LETTER: Houses? We don’t need no stinking houses!

In his May 11 letter, Ray Kolander said it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out one reason there is an affordable housing shortage in Las Vegas Valley. The federal government owns 80 percent of the land. He goes on the say that Rep. Mark Amodei’s proposal to sell 93,000 acres of public land would be welcome and push housing costs down.

Let’s say 50,000 of those 93,000 acres were developed for housing. Conservatively, four houses per acre would equate to 200,000 new homes. With an average usage of 130,000 gallons of water per home in valley, that comes out to 26 billion gallons a year.

We’ve already been forced to remove beautiful green grass and replace it with rocks. With more housing pulling water out of Lake Mead, the residents of Las Vegas will continue to be impacted by a shortage of water. Where will this valuable resource come from? Nevada’s allocation of water is being reduced each year. Maybe this is where the rocket science comes to play.

If we are serious about water conservation, we would not be looking to continue building houses at the current rate — which for the last few years is around 12,000 per year.