LETTER: Las Vegas needs more condos
‘The most affordable for-sale housing in Southern Nevada are condominiums, which had a median list price of $265,000 per unit in April 2025. That is way lower than the $370,000 median for townhomes or the $475,000 median for single-family homes.
From the Clark County Department of Comprehensive Planning Data, there were 82,089 total condominiums that existed in Clark County in 2009, but only 78,273 condominiums that existed 14 years later in 2023. That is a 4.6 percent decline over that 14-year period.
During the same period, the number of single-family homes increased by 103,924, or by 22.2 percent. Townhomes increased by 11,010, or 28.5 percent. There must be something different about affordable condominiums to explain whey they are not being built anymore — or at least not being built at the same rates as single-family housing.
My opinion is that construction defect litigation is one of the main reasons that developers and insurers have not been interested in building affordable condominiums. Could it be that the shortages of affordable housing in Southern Nevada would be largely avoidable if the construction-defect litigation industry didn’t exist?
If affordable housing is really important, is it possible to make the construction-defect litigation industry, made possible under section 40 of the Nevada Revised Statutes, go away so that more affordable condominiums could once again be getting built in our communities? This might make it possible for younger people — our children and grandchildren — to be buyers and owners of affordable starter housing, like many of us were in earlier generations.
