Complex's history full of violence, squalor

"A Las Vegas man was shot three times in broad daylight as he stood in front of a building at the Sierra Nevada Arms apartment complex."

That was the lead of a March 21, 1994, Sun story about one of many acts of violence that plagued the West Las Vegas apartments that were built in the 1960s and long ago fell into decay.

"As little children ran about and residents clustered about talking quietly, officers collected numerous casings littering the complex grounds near the shooting scene," the story went on to say.

It was a story not unlike many others that have been written about the federally subsidized low-income housing complex once said to be among the worst in the United States.

"A bullet passed through my window before," a grandmother told the Sun for that story. "I'm scared."

She had good reason to be.

With such a checkered history, a fire that destroyed three of the abandoned buildings at the dilapidated complex in the 1900 block of Coran Lane early today was not surprising. It wasn't the first fire either.

In August 1994, then-Housing Assistant Secretary Andrew Cuomo stepped off a trolley near a burned-out unit on the edge of the Sierra Nevada Arms Apartments and said: "Seeing is believing ... and this is intolerable. It is definitely something we have to get on top of."

Cuomo asked to see Sierra Nevada Arms after a Sun reporter asked him about the future of the federally subsidized apartment complex off Lake Mead Boulevard between Rancho Drive and Martin L. King Boulevard.

The building in question had all but been destroyed in a fire 2 1/2 years earlier. But it wasn't until two years after the fire that a chain-link fence was put up around the structure and the last tenant moved out from the ground-floor unit below a burned-out apartment.

The charred building sat directly behind a playground and children's sandbox.

"We have to do something about it," Cuomo said at the time. "It's wrong to have children subjected to this. It is not the right way for children to live. Human beings should not have to live this way."

At the time, 195 of the the 352 units were occupied. The rest were vacant and boarded up.

Nearly a month before Cuomo's visit, the complex was in its worst shape in its history. Human waste spewed from an open sewer pipe onto a yard where children played. Broken glass was embedded in a mostly dirt area that had been designated as a playground. Garbage was strewn everywhere.

Such conditions earned Sierra Nevada Arms the label of the worst project managed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Las Vegas office.

The complex in July 1994 became part of a congressional investigation into some of the most poorly maintained properties subsidized by HUD.

By October 1994, the complex's federal subsidy had been pulled and families started to move away as the Las Vegas Housing Authority began distributing rent vouchers at HUD's request.

More than a year later, the complex was still plagued by health and safety problems and the owners had to sue the federal government in federal court to temporarily halt a foreclosure on the property.

Five months earlier, a Las Vegas City Council committee recommended the city buy the troubled complex from HUD and then allow a private developer to upgrade it. The recommendation never materialized.

Over the years, the complex kept police hopping.

In June 1994, a Las Vegas man who tried to intervene in an argument at the Sierra Nevada Arms was shot and killed, and two teens were charged with the crime.

In December of the same year, three men were found shot at a nearby complex, allegedly wounded by a security guard who worked at the Sierra Nevada Arms. Earlier in the day, there had been an altercation between the men and security officers of the Sierra Nevada Arms.

To say that nothing had been done to improve conditions at the Sierra Nevada Arms in the mid-1990s would be unfair. The raw sewage that flowed near children's play areas was cleaned up; the broken glass and other debris was swept away. And the frequent violence quelled.

But it was too little too late. By April 1995, just 53 people lived there. By early 1996, they had all moved away.

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