Meet the man who shut down banks
Former state official says Nevada industry stronger because of experience
On a late Friday afternoon, George Burns walked into Carson River Community Bank to shut down his seventh bank in Nevada in 20 months.
As commissioner of the state’s Financial Institutions Division, it was Burns’ job to deliver the news to bank owners and employees that their institution could not be saved.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers a decade ago this month triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And it toppled Nevada banks like dominos.
Burns would have to close 13 state-chartered banks between 2008 and 2013 as mounting real estate defaults and a run on deposits left them with too little cash to meet their obligations.
Those failures wiped away more than half of Nevada’s chartered banks. No other state lost as many by percentage.
But closing Carson River on Feb. 26, 2010, was
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interview that the building opened around Aug. 1 and is about 30 percent occupied. Apartments range from
400 square feet to as much as 2,000 square feet – the average is about 650 – and average rents are around $1.93 or $1.95 per square foot, he estimated.
Carlson acknowledged those prices are high for Las Vegas but said rental rates climb a bit in the urban core, where construction costs are typically higher than in the suburbs.
Downtown Project and Wolff held a groundbreaking ceremony in May
2016. At the time, Carlson said the group aimed to finish the project in the second quarter of 2017.
On Tuesday, he attributed the delay primarily to an ongoing construction-labor shortage.
“It was just pure economics,” he said. “Just not enough labor to build everything that wants to be built right now in Las Vegas.”
Despite downtown’s revival of recent years – led by Hsieh’s investments in retail, real estate and other ventures – apartment developers have largely been building elsewhere. Land prices downtown are expensive, the parcels are smaller, and it’s harder to assemble project sites because of
fractured ownership of city blocks.
Suburban projects also are easier to finance, and developers haven’t been convinced they can fetch highenough rents downtown to make projects feasible, real estate pros have said.
Downtown Project is a dominant property owner in the neighborhood, and Carlson said Wolff wouldn’t have built Fremont9 if it didn’t have a partner that already owned the land.
“It would have been nearly impossible or too expensive,” he said.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.