According to Wikipedia, in 1952, Howard Hughes purchased 25,000 acres of land that would ultimately become Summerlin, Nevada. What did Hughes pay for that land and what would that land be worth today?
Summerlin.com says Hughes paid $3 an acre for the land, which would make for quite a bargain at $75,000.
The aggregate current value is difficult to estimate, given the ways in which the land has been divided and developed.
However, historian Geoff Schumacher, senior director of content at the Mob Museum, who also wrote the book on Hughes (Howard Hughes: Power, Paranoia and Palace Intrigue), says there’s no apples-to-apples comparison of Summerlin’s worth.
“Summerlin’s value today is an apples-and-oranges question, because the developer has sold off most of the acreage to home builders, commercial brokers, schools, churches, parks, etc. Early on, large pieces were sold off to build Sun City, Desert Shores, and The Lakes,” he writes us. “Some land also was traded with the government to protect Red Rock Canyon.”
Turning to Schumacher’s book, we find that Hughes took advantage of the Taylor Grazing Act to parlay 73,000 acres of farmland scattered across five northern Nevada counties into all that desert scrub in the western Las Vegas valley that would become Summerlin. The rural land was valued at $1.25-$1.50 per acre, so Hughes definitely scored a bargain by swapping it for the $3-per-acre southern Nevada land. The mega-mogul dubbed his new kingdom “Husite,” intending it for tests of “new and improved radar control and guided missile devices” for Uncle Sam. (West Coast sites were deemed too vulnerable.) He tried moving Hughes Aircraft from Culver City to the Nevada desert, but encountered too much internal resistance … yes, it was actually possible to say no to Howard Hughes.
Hughes’ Plan B, hatched in 1966, was to construct an airport for supersonic planes on the Husite land. This too did not get anywhere and so the land lay fallow for the remainder of his life and for many years thereafter. Summa Corp. executives kicked around the idea of a master-planned community in the early 1980s but only succeeded in stirring up an outcry among local environmentalists, worried about the project’s proximity to Red Rock Canyon. A deal was brokered in 1988 whereby the Bureau of Land Management paid almost $3 million for 439 acres (where the Red Rock visitors center currently stands), followed by a swap with the Bureau of Land Management of 4,863 Red Rock acres for a 3,767-acre enlargement of Husite.
The latter broke ground, now named Summerlin after the maiden name of Hughes’ grandmother, in 1989. The Tournament Players Golf Course was the first item constructed. Homebuilding began the next year and “by 1992 the development was a runaway success story. Between 1991 and 2001, more than 18,000 houses were sold in Summerlin,” Schumacher chronicles. This did come with some cost: To generate working capital, Summa Corp. sold off bits and pieces that became The Lakes, Desert Shores and Sun City. However, Summerlin also grew to the south, adding 998 acres in 2002 by dint of surrendering 1,071 Red Rock acres to the BLM. Hence the difficulty of measuring the giant parcel’s initial worth against what it would bring today.
Perhaps Summa Corp.’s great legacy will be the role it played it in preserving Red Rock, seconded by its commitment to environmental sustainability. Schumacher: “Summerlin was the first Las Vegas development to embrace to arid Mojave Desert environment. Rather than planting vast expanses of water-wasting grass, it landscaped public spaces with drought-tolerant trees and bushes.” We have no idea what Howard Hughes would have thought but his present-day executors have drawn praise from environmentalists and historians alike for their sensitivity to nature and proactivity in working with community. If Hughes weren’t proud, he should be.
