New York Times Article
August 13th, 2008A few days ago I read a NY Times article regarding Kingman. I didn’t see the original article until I read comments on the article on a blog. The comments were not complimentary. Some of the less negative comments:
“The times is leading people to think that Kingman is a safe place to buy a house? I posted some info in the forum about Mohave County; they have about 20 properties a day going to foreclosure auction. When I drove through in June, the whole place looked like it was on sale. Read the article; 80k new houses?”
“Kingman is in the north west corner of AZ. Lots of CA and NV speculators ran up prices and the developers went nuts. There are so many bulldozed subdivision sites the country looks like an Inca desert drawing.”
I then read the article and researched the writer. The writer is not a NY Times reporter but a free lance writer from Las Vegas. I assumed the article was written as a pr piece to draw attention to the dwindling investment market in Mohave. Being from LV, the writer probably has ties to someone with investments in the area. The majority of the land purchases during the boom were by Las Vegans.
This is a feed of the original article (the NYT article requires registration, so this is from a NC paper).
Today the Miner has jumped on this with their own article. Now, based on a PR piece written by an LV writer (not a NY times reporter as the Miner calls him), we are going to gear up to the “inevitable” invasion. From the article:
Salem anticipated that once growth does get underway, especially following he completion of the four-lane Hoover Dam bridge in 2010, he expected it to be greater than the 5 to 6 percent rate it has been, but not so great as the boom experienced earlier this decade.”
http://www.kingmandailyminer.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1&articleID=16958
I see dollar signs and lots of debt in the future for our little town. The powers that be are counting on an illusion being trumpeted by speculators and developers who gambled and are losing their shirts, based on the current foreclosures.
No one has ever answered my questions regarding this “invasion” of Las Vegans.
..Why will the “bridge” cause hundreds of thousands of people to move here?
..Why will the “bridge” create more traffic through Kingman? Where is this additional traffic going to come from and why?
..Why would Las Vegans travel over 200 miles a day to live in Kingman when there are much closer alternatives in their own state if they choose to not live in Vegas proper?
..Prices have fallen so much in Vegas that larger houses are available for less money than in Kingman, why would they spend more to “commute” to a different state?
..When Las Vegans joke about the master planned community north of them and how they wouldn’t drive the 50 miles to live there, why would they drive 100 miles to live here? That community with a planned 150K homes cannot even get one home built. There is no demand.
