KVIG Informative

Summerlin began as desert nobody in Las Vegas wanted badly enough to develop for more than three decades. The land-exchange tool that finally cleared the way for it is the same one Southern Nevada officials are still using today to decide what little undeveloped land near Las Vegas gets built on next.

Howard Hughes bought roughly 30,000 acres on the western rim of the Las Vegas Valley in 1952 for a reported $3 an acre, according to the official history published by Summerlin’s master developer. Hughes considered relocating his California business operations to the site but never did, and the land sat undeveloped for more than 30 years.

Summa Corporation, which managed Hughes’s Nevada real estate holdings, announced development plans for the property in 1988 under the name Summerlin, after Hughes’s paternal grandmother, Jean Amelia Summerlin, the developer’s history states. She was born May 6, 1842, in Van Buren County, Iowa, and died in Los Angeles in 1928, according to the same company history. Her son, Howard Robard Hughes Sr., founded Hughes Tool Company and was Howard Hughes Jr.’s father.

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Before any homes could be built, Hughes’s development company completed a land exchange with the Bureau of Land Management, brokered with help from The Nature Conservancy, trading 5,000 acres of environmentally sensitive land for 3,000 acres better suited to development, according to the developer’s official history. The company calls that exchange the most important step in preparing the property for construction.

Construction began in 1990. Summerlin Parkway, a four-mile roadway funded by the Hughes interests and Southern Nevada’s first three-level highway interchange, was completed that year, and development started on The Hills, the community’s first village, per the developer’s history. Cal and Maria Champlin and their children moved in as Summerlin’s first residents in March 1991. TPC Summerlin, the community’s first golf course, opened later that year.

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Summerlin has since grown past 130,000 residents, and about 2,000 gross acres of the original property remain to be developed, according to the developer’s own history. The land-exchange mechanism that assembled Summerlin in 1988 is the same basic tool Southern Nevada governments are still using to decide what happens to the little undeveloped land left near Las Vegas, including the Bureau of Land Management’s sale of 22 parcels of valley land this year and Clark County’s pending request for a new federal land-sale boundary around the valley.

Hughes paid about $3 an acre for land no one in Las Vegas wanted badly enough to build on in 1952. There is almost no comparable stretch of private land left in the valley to try that again.