Some pretty amazing photos here of earthworks for an upscale housing development in Nevada that never saw the light of day. A whole mountain basically flattened and sculpted. That can’t have been cheap. :eek:
Anyone know any more about this project? It appears to be still dormant, at least on Google Maps.
Damn, McMansions are horrors!
If you’re going to build a mansion, it needs a minimum of 40 acres, IMHO. Why, Stately Mercotan Manor is on 60 acres!
Fascinating photos.
I see these places every day. Henderson also has really cool post-Modern condo complex that stopped construction when it was about halfway done; I’ll see if I can take & post some pics.
That’s an interesting area to look at with the historical imagery feature on Google Earth. It looks like they’d started laying out the roads in 2005, had them a little more defined in 2007 and after 2008 it’s exactly the same until the current imagery in 2012. Also if you go back to 1994, town stopped at (what is now) I-215!
And you probably got enough water.
Heh, it’s Vegas, doc. They don’t do “stately”, they do flashy and fake (from the Eiffel Tower to the breasts).
But yes, very fascinating – the building boom in/around Vegas was crazy and when I first visited after the crash (early 2010), it looked like a neutron bomb had gone off, the projects had just been walked away from.
On the positive side, I must assume it all meant quite a bit less of a drain on Lake Mead, which had not been doing great replenishment-wise.
Interesting but, speaking as a geologist, a little “unsettling.” I’m struck by the similarity to a strip mine.
My dream home in the hills will be impressive, but to the degree it blends in with and incorporates the natural landscape, not sits atop it like a pimple.
If anyone ever builds there it’ll be killer. I think plastic surgeons would feel right at home.
Really cool. Reminds me of this, taken in Florida.
Really interesting (and sad) pictures. The Florida link reminded me of this song…
Is that Sudden Valley?
Exactly! If I wanted to hear my neighbors, I’d live in an apartment!
My 5 acres lets me play my music as loud as I want, and strip naked and jump in the pool after mowing the lawn without offending anyone but the cheeruns!
But I want more! This is right in the middle of motorcycle country, so I don’t have to go far to scrape my knees!
Almost looks like the ancient ruins you see in South America - maybe in a few thousand years theorists will be trying to figure out how these sites were built to attract Ancient Aliens, or predict the seasons.
Some of the sites in the other pics in the link have been finished.
This one now looks like this. That house at the end is pretty cool, with the driveway going between the rocks like that. Not much land, though. If I had a house like that I wouldn’t want pesky neighbours getting in the way of my view.
…and the house under construction just left of centre of that photo is now on sale for $6.3m. Only need $28k a month to cover the mortgage 
It happened in Victorian times in Yorkshire(UK) too.
This is the wildest pic of a road I’ve ever seen. How in the world could anybody drive up and down it every day?
Those five lots look like giant steps. They got too much money invested in all that terracing. Someone will take over after the bankruptcy is finished and get rich building those houses. Preparing the land was the most expensive job and it’s done.
Always makes me sad when I see mountaintop removal.
I don’t know if it’s as steep as all that. Shame the Street View cars couldn’t go up it - I enjoy “driving” around some of the abandoned building plots in Florida, for instance.
I’m pretty sure this street in the UK has it beat for steepness 
There was a lot of this on a smaller scale around here after the crash. A development started, a half dozen units completed (and moved into) and the builder would go bankrupt. Sidewalks never completed, a pool dug and left as an uncovered pit, neighboring homes still as frames or without siding/windows/doors and decaying to the elements, etc. Posed issues as eyesores, places for n’er-do-wells to hang out, wildlife taking shelter and other problems. The usual performance bonds weren’t enough to cover the necessary work and the village is stuck trying to make the place habitable for the few lucky people who get to live there.
Good luck finding 5 acres in Vegas that you’d actually want to live on and can afford, friend.
When we were looking last year, I checked out tons of those awful houses out in Anthem and the other fancy pants developments in Henderson and also northwest Vegas (which is where a lot of the celebrities and such live). The houses in Henderson were beautiful and surprisingly unique for being effectively tract houses. . . but goddamn, were they on top of each other! For more than half a million dollars, you shouldn’t be able to see into your neighbor’s kitchen.
There are very few acre+ sized lots in Las Vegas. Most that are that large are old houses-- and not old in that charming fun way, old in the rotting original shag carpet, crumbling walls, and rusted out plumbing and electrical way. Trust me-- I saw at least 30 of them, as a large lot was our one stipulation and we were willing to do construction to update a house. But the thing was, because of the land, most of these rotted out monstrosities were still over $500k. . .and required at least $100k in work to get them livable. Remember too, many of these homes have been sitting empty for god knows how long, so they are even worse than you’d imagine.
Oh, and most of those large lot having old homes are in really questionable neighborhoods. Not in the uptight waspy “OMG I NEED TO BE BY WHOLE FOODS AND THERE ISN’T ONE HERE!” way. . . like, Vegas bad neighborhoods are bad neighborhoods.
I did see one gorgeous house on an acre lot out way west on Blue Diamond. It needed some work for sure, but had no neighbors and was perfect. . . except it was $1.7 million. Oops.
After many months of searching and visiting many awful houses, we found a gem that the owners had to unload due to moving for some sudden health issues. On half an acre, but fully privately fenced with an electric gate. No direct neighbors due to the land around it, updated and needing very little work. . .and *well *under the price of any of the other houses we saw. It was a fluke that I doubt we’d ever be able to reproduce.
And throughout much of the United States in the 1930s. Most of those speculative subdivisions from the 1920s boom eventually got developed – in the 1950s. In some areas, 1920s-era subdivisions remain unbuilt to this day; they’re paper subdivisions, with legally subdivided lots and rights-of-way, but fragmented property ownership prevents development. I used to live in a close-in suburb of Cleveland, where there’s still ghost subdivisions from the 1920s that, to this day, remain undeveloped.
Here’s a couple of photos I took in the Cleveland area of what were intended to be upscale developments in the 1920s, where lots sold for pennies on the dollar in the following years.
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6467/medium/great_depression_fallout_south_euclid_02.jpg
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6467/medium/great_depression_fallout_south_euclid_01.jpg
Shaker Heights, Ohio was originally planned to be a much larger community than it is now. Some areas that were platted in the 1920s were developed in the 1980s; by that time they were parts of other suburbs, which annexed land that was originally intended to be part of Shaker Heights. Provisions for future parkways and rapid transit lines, part of the original plans of the 1920s, are still in place. Here’s some photos of rapid transit rights-of-way that remain empty to this day:
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/526/medium/van_sweringen_rapid_row_1.jpg
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/526/medium/van_sweringen_rapid_row_2.jpg
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/526/medium/van_sweringen_rapid_row_3.jpg
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/526/medium/van_sweringen_rapid_row_7.jpg
http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/526/medium/van_sweringen_rapid_row_6.jpg
