What Do New Homes Have To Do With Vintage Vegas?

Nothing! And Everything at the same time. How could that be?

The National Association Of Home Builders says:

“Despite the present market contraction, Seiders said that housing should begin to turn around next year for a number of reasons: the overall economy and job growth continue to move ahead at a decent pace, core inflation is under control, the late-summer credit crunch in mortgage markets is showing signs of easing since the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates on September 18, and the supply-demand equation will be better balanced as builders begin to whittle down excess inventories.”

So there’s going to less of the same old same old everything looks like everything else out in the suburbs. But there’s hardly a single new home to be found in Vintage Vegas. Regardless of how I define “Vintage Vegas”….geographically, or by age of the homes, or by housing style, there’s only so much of Vintage Vegas.  And the demand for “close to the strip”, “charm and character”, “big lots with big trees”, “like the house I grew up in”, is catching on and growing.

One of the things that has always defined Las Vegas is timing. It was still a railroad camp when the big cities of the east coast and midwest already had huge populations. The median age of home in Las Vegas (by my calculation) is 1993. The medium home in Columbus, or St. Louis or Chicago, or Dallas is probably about 1960, which is when their population was half of what it is now. Every other major city in America has had a rebirth or regentrification of their urban core neighborhoods. Because Las Vegas is such a “new” city, by all big city standards, we’re the last city left where the rebirth of the urban core is still in in it’s adolescence.

As a volunteer tour guide today at Dr. Lonnie Hammargren’s Open House, I had a chance to speak to dozens of Las Vegas residents who had “absolutely no idea” that neighborhoods like Paradise Crest existed. All I could do was hand them a card and ask them to keep moving, as there was something like 7000 people that came to the open house.

There’s a couple of rules in life which just can’t be ignored. Gravity is one of them. Location is another. Even if we had nothing else to offer in Vintage Vegas….we do have location.

.