Developers: With slump and all, just writing to say we’re OK

By Mike Trask

Friday, June 6, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In a telling sign of the times, the developers of the biggest planned community in North Las Vegas has sent out a news release to announce they are still in business.

“Development continues on despite the downturn in the economy,” last week’s release trumpeted.

Stop the presses!

That Park Highlands felt the need to assure everyone it’s still plugging along perhaps says less about the developers than it does about the dismal state of the housing market.

Park Highlands is the future of North Las Vegas, the next step in growth in the nation’s fastest-growing city.

The city of 230,000 residents is expected to more than double in size to 500,000-plus over the next 20 years. About 50,000 of those new residents will live in Park Highlands when the 16,000 planned homes are built over the next decade.

Park Highlands’ all-is-well missive reflects the obvious: It is not immune to the housing slump that has torn through Las Vegas — and much of the country.

The developers, led by the Olympia Group, recently filed suit against D.R. Horton for default of an infrastructure agreement, claiming the homebuilder owes Park Highlands $4.1 million plus interest.

Still, construction on underground utilities is ongoing in the first part of the development, near Aliante Parkway north of the Las Vegas Beltway.

But there is little noticeable progress. The lot is still vacant desert, bordered by a chain-link fence and circled by campaign signs targeting commuters headed into the city from Aliante.

“By the end of this year most of the underground utilities will be in and ready to go, so when the timing is right we’ll be able to start with the paving and landscaping,” said Chris Armstrong, vice president of planning for Park Highlands.

“It’s going to look like not a lot of work has been done. But most of the work is underground.”

All of that work is on only the first 600 acres of the 2,675-acre project. The rest of the project on the eastern side — including a planned Boyd Gaming casino — is in the design phase.

Plans call for an elementary school site and a 10-acre park to be completed by the end of 2009, about the time the first model homes go up.

Construction on Park Highlands began in January 2007. Olympia bid $639 million for the property at a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2005.

By 2010, Olympia principal Guy Inzalaco says, the housing market will have turned around.

“We don’t have a crystal ball,” Inzalaco said. “We believe the market will come back. It’s just a function of when. We’re going to keep moving our project along. We think we’ll have timed our infrastructure and our models to come out as the market comes back.”

By then North Las Vegas also will have made a final decision on whether to allow Boyd Gaming to move a planned casino site from near Lamb Boulevard and Centennial Parkway to a new site north of the beltway on the eastern side of Park Highlands.

“It’s a way to provide the services to the residents,” said real estate analyst John Restrepo, principal of Restrepo Consulting Group. “It brings a cash infusion and a high-end amenity.”

It has been hyped as similar to Green Valley Ranch Station Casino or Red Rock Resort — or Aliante Station, scheduled to open this year a few miles west of the Boyd site. Few residents have opposed the Boyd casino, although an anonymous mailing last month urged people to take a stand against a casino in the future neighborhood.

North Las Vegas officials long have hoped to attract the movie theaters, restaurants and shopping that accompany the new breed of neighborhood casino.

“North Las Vegas is transitioning from a blue-collar, high-crime perception to more of a fast-paced professional-quality-development type of community,” City Manager Gregory Rose said. “I believe Park Highlands helps this transition as a community.”

It also helps that Park Highlands will have as a neighbor Aliante, the community many in the city credit with converting North Las Vegas into a desirable suburb.

In many ways Aliante paved the way for Park Highlands. The challenge for the new community will not be fitting in, but rather standing apart from its neighbors.

Now it’s just matter of waiting for the market to rebound. In the meantime, Park Highlands, as the release notes, is still standing.