by Calculated Risk on 12/19/2010 09:47:00 PM

Patrick Coolican at the Las Vegas Sun takes a drive around Las Vegas: Boom-bust era leaves architectural scars across valley

A couple of excerpts:

Now we’re on Gibson Road in Henderson, up the hill from Interstate 215, and there sits Vantage, a boxy, glassy modernist condo development; a historical artifact of the era of the credit boom, and, perhaps, delusional exuberance. It was a $160 million project, but no one lives there. It sits on the hill, surrounded by suburbia, like a hipster who’s stumbled into a church that he thought was a nightclub.
...
We drive east on 215 to ManhattanWest on Russell Road, another half-finished mixed-use development. Dense, high-rise urbanism plopped down in the suburbs, its name a great irony. Some windows are covered with plywood, like an abandoned property in a city that suffered a natural disaster.

It’s like a Hollywood set. But of what? It imagines that it’s supposed to look this way because somewhere, there’s something that’s cool and authentic and looks like this, perhaps? But there is no such place.

This quote from the article captures the bubble insanity: "It seemed any project, no matter how preposterous, could make money." They were wrong.