Housing recovery more difficult than throwing money at it – Nevada builder sued

Many communities remain unfinished. Photo above by Todd Petit (not of the community mentioned below).

It all starts in 1996

In 1996, a Reno lawyer paid $15 million for 40,000 acres and planed 160,000 houses to be built. Coyote Springs was to be a master-planned community an hour north of Las Vegas complete with a golf course.

Homebuilder partner Pardee Homes was to open the first model home in 2008 but when the housing crisis hit, the builder pushed back the opening date.

The Vegas lawyer who bought the land and brought Pardee Homes on to build the 160,000 houses is suing, alleging that Pardee stalled the project and is in breach of its agreement to develop out the finished residential lots, have stopped work on the golf clubhouse and sewage treatment plant.

Pardee claims they are still on site developing infrastructure.

How this scales nationally

Although no one lives in Coyote Springs yet, this tale is not completely unique. There are unfinished communities across America– some already have residents living in a ghost town incomplete subdivision while other communities have nothing more than basic infrastructure.

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The new home sector has hit historic lows recently and is so bad that some analysts claim they may never recover. Recovery is more difficult than developers suing builders, homeowners suing developers, cities suing developers, homeowners suing builders, even when many of the claims are legitimate- contracts are contracts.

That said, an overall housing recovery is more difficult than simply suing for chunks of cash. We’ve got a real problem here in America and lawsuits are capturing headline attention at an escalating pace, helping some entities to recover, but it will take much more than recouping losses on individual contracts breached to solve this nation’s ills.