LETTER: Clark County commissioner downplays local sprawl

Clark County Commissioner Jim Gibson’s brush-off of concerns over sprawl in the valley (“Gibson: Sprawl nonissue in housing crisis solve,” Oct. 26 Review-Journal) may make him loved by the area’s developer clans (as it foreshadows his support for handing over cheap land to those builders), but it does nothing to solve local housing affordability problems and would dramatically worsen the water shortage we’re already facing.

Those who think developers are going to build cheap housing on any new lands opened to them outside Las Vegas’ current footprint have their heads buried deeply in our very dry desert sands. There are a great many vacant parcels of land still available within the Valley, but developers aren’t keen on building on those lots because they can’t build and sell multimillion-dollar, single-family homes nor million-dollar condo units there. That’s where the big profits flow for them, and you can bet that is what will end up being built on those shimmering hillsides just out of reach to them if Clark County allows it.

And contrary to Mr. Gibson’s white-washing, sprawling development is exactly the big threat to our ability to provide water to our residents. Population growth is not a threat in and of itself because most of the water being used in the area is captured and recycled. But the bigger the development footprint, the more water is lost.

Fill in the vacant lots first. Then we can talk about expanding the valley’s footprint.