apartments for about $800 a month and starter homes at just over $100,000 to five-bedroom 6,200-square-foot homes starting at $635,000 and custom-home view lots costing more than $1 million.

Summerlin’s developer is the company founded by eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, whose greatest local legacy was buying mob-owned casinos and turning them into corporate-run operations.

In the 1950s, Hughes acquired about 25,000 acres of government-owned desert west of town, in case he needed to move his California-based businesses far from the invasion-vulnerableWest Coast. In exchange, he traded even more land, in California’s Mojave Desert, to the government.

Hughes, in a legend that may be apocryphal, reportedly said he wanted to build a germ-free domed community here.

But he died in 1976 having done nothing about it, leaving his corporate successors eventually to build a residential community. Their timing could not have been better.

With neighborhood blueprints in hand just when Las Vegas’ population began booming, the Howard Hughes Corp. constructed a 3-mile offramp from the freeway heading northwest out of town. The company road led into the empty desert and was ridiculed as the “road to nowhere.”

Today, Summerlin Parkway is one of the region’s busiest arteries, carrying people to and from Summerlin--which, if not germ-free, may be as close as Las Vegas will ever get to sanitized living.

Summerlin wasn’t the first master-planned community in the valley. Local newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun purchased about 8,400 acres in nearby Henderson and made several false starts at developing the land in the 1970s. By the time he died in 1989, Green Valley had become the area’s first thoughtful array of neighborhoods, golf courses, retail and business centers, schools, parks and libraries. Though there were a few tony residential enclaves in Las Vegas, popular among casino executives and the wealthy, Green Valley nurtured a reputation as the place for local professionals to raise their families.

Today, Green Valley is virtually built out, and new neighborhoods have sprung up elsewhere in Henderson. In one collection of gated communities called Seven Hills, developed by a Greenspun Corp. subsidiary, American Nevada Corp., opulent custom houses sit on hillside lots offering spectacular, sweeping views of the entire Las Vegas valley.

Among the single largest builders in the Las Vegas valley is the Del Webb Corp., which recently announced its acquisition by Michigan-based Pulte Homes. It was the first to build in Summerlin, creating one of its signature Sun City communities and selling all of its 7,778 houses by 1998 in a home-buying frenzy that surprised even Del Webb officials.

It built a second Sun City in Henderson, which has since sold out, and its newest development, called Anthem, which features an unprecedented third Sun City in the same market area, ranked sixth in the nation in 2000 for the number of houses sold, according to Robert Charles Lesser & Co., an independent real estate advisory firm.

But most eyes remain on Summerlin, which for four consecutive years has been the best-selling master-planned community in the nation.

“The community continues to reap the benefits of both an insightful master plan and the staggering growth of the Las Vegas area over the past few years,” said Gadi Kaufmann, CEO of Robert Charles Lesser & Co.

Smaller subdivisions continue to crawl even farther into the desert. The federal Bureau of Land Management has begun selling at auction thousands of acres in North Las Vegas, paving the way for still more growth. The successful bidder was a partnership between Del Webb and American Nevada Corp.

But Las Vegas has never before seen--and probably won’t again--the likes of Summerlin.

A. Somer Hollingsworth, president of the Nevada Development Authority, which recruits business to move here, said Summerlin adds credibility to his sales pitches.

“People see Las Vegas as five miles of hotels and casinos, but there’s another side of Las Vegas,” he said. “When I take people out to Green Valley, and now to Summerlin, they’re shocked” to find housing comparable to expensive subdivisions in Southern California.

About a third of Summerlin’s residents move here from elsewhere in Las Vegas and the state, about 15% come from California and about 50% come from elsewhere in the United States, the developer has found.

To some of them, Summerlin may look somewhat familiar.

After all, Summerlin was inspired largely, company officials say, by Irvine Ranch, Mission Viejo and Rancho Margarita, which helped define Orange County.

In fact, little sets Summerlin apart from its predecessors elsewhere, from Columbia, Md., to the Woodlands, outside Houston, to Rancho Bernardo in San Diego.

“The development of a mass residential housing market in Las Vegas is almost as interesting as the development of the casino industry there, because Las Vegas is essentially a desert,” said Mark Gottdiener, an urban planning and sociology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1999 he wrote “Las Vegas--the Social Production of an All-American City.”

“The federal Bureau of Land Management considers most of Nevada a wasteland,” he said, “and it was quite a trick to turn wasteland into an attractive place for people to live.”

To finance the project, the company sold several thousand acres of Hughes’ initial land holdings to other developers, to start extending city services in Summerlin’s direction and to infuse the company with cash to finance Summerlin’s own infrastructure.

To acquire quick name recognition for its new community, the company enticed the PGA to collaborate in a private golf course, the Tournament Players Club. It was the course on which, in 1996, Tiger Woods won his first professional championship. What to call the place? A Hughes biography showed the answer in the family tree: Summerlin is the maiden name of one of Hughes’ grandmothers.

“We wanted a substantial name, not just another real estate name like El Rancho Heights or Western Hills,” said John Goolsby, the company’s CEO from 1988 to 1998. “Summerlin sounded right to all of us.”

By 1989 Las Vegas was booming, thanks in part to a new generation of mega-resort casinos starting with the Mirage. Thousands of new jobs were being created, and people began streaming to southern Nevada.

The existence of Green Valley and the advent of Summerlin dovetailed with the construction of high-end casinos, said Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Master-planned communities are a part of the normalization of Las Vegas to the rest of the world, the same way that Wall Street investments in casinos attracted people’s attention,” he said. Green Valley and Summerlin, he said, “transformed both the geography and the demography of southern Nevada.”

Mark Fine, a real estate developer who had been hired by his former father-in-law, Greenspun, to oversee his Green Valley development, was hired in 1990 to be president of Summerlin, and he oversaw the new community’s master blueprint.

“The hotel resorts were now hiring higher-quality people, and they had to be shown that they could enjoy a quality of life in Las Vegas,” Fine said. “And now we could show them Summerlin. It was bringing Las Vegas to the next level.”

Summerlin advanced quickly through the planning and approval hoops, partly because city and county bureaucrats didn’t quibble very much over the plans, said Jory Stewart, a planner who worked on Summerlin for the city of Las Vegas and, now, for Clark County’s planning department.

“They were trying to accomplish the very thing we wanted to do throughout the county: create a place where people could live, work and play in the same geographic area,” said Stewart, who later moved to Summerlin.

It helped that Summerlin simply took pages out of the master-plan blueprints that had proved successful elsewhere.

“We visited as many master-planned communities as we could, to borrow their ideas,” said Goolsby. “There’s nothing unique about Summerlin, except that it was unique for Las Vegas.”

To help pay for the construction of streets and other public works, the company adopted a technique common in Southern California: It established a separate assessment district, charging residential buyers hundreds of dollars annually to pay for Summerlin’s infrastructure. Besides the requisite schools, parks and carefully trimmed retail centers, Summerlin is home to such businesses as Household Finance, TRW and Bank of America financial service centers.

The area provides about 13,000 jobs, with 30,000 more anticipated, saving workers a sometimes miserable commute to and from Las Vegas proper, which requires them to drive into the sun during morning and evening commutes.

“Until now, this has been a factory town--and the factory was on the Strip,” said Jim Veltman, who was hired in 1989 to help develop the initial master plan. “When we originally estimated the amount of land to put aside for business, we took everyone’s estimate and doubled it. It’s worked like a champ, and we probably should have tripled it.”

(In 1996, the Howard Hughes Corp., which had been held by Hughes’ heirs, was acquired for $520 million by the Rouse Co., based in Columbia, Md., one of the largest publicly held real estate companies in the nation.)

Today, Summerlin features a library with performing arts center, a private school of ballet, southern Nevada’s first Hindu temple, golf courses, parks, ball fields and 100 miles of trails constructed along desert washes.

Still to be built: a “town center” with an eclectic mix of hotel, high-density residential, office, retail, entertainment and park space. The notion: A person can live, work, play and shop without getting into a simmering-hot vehicle--unless he wants to visit the Strip.

But for that matter, Summerlin is already home to one casino and five more are on the drawing boards.

This is still, after all, Las Vegas.