In the summer of 2020, as COVID dominated the news and traffic deserted the streets of Southern Nevada, I returned to a North Las Vegas neighborhood I’ve known since childhood, Windsor Park. Situated near the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Carey Avenue, the historically Black neighborhood was the result of the Federal Housing Act of 1954, which granted funding to local governments to develop urban housing. According to a government summary issued that year, funding was conditioned on municipalities implementing housing programs that used “all means available to eliminate and prevent slums and urban blight.”
Built between 1964 and 1966, Windsor Park housed Black people when unofficial segregation was prevalent in valley housing patterns. But Windsor had a serious problem from the start: It had been built on top of geological faults and an aquifer — groundwater that was being pumped out to a parched valley while Windsor Park sank.
I had memories of a place already in strange physical decline in the 1990s, but what I saw now showed the deep damage of the decades that followed: roofs on houses slanting in unintended directions, cracks in pavement defining the neighborhood’s roadways, stand-alone foundations in otherwise vacant lots where families had once lived. All of this contrasted with one of the valley’s most spectacular views of the Las Vegas Strip.
As a student at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, I set out to learn more about this sad state of affairs, and what was being done about it. For nearly two years, I was a research assistant on a Windsor Park project brought to the school by then-assemblywoman Dina Neal, who is now a Nevada State Senator and has spent years working on the issue. I also participated in the creation of a 2021 documentary film, Windsor Park: The Sinking Streets, by contributing voice-over and research. (In the wake of the film’s premiere, North Las Vegas city officials released a statement saying that they had been appealing to state and federal officials for help addressing the problems for two years, and would continue to do so.)
During my research, I spoke with elected officials and with residents of Windsor Park who claimed the city government’s inadequate planning and neglect over the past half-century has robbed them of the American Dream — in particular, the dream of creating generational wealth, or at least a measure of financial stability, through home ownership.
But on a deeper level, something more fundamental had been lost: time. For decades, as Windsor Park families have pursued some kind of reasonable remedy, children have grown up, grandparents have passed, and the opportunity to build a better life has, in many cases, slipped away. What should be a haven — the home, the neighborhood — instead became a quiet rolling catastrophe, a nagging distraction from the deeper challenges and joys of life.
By the summer of 2022, when I graduated from Boyd, I’d learned a great deal about this neighborhood not far from my grandmother’s house, where I’d spent time growing up. I’d learned that Windsor Park was still dying, that its residents were still seeking restitution, or — for the resolute, and for those simply unable to move — a way to save the place. I’d learned of the policy battles that had yielded mostly frustration.
As November’s North Las Vegas mayoral election approaches, candidates are at at least acknowledging that frustration, and the attention comes not a moment too soon: If you look at a satellite image today, you’ll see blocks of vacant parcels punctuated by the occasional house. North Las Vegas is the fifth fastest-growing city in the United States over the past two years, according to…
Read More: The long, hard struggle of Windsor Park