I'll comment here based on my 5 years in Las Vegas. I renovated an old (1950s) house on half an acre that, when it was built was how-can-you-live-way-out-there far from downtown. Now it's in the middle of everything, within walking distance of casinos and shopping, and surrounded by houses on 7,000 sq ft lots.
There is lots and lots of tract housing in cookie-cutter like subdivisions, but if you look in the spaces in between, you can still find land to permify. You have to be very familiar with the area, or at least willing to drive around a lot. The phrases to key on in the real estate listings are: horse property, Clark county (vs.
City of Las Vegas), built pre-1970, agricultural zoning.
You are right that 10K/acre is high for land, even fertile bottom land in a place where it rains, but the illusion remains that land speculators will strike it rich when the developers need your land for their next subdivision. The cheapest land price goes with an old house on a lot that can't be swallowed into a subdivision. A good place to look is due west of the North Las Vegas airport, in the triangle bounded by Vegas on the south, Jones on the west, and Rancho Bl. on the northeast.
The other avenue is to go outside of town, to where you think it will be a long time before developers and civilization arrive. But people with those ideas have consistently underestimated how fast Vegas can grow, as evidenced by the pig farmer in North Las Vegas who happily fed his pigs on buffet waste he collected from the casinos, but who came to be neighbors with people who started to complain about the smell of swine:
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