August 28, 2026
The Vacant-Land Paradox: Why Las Vegas Has Plenty of Dirt and Almost No Sites
Drive 20 minutes from the Strip in any direction and the dominant view is open desert — roughly 4.6 million acres in Clark County are vacant, about 90 percent of the land area. But approximately 94 percent of that vacant land is federally controlled, and the land legally available for private development is bounded by the SNPLMA Disposal Area: just 6.3 percent of the county. Las Vegas isn't running out of land — we ran out of easy land long ago.