The Badlands Fence Finally Has a Name on It. The Lawsuit Never Left.

If you have lived behind the guard towers on Alta Drive or Charleston for more than a few years, you know the fence. Chain link, then taller chain link, wrapped around 250 acres of dead fairways that used to be the Badlands Golf Course. For most of the last decade it was just there, a gray backdrop to whatever else was happening in Queensridge that week.

Sometime in 2025, that changed. A banner went up at the corner of Alta and Rampart Boulevard: "Reclaiming the Badlands. Redefining Luxury." Lennar's name on it, and a new one for the property itself: The Preserve. By 2026, grading equipment had shown up on site. After ten years of nothing, something is finally moving on that land.

Here is what almost nobody watching the dirt work seems to know. The legal fight that created this vacant lot in the first place has not actually ended. It spawned a second lawsuit, this one between Clark County and the City of Las Vegas over who owes eight million dollars in property taxes, and as of this year that fight is sitting in front of the Nevada Supreme Court, unresolved.

What the Sign Actually Says

The Preserve is Lennar's name for a 1,480-unit development spread across the old golf course footprint. The plan the Las Vegas City Council approved in February 2025 calls for roughly 560 single-family detached homes plus a mix of townhomes and condominiums. Nothing on the site can rise above 45 feet, and density is capped at eight homes per acre. Ninety-eight acres, close to 40 percent of the property, is set aside for parks and landscaped trails rather than rooftops.

Lennar's own marketing for the site leans hard into the site's history, describing a transition from "a legendary golf course" to "a masterfully planned community where beauty, serenity and architecture blend." The signage at the property lists an opening date of 2028. Dirt work began this year, which means the gap between banner and actual houses is still a couple of years wide.

The Design Choices Aimed at Your Sightline

The plan Lennar brought to the council was not the free-for-all version EHB Companies once proposed. The company behind that earlier plan, run by developer Yohan Lowie, had floated thousands of multifamily units before Queensridge residents organized against it. What got approved this time is smaller and more deliberately buffered.

Three details stand out for anyone whose lot once backed the fairways:

• The Preserve will run on its own homeowners association with four private gated entries. It will not tie into Queensridge's existing gates or HOA structure.
• Homes are being graded at a lower pad elevation than existing Queensridge lots, a design choice meant to preserve the sightlines residents paid a premium for when they bought view lots along the old course.
• A green space buffer and wall will separate the new community from the Queensridge perimeter, and a drainage system upgrade is built into the approval to address flood risk in what is a desert wash environment.

Those choices trace directly back to a January 2025 meeting at the Veterans Memorial Community Center, where close to 200 Queensridge-area residents pushed back on four things: traffic on the already congested Rampart and Alta corridors, school capacity given roughly 1,480 new units, property value effects from sitting next to multifamily product, and the sheer disruption of years of construction on land people had treated as open space since the course closed in 2016.

What a Decade of Fighting Actually Cost

The number that gets repeated most often is $636 million, but that figure only makes sense once you see how the pieces moved.

To cover its share, the city pulled from general fund reserves, delayed capital projects, and sold Cashman Field. City leadership has been candid that the payout reshaped budget priorities well beyond this one property.

The Sequel Nobody's Been Watching

Here is the part that gets lost in most coverage of the grading trucks. While the city and EHB were settling their fight over the land itself, EHB's subsidiaries, 180 Land Company and Seventy Acres LLC, filed a separate lawsuit against Clark County in April 2025. The claim: the county kept collecting property taxes on the golf course parcels from 2017 through 2025, years after courts had already ruled the city took the land from Lowie through inverse condemnation back in August 2017. If the land was effectively government property that whole time, the argument goes, it should have been tax exempt.

Clark County District Court Judge Tierra Jones agreed. In January 2026 she denied the county's motion to dismiss and ruled the county owes Lowie's companies $8.2 million in improperly collected taxes. Add roughly $680,000 in attorney's fees and the county's likely bill runs past $12 million once interest is included.

Lowie's attorney, Jim Leavitt, did not mince words about the county's position:

"It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem reasonable. It's not logical. It's not legal."

Clark County disagreed enough to take it further. In March 2026, county commissioners voted unanimously to appeal the ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court, arguing the city, not the county, should be on the hook for the refund. As of this year's reporting, that appeal was still pending. Nobody has said when the court will decide.

Two Governments, One Fence, Still Fighting

What makes this worth understanding if you live in Queensridge is the overlap. Grading equipment is moving dirt on the same 250 acres where a judge just ordered a government agency to write an eight-figure check for taxes collected on land that, by the courts' own ruling, was never really taxable to begin with. Construction and litigation are running on parallel tracks over the exact same fence line you drive past.

There is a quieter footnote here too. For seven years while that fence stood, the shuttered course became an unofficial public space during the day, used by joggers, dog walkers, and cyclists who treated it like a park because, functionally, nobody was stopping them. That informal use is part of why the tax argument has legs: land the public was using and the courts said the government had taken does not fit neatly into the category of privately taxable property.

Lowie himself has not stepped away from Las Vegas real estate. Records show EHB Companies quietly closed on a 20.6-acre parcel near Tropical Parkway and Alpine Ridge Way in the northwest valley for about $14.2 million in May 2026, a modest deal by Badlands standards but a sign the developer who spent a decade fighting City Hall is still buying dirt in the valley.

What This Means for the Next Two Years

If your lot ever backed the old course, expect the next stretch to look and sound like construction, not litigation. Traffic and drainage studies are already a condition of the city's approval, and grading crews working through 2026 and into 2027 are the visible part of a 2028 opening date. The Preserve's own gates and HOA mean it will operate as its own community rather than an extension of Queensridge, so the buffer wall and lower pad elevation are the practical inheritance of a decade of resident pushback, not just a design preference.

The tax appeal is a separate clock running in the background. It will not slow down grading crews and it will not show up in a school zoning map, but it is the reminder that this particular piece of Las Vegas history still has at least one unresolved chapter, even as the "Coming 2028" banner suggests the story is basically over.

If you are weighing what any of this means for your own property, whether you are thinking about a future sale, an addition, or simply want a read on where Queensridge values stand while The Preserve takes shape next door, Teresa McCormick and the team have been tracking this corner of the valley closely. Reach out for a straightforward conversation, or get a complimentary home valuation to see how your specific address is positioned right now.