Las Vegas housing project near rural area clears hurdle
The Clark County Planning Commission this week gave the green light to a housing project that concerned neighbors over its potential effect on their rural pocket of Las Vegas.
The Planning Commission on Tuesday approved plans by Richmond American Homes for a 99-lot subdivision on 19 acres just south of Blue Diamond Road at Tenaya Way. As announced at the meeting, the Clark County Commission is slated to consider the project, for final action, on Nov. 19.
Multiple neighbors — including the famed magician Teller, who has lived in the area for almost 30 years — told the Las Vegas Review-Journal ahead of this week’s meeting that they worried the project would bring an influx of traffic to the quiet, surrounding community, which has horses, chickens, stretches of open land, and homes on large lots.
Neighbors voiced their concerns to the Planning Commission as well.
“We do not want this suburban project to ruin our rural character,” local resident Cathy Fry told the panel.
‘This is a growing county’
Builders put up other housing tracts over the past several years in the surrounding area, a designated Rural Neighborhood Preservation zone. They built homes on roughly half-acre lots, given the area’s land-use rules that prevent suburban-style projects with houses crammed together on small parcels.
A 5-acre section of Richmond American’s project site falls under those rules and would have nine, large lots in compliance with those policies.
But the balance of the site, closer to Blue Diamond, falls under different land-use rules, and the builder wants 90 houses there.
As part of its proposal, Richmond American sought a zoning change and a changed land-use category for most of the site.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Commissioner Michael Roitman said that his family moved to Las Vegas from Reno in 1988. They lived at Desert Inn Road and Rainbow Boulevard, and as he described it, they were at the far edge of town at a time when Southern Nevada’s population was much smaller than it is today.
Back then, everything west of Rainbow was open desert, with coyotes, horse trails and the like, he said.
“It would be nice if we could keep all those things in our backyards forever, but this is a growing county,” he said. “And so, homes are gonna get built.”
New access
Land-use specialist Stephanie Gronauer, representing Richmond American, told the commission that the Nevada Department of Transportation has approved a curb-cut in the median along Blue Diamond. This will allow westbound drivers to turn south off the thoroughfare to the project site, meaning they won’t have to drive through the surrounding residential area to access it.
She also said that while neighbors want to protect a now-quiet street along the southern edge of the project, this street, Meranto Avenue, is a public road, and there is no reason that the surrounding neighbors have more rights to it than anyone else.
Teller, the mononymous, silent-on-stage half of longtime Vegas headliners Penn & Teller, previously described Meranto as a horse-trail-type street with little traffic.
Gronauer, a partner with law firm Kaempfer Crowell, also indicated that under the current land-use rules, the bulk of the project site could have mixed-use development, including an apartment project with far more housing units than what her client wants to build.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
