Ready or not, Las Vegas Valley will continue to grow

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For many years, I pitched my tent in the small but feisty slow-growth camp. I was alarmed by the chaotic growth of Las Vegas in the '90s and concerned about the negative effects: school crowding, traffic congestion, air pollution, lack of police protection, etc. Above all, I felt we were just trying to keep up with the bulldozers rather than doing real urban and regional planning.

I wrote newspaper columns in which I pondered various ways to slow the swelling: limiting building permits, withholding water permits, placing a moratorium on hotel construction -- whatever method could be devised to apply the brakes on this runaway train.

But a few years ago I changed my mind. In an interview, veteran local development consultant Greg Borgel made a simple yet profound point that, for whatever reason, I hadn't fully appreciated until he explained it: "We couldn't slow the growth if we wanted to," Borgel told me. "We can't keep people from moving here. We could limit the issuance of building permits. That won't keep people from moving here. They'll just double up in houses or live in RV parks or something. ... The government didn't vote to invite these people to move here. It's the way it happens if you are a successful community."

You might ask, what about Boulder City? Apples and oranges. A Boulder City ordinance limiting the issuance of building permits keeps the growth rate at or below 3 percent each year. And it works for Boulder City, which is striving to maintain its small-town America lifestyle.

But Las Vegas is not Boulder City. Boulder City does not have the world's largest tourism industry at its center, and it doesn't have thousands of people rolling up in U-Hauls every month expecting to find a good job and a new life.

If you agree with Borgel's market-based perspective, then the next logical camp to migrate to is called "smart growth." Smart growth means managing and designing development to ensure that proper roads, schools, environmental protections and public facilities are in place to maintain a high quality of life for the growing population.

This is easier said than done, of course. The Las Vegas Valley remains a place where developers and home builders generally have the upper hand over county commissioners and city council members. It's a place where neighborhoods are built first and roads, schools and other public services come second. It's a place where jails are jampacked and child protective services are woefully underfunded.

Still, in recent years I've been encouraged by tidbits of progress.

Neighborhood and regional parks are far more common today than they were just 10 years ago. Attractive street landscaping is required. School construction is basically keeping up with the student influx. Historic preservation is a reality in small pockets. Water conservation is really happening. Flagging downtowns in Las Vegas and Henderson are being revived. Cultural institutions are growing and thriving.

In short, the community is maturing in positive ways -- in part because of conscious efforts to manage growth, in part a natural result of demands from a more sophisticated populace.

And the growth isn't going to stop anytime soon. Las Vegas is a product of massive, long-term population shifts. Millions of people are moving west, thousands of Californians are moving east and millions of immigrants are entering the country. These trends are simply beyond our meager power to control.

In addition, the nation as a whole is growing. In October, the media was atwitter over the arrival of the 300 millionth resident. Commentators far and wide weighed in on whether this was a good or bad thing. This momentous event served as a jumping-off point for debates over everything from illegal immigration to the evils of sprawl.

The Wall Street Journal took the issue a step further, noting that demographers and economists are really worked up about what the country will look like when we witness the arrival of the 400 millionth American in about 35 years.

Just don't tell me we don't have enough room for 400 million people. It's not true. According to the Journal, the United States has 86 people per square mile today. That's a small fraction of the density of most other countries.

I recently made an 1,800-mile drive from Las Vegas to Madison, Wis. The route took us through Utah, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa, and I can assure you there is all kinds of space out there. Long stretches of Nebraska and Iowa are almost as sparsely populated as long stretches of Nevada. Getting people to move there, however, is another matter.

Richard Dooling wrote a column for The New York Times in November in which he suggested to economically stressed people living on the coasts that they consider moving inland, specifically to his hometown of Omaha, Neb. Dooling notes that in Omaha, traffic is light, the public schools are excellent and the people are friendly.

Dooling wrote the column partly as a gag, but the truth is that economically vibrant inland cities such as Omaha, Boise and Austin are thriving and will continue to grow in coming decades.

Las Vegas is projected to double in size over the next 20 years. We'll have about 3 million people at that point, making this one of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation.

It's not something we can prevent by limiting building permits or hotel rooms. It's a waste of effort, I've come to believe, to advocate for government measures to slow growth. Instead, we must get better at managing that growth to improve the quality of life and help the community mature.We also need to get more serious about planning for the growth of satellite communities such as Pahrump, Overton-Logandale, Mesquite and Coyote Springs. Environmentalists can rage all day and night about Coyote Springs, which straddles the Clark County-Lincoln County border, but if the Las Vegas metro population is going to double in 20 years, the people aren't all going to fit in this valley.

As a result, we must proactively improve the highways connecting Las Vegas with these exurban communities, and we must make plans now to address the social, educational and economic impacts these communities will have on the region and the state in coming decades.

That's the essence of smart growth.

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