MARK SMITH Advertisement

The recent uproar about the Focus Property Group's plan to slam hundreds upon hundreds of homes into some acreage at the southeast end of town includes elements that remind me of the law of unintended consequences.

It seems to me that during the 1950s a lot of people started moving to the Southwest and digging in around places like Phoenix and Tucson and, yes, Las Vegas, because they could get away from all the pollen that was aggravating their allergies and asthma back east.

What they did once they got out here, of course, was plant lots of beautiful flowers and create beautiful green lawns, and then they found themselves as beset with the same old allergies and asthma attacks as had been the case in Richmond or Columbus or Passaic.

What reminded me of that tale were some of the comments about Focus Group.

Like other developers, Focus Group is not just planting its flag on some vacant land because acreage happened to be available at a reasonable price. No one plans to put up 5,000 or so homes unless he or she or they or it are pretty darned certain that 5,000 or so buyers are going to be clamoring to slap a down payment on the table and chain themselves to a mortgage for the next three decades, or until the equity makes it worthwhile to sell to someone else along the way.

That is, there are buyers out there. Hundreds of them, eager to become Pahrumpians. And when they do, without question, they will start to put their stamp on this community. The idea that today's Pahrump can somehow be maintained for today's Pahrumpians is not only misleading, it may be positively injurious.

I'm not unaware of the attitude being expressed. I had it expressed to me when I moved to Juneau, Alaska, in the mid-1970s and found a lovely girlfriend who was brought up in a nearby community. We were definitely an item, and I was taken aback one day when she turned to me and said, "I really like you, Mark, but I wish you had never moved here."

Imagine your spouse rolling over and announcing, "I really love ya, darling, but I'm not entirely happy to be here with you."

To be brief, what my girlfriend told me didn't make a bit of difference, either to me or, by extension, to others who tumbled off the state ferry or Alaska Airlines' jets. We were there for our own sake, not for that of everyone who came before us.

Same thing will happen here, and the town will change not so much because today's residents lobby for an Olive Garden or sidewalks or pavement or a Pizza Hut but because more and more voters will appear who not only want those things but expect them as if by right ("No Pizza Hut? Whadya mean, 'No Pizza Hut'?").

The irony is that those people who move here for what Pahrump "is" will, as was the case with the gardeners and lawnkeepers in Phoenix, Tucson, etc., almost inevitably bring along what they are trying to getting away from -- dense shopping malls, traffic, gated apartment and condo complexes, etc.

Why? Because for all their talk about getting away from it all, "it all" is what they are comfortable with. They will simply imagine that here they'll be able to do it right.

Back in the late seventies, the state of Alaska engaged in a survey of its new homesteaders to see what they wanted that the state might help with. Remember, these were homesteaders in the traditional sense -- men and women who cleared forest and built a home and made improvements and eventually took title to the land they had wrested from the wilderness. They were the real back-to-nature types, not the phonies who think that eating greens in a plastic package with the word "organic" stamped on it means something profound. They were out there in the distant boondocks because they wanted to be.

So what did the survey find?

Well, it seems these hard-core folks wanted access to TV, they wanted better access to shopping, they wanted paved roads ... Ah, wilderness.

Bleating that newcomers should recognize the town's assets and respect them is not the way to convince newcomers that Pahrump ought to be kept as is.

A community as relatively young as Pahrump is needs to focus on 1) what makes it unique and 2) what gives it a special flavor different from any other town, and then work to make sure that's what the newcomer sees and senses and learns. That will eventually lead to pride and a sense on the part of the newcomers that they, too, have a real stake in keeping Pahrump the way it is.