US Town On Sale For $8 Million

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A small American town has gone on the market with an asking price of $US8 million ($AU11 million).

 

You'll be buying a thriving community that is home to 350 hardy residents. There is a casino, store, camper van park, motel, bar and restaurant that draws high-desert wanderers from thousands of miles around.

 

Cal-Nev-Ari is located hour south of Las Vegas, where Nevada's narrow southern tip comes within 16km of both California and Arizona. It's just the latest town to go on sale, with Australia's own Tarraleah also on the market for $11 million.

 

The owner of Cal-Nev-Ari is a woman called Nancy Kidwell, a modern-day pioneer of the American desert, a rough-riding frontierswoman who built an entire town amid the lonely yucca trees and sturdy sagebrush, where nothing existed before.

 

A half-century ago, Kidwell and first husband Slim turned a triangle-shaped gravel airstrip abandoned by the US military into a successful township.

 

Many travellers landed in private planes to frequent this gambling state's first-ever fly-in gaming emporium, that once advertised "seven hours of fun" where one-armed bandit aficionados could touch down in the late afternoon and taxi out that same night.

 

This patch of desert is all the 78-year-old has known since she and Slim first flew over the arid expanse in 1965, gawking at the isolation and sheer beauty of the spot they'd chosen to make a break from the California rat race.

 

But now her beloved Slim is long gone -- a victim of Alzheimer's disease in 1983 -- and Kidwell has grown weary of working seven-day weeks supervising 22 employees, playing the role of the town's mayor, police chief and sole businesswoman. She wants to travel, maybe buy another aeroplane for a tour of the nation's parks -- Yosemite, Yellowstone and Gettysburg included.

 

"I'm going to find out what you do after you spend 51 years of your life working in one place," she said, "when you suddenly don't have to wake up at 5am each day to get the work done."

 

Kidwell is selling a full square mile along US Highway 95, with 500 acres (202 hectares) of the parcel ready for immediate development. After all, she and Slim already did the backbreaking work of building the infrastructure, bringing in utilities and digging the wells.

 

Years ago, when Kidwell put the town up for sale at $17 million, two developers got into a bidding war before the real estate market collapsed and her well-laid plans turned back to dust. Now, at a mere $8 million, Kidwell is seeing sizeable interest: "My broker says the whole thing has gone viral."

 

She has no idea what her town will become once it's sold, but has received calls from people who want to turn it into everything from a renewable energy project, motorsports park, guest ranch, survival school or shooting range.

 

 

 

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