Sorry for the long post, but this is a place thats fascinated me for ages! SILVERADO, MOHAVE COUNTY, AZ Silverado was to be a shining new community for north-west Arizona. Situated east of Kingman on US-93, the 5000-acre site would have homes (around 113 luxury dwellings would stand on their own two-and-a-half acre plots), parks with barbecue grills and an 18-hole golf course designed by Forrest Richardson. Neighborhood communities were planned with 12,000 homes, schools, a fire station, shops and a sewage plant. ‘The quiet beauty of the surrounding desert’ would, said the developers, ‘enhance life’s daily experiences.’ And then, in 2008, the housing market crashed and so did the plans for Silverado. The owners applied to the Mohave County Board of Supervisors to rezone 1400 acres residential to general commercial/highway frontage to build the Albiasa solar plant. Although, despite controversy over how much groundwater this would use, the county approved the zoning in 2009, Albiasa never applied to the Arizona Corporation Commission for approval and the project was never built. Just over a year ago, the Board of Supervisors unanimously denied allowing developers more time to meet the conditions of rezoning the property, putting the nail in the coffin for any future commercial development. You can still see the road layout on Google maps, although many of those roads are overgrown or with huge washes now bisecting them. Today Silverado is returning to the desert. The dozen or so luxury houses that were built stand empty, some with their windows intact, some open to the elements. Many of these houses were days from completion, with their garage doors and light bulbs fitted. Some fittings have been removed but theyre surprisingly unvandalized. All that remains of the so-called dream community are these mouldering houses that never saw life and some faded boards along the highway exorting people to buy land at Silverado Ranch.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 14:50:21 +0000
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