Economic freedom is so inconvenient

County may bar some property owners from selling their land
Jan. 17, 2006
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

The land on which many mobile home parks sit is now worth more for other uses -- especially near the booming Las Vegas Strip.

Thirty mobile home parks have closed in Nevada since the year 2000, half of them in Clark County. The county assessor reports an 8-acre mobile home park near Tropicana Avenue and Koval Lane sold in May for $120 million -- a hard return to duplicate by collecting monthly rents.

Thirteen mobile home park owners sold their properties last year, leaving more than 1,000 residents to find new places to live.

Not to worry, though. Clark County Commissioner Myrna Williams has a two-tiered plan. First, reduce from eight to five the number of homes that can be built on an acre of land zoned for mobile home park use, a step supposedly intended to make such land sales less attractive. Second, place an 18-month moratorium on the sale of mobile home parks for other uses.

"Mobile home parks have been identified as critical to our ability to have affordable housing at this time," Ms. Williams explains. "There is no place for these people to move. They can't afford it."

Mobile home buyers are responsible for exercising due diligence. One of the down sides of such a living arrangement is that the land under your home is owned by someone else, who is (or ought to be) free to sell it.

Would Ms. Williams be happier if the owners of an 8-acre park, instead of selling, merely raised mobile home rents sufficient to produce another $40 million or so per year in revenue out of that property? No. She would surely be among the first to shriek, "They can't afford it!"

Is it really true these residents have "no place to move"? If there is an apartment shortage in the valley, let us look to Not-In-My-Back-Yard zoning codes and other government interventions.

There's plenty of cheap real estate in the Dakotas. If it's the business of government to help people live where the dynamics of the market make it less affordable for them to live, shall the taxpayers simply buy every retiree of modest means a nice house in Summerlin? A condo in Maui? (We surely wouldn't want to lower tax rates generally, thus allowing folks to save more toward a home purchase, would we?)

Lowering the number of homes that can be built on each acre -- even if it withstands a court test -- will have the affect of making each of those homes more expensive. Is that how Ms. Williams plans to make valley housing more affordable?

The County Commission is free to rezone thousands of acres to allow less-restrictive residential uses, including residential hotels, "grandma apartments," and mobile home parks. But apparently it's more politically convenient to make a few demonized "trailer park slumlords" absorb the hidden costs of government policy.

Would these property owners still be expected to pay property taxes on land they no longer fully control?

What would the precedent of such a "sales freeze" do to the future willingness of other investors to build new mobile home parks -- ever?

And all this is before we even consider whether such a moratorium constitutes a "taking," for which the Fifth Amendment demands just compensation. If we're stopped from accepting an offer of $120 million for our property today, and the market drops (thanks in part to Ms. Williams' ill-considered interventions) to the point where we can get only $100 million in 2008, will Ms. Williams and the County Commission -- that is to say, the taxpayers -- cover our $20 million loss?

They will if a court orders them to.

There used to be farms on Manhattan Island. Presumably, agricultural workers on those farms were upset when that land was sold for more profitable uses. Should such land sales have been blocked to "protect" a few farmhands?

What next? Shall commissioners ban people from selling off their older automobiles, in order to protect the endangered jobs of the auto mechanics who repair them?

The County Commission will consider these infringements on property rights on Wednesday. The free market has served Las Vegas well. Have we grown so quickly bored with our prosperity that we would now emulate some other system? Will there, at least, be torchlight parades?

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