KVIG Informative

Desert Pines Golf Club is closing for good, cleared to make way for a mixed-use neighborhood in east Las Vegas. Residents worry about what happens to everything living there now.

The Desert Pines Golf Club, a 100-acre course in east Las Vegas, is closing permanently to make way for a new mixed-use community, according to the City of Las Vegas. The project, part of the city’s Nuestro Futuro Este de Las Vegas initiative, aims to transform the site into a neighborhood offering affordable housing, commercial space, walking trails and recreational areas.

East Las Vegas residents have voiced concern about what happens to the wildlife that has lived on the golf course for decades as construction moves forward. The city said the project will be carefully monitored and confirmed that no construction will begin until the sale of the property is finalized this fall.

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Doug Nielsen, an officer with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, said native species in the area are adapted to the desert environment and will likely relocate to new habitat once construction begins. He said any time land is developed or repurposed, whatever is living there gets displaced as a direct consequence.

Nielsen said the cumulative effect of individual development projects is often underestimated, arguing that every new home and every new road built carries a real consequence for local wildlife populations, even when no single project appears significant on its own.

The project is part of a broader city effort to convert water-intensive, decades-old golf courses into mixed-use neighborhoods that align with Las Vegas’s sustainability goals, following a pattern the city has pursued elsewhere as urban water use comes under increasing scrutiny.

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City officials frame the redevelopment as an opportunity to bring affordable housing and green space to a part of the city that has seen less investment than other neighborhoods, alongside educational opportunities tied to the project.

The sale of the Desert Pines property won’t close until the fall, and construction won’t start until then either. What’s already clear is that turning a golf course into a neighborhood means turning someone’s habitat into someone else’s front yard — and no one’s asked the wildlife how they feel about the trade.