Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The southern boundaries of Green Valley nestle against recreational and wilderness
areas including the North McCullough, South McCullough, and Eldorado wilderness
areas. Access to these and other recreational facilities in Henderson are desirable features,
yet many of the residents who bought homes on the edge of the wilderness areas, sup-
posed for the closeness of their homes to natural areas, are generally not receptive to “out-
siders” coming into their neighborhoods to enter the same areas to access the recreational
and natural areas.*
Another example of how the human communities like Green Valley are built without
much regard for the surrounding biotic community is seen in the problem of the desert
tortoise. These indigenous creatures require a large amount of land to support their graz-
ing. But the rapid development in Green Valley displaced many of the tortoises as their
habitat was covered over. Until just recently, it was common to gather up all the tortoises
and wild burros in the area and move them elsewhere, into places where previous tor-
toises and burros had already established territories and habitats.
In many ways Green Valley serves as an example of the failure to practice building
long-term community wealth. In Green Valley, the residents are limited in their flexibility
to build their homes with a design reflecting the natural surroundings and must rely on
ready-made development plans for home and neighborhood, often guided by the goal of
rapid profit from the sale of these homes. This concern for the short-term profit over the
long-term wealth of the community that is found in the quality of the life of the people
living there illustrates the inherent problems of community in such developments. It is
a common feature for developers in the “communities” of Green Valley and other such
master-planned developments to build as large a house as possible on a single site, maxi-
mizing the number of properties for sale in a given area. However this leaves little room
for homeowners to add new rooms as their family needs change.
†
The only option is to
sell the “starter house” and move to another larger house in a new community where the
family has no long-standing connections (Figure 18.5).
‡
But even in Las Vegas there are alternatives to Green Valley. And while the problems
of community in the southern Nevada area are many, it is possible that postmodern
communities, with features described in this chapter can be developed. The problems of
isolation in such modern communities as Green Valley result from building in such a way
as to disconnect and isolate people not only from each other but from the larger biotic
community around them.
*
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/dec/31/residents-say-hikers-not-our-back-yard/ (accessed July 19,
2009). Fortunately not all the local residents share the antipathy to hikers.
†
This was not always the case. In many of the early postwar developments such as the well-known Levittown,
the developer provided only homes with a similar small, basic plan but left room for homeowners to expand,
modify, and create individual homes as would suit their needs. Such homeowners would live for decades
in such home, establishing true communities with neighbors. Although Levittown provided affordable
houses in what many residents felt to be a congenial community, critics damned its homogeneity, bland-
ness, and racial exclusivity (the initial lease prohibited rental to non-Whites). Today, “Levittown” is used as
a term of derogation to describe overly sanitized suburbs consisting largely of tract housing. See Peter Bacon
Hale's website Levittown: Transformations of the Postwar Suburb, found in http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/
Levittown/oldindex.html (accessed July 19, 2009) for a vivid photographic account of how homes in Levittown
have been transformed to fit the needs of community members.
‡
To successfully market a house as a “starter” home requires a buyer who accepts the necessity of eventually
moving to another house as a family grows. Such a buyer will be more concerned that property values in
the area remain high. To that end, CC&Rs and homeowner associations will be hostile to attempts to create
individual homes that do not “fit in” with other homes in the area, no matter what the needs of the individual
homeowner are.
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