There's a time when things that were popular as kids becomes popular again as an adult. In the 90s Pokemon was a craze. While it's never faded away, and I was too old to get into it, it has ebbed and flowed in time. But now, we're seeing something interesting: Pokemon infiltrating everyday life. In this case it's a new community in Las Vegas where each street will be named after a Pokemon creature. Nicole Clark at Polygon has more.
Construction has been booming in the Las Vegas valley, leading to the unique challenge of coming up with names for new streets. “It’s really, really hard to name streets in this town,” Andrea Miller, a construction manager at Harmony Homes LLC told KLAS 8 News NOW (Channel 8 in Las Vegas). In order to create street names, a developer must figure out the number of streets and then submit double that number of names, so that they may pass jurisdiction to determine whether they’ve already been used (among other concerns), Miller explained.
Polygon
Sure enough, Clark's reporting is accompanied by photos of the cleared land with a single street sign: Squirtle Lane. This also gets me thinking about the way streets are named. Some communities have a theme to them (Great Lakes, all starting with the same letter, storybook characters) but never has something so recent come onto my radar.
Even more fascinating is how a developer must submit double the amount of street names needed to ensure there's no duplicates. I would guess this is why so many common names end up repeating themselves across the country.
While the development in Vegas has only began, it will be interesting to see if these fun names impact (for better or worse) the values of the houses going up.