The volume of land in the study is identified broadly — for example, it even includes underused portions of large parking lots. (Photo: Hugh Jackson/Nevada Current)
There are more than 82,000 acres of vacant and underutilized land in the Las Vegas metro area that could be used for infill development, including construction of additional housing, according to a recent analysis presented to the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada in December.
For perspective “that’s about the size of the City of Henderson,” said Deb Reardon, a planning manager with the RTC and the administrator with the regional planning collaborative known as Southern Nevada Strong.
The volume of land in the study is identified broadly — for example, it includes portions of large parking lots.
But the inventory is also “likely an undercount since it doesn’t include vacant buildings as well as some publicly owned properties,” Reardon told the RTC in December.
The details Reardon provided the RTC, a joint powers board comprised of elected officials from Southern Nevada local governments, will be part of a final report released later this month.
The group is planning to also release policy recommendations later in the year about what actions local governments could take to boost more housing development, such as reducing minimum lot size needed for residential buildings or ending parking mandates, which requires new developments to have a certain number of parking spaces.
RTC commissioners asked the study’s authors to propose potential zoning changes to areas identified in the inventory to enable developers to create more housing.
Las Vegas City Councilman Brian Knudsen, who sits on the RTC, asked if the inventory could be broken down by ward and city jurisdiction to further aid local governments in identifying infill development.
The analysis of underused and available land comes as Nevada contends with an affordable housing crisis and local, state, and federal government officials, along with housing advocates and policy experts, debate how best to address obstacles to building, including financing gaps, zoning barriers and land availability.
Clark County has an estimated shortage of 78,000 affordable homes for renters.
‘More cost-effective’
The study, which was compiled by the RTC’s Southern Nevada Strong Regional Plan committee, provides insight on the potential of infill development at a time that some state officials have called for urban sprawl and building outside city limits.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has called on the federal government to release more land to address the housing crisis. Last year, Lombardo sent several letters to President Joe Biden criticizing the White House for not making more federal land available to build more housing.
At the Western Governors Association meeting in December, Lombardo again emphasized the need for more federal land to build housing.
“Nevada experienced the most encumbrance by the federal government and the management of the lands,” he said. “Unless you have it available, you have to go vertical. Vertical is very expensive, and we don’t have the resources or the money to back that idea and have the ability to provide what is needed.”
Both local and national housing policy experts have warned that urban sprawl creates other problems, such as the lack of transportation infrastructure needed to connect people to jobs.
Reardon told RTC commissioners in December that while “reinvesting in existing neighborhoods” can be expensive, it also has benefits.
“From a transportation perspective, it is more cost-effective to use existing bus routes and roads versus extending further out,” she said. “Living close to work reduces commute and related household transportation costs.”
The Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) has argued the state could face a land shortage that would impede development of commercial and industrial housing.
GOED has previously published an inventory of commercial and industrial land that showed “about 8,000 acres to meet our long term needs for our workforce,” Reardon said.
However, GOED’s criteria for what land is available for development had some stringent requirements.
“Land in this inventory needs to actually meet certain requirements,” she said of the GOED analysis. “It needs to be pretty large, 20 acres. For perspective, that’s about the size of 15 football fields. It needs to be near highways as well as pretty flat.”
But the topline policy discussion in Southern Nevada has not been about commercial development — at least not publicly — but the need for additional housing that working Nevadans can afford.
The infill study shows there is more land available within the Las Vegas metro area that could be used to build affordable housing than some public and industry officials have indicated.
The Southern Nevada Strong steering committee’s analysis concentrated on two primary qualifying criteria for potential development or redevelopment of land within the metro area: if a structure or structures on land used only a minor portion of the site, and if so, were the improvements worth less than the land itself.
Under that scope, the group was able to identify 82,587 acres of vacant and underutilized land in Southern Nevada, Reardon told the RTC board.
The analysis ranked sites in the study for their relative suitability for infill development.
“Neighborhoods where lots of people live, where social services and transit were more accessible, or if the sites were in an existing redevelopment area,” were given higher rankings, Reardon said.
Many of the “highly ranked parcels” of vacant and underutilized land are located in the central part of the valley, in North Las Vegas and downtown Las Vegas, she said.
“Sites ranked higher if they were in a neighborhood where lots of people live, where social services and transit were more accessible,” she said.
Reardon added that “much of the underutilized land is also along many of the key corridors” RTC transit is working to improve, including projects along Maryland Parkway, Boulder Highway and Charleston Street.
Efforts elsewhere
As many cities across the country address the housing crisis and the lack of affordable places to live, officials have looked at how to encourage more infill development.
ECONorthwest, which collaborated with Southern Nevada Strong on its inventory, noted that several areas are trying to figure out how to “provide a greater range of housing options in existing neighborhoods.”
One example the group pointed to was California Senate Bill 9, the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act, which promotes infill growth and streamlines the process to create duplexes or subdivide existing developments.
Other cities across the country have also targeted policies that have created barriers to infill development. More than 50 cities have gotten rid of parking minimums per apartment or business to help promote more affordable housing development.
The City of San Diego also has an “Adequate Sites Inventory” that identifies existing sites for all types of housing.
Any new development that occurs in San Diego outside of those specific areas would require a developer to pay a transportation impact fee to help cover the costs of new transportation infrastructure.