I was a teenager when I read Stephen King's novel The Stand. Okay, so I was young and impressionable: Las Vegas deserved the Sin City moniker because it was Evil Headquarters. OMG! How could normal, nice people even think about wanting to live there?!? Fast-forward a decade or two and the mini-series airs. Note to self is now bold, all-caps, multi-underlined:
NEVER LIVE IN VEGAS!!!
Yeah, I know, never say 'never'...
Been here almost 20 years now and my young, impressionable self was absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt right; this place is not normal. Ours was to be a temporary RV stop on the way to Better Things, USA. Alas, John Lennon's prophetic words still ring in my ears: life is what happens when you're busy making other plans'. A short term job morphed into a permanent one and, before we knew it, were eyeing that pension, raising a grandchild and too upside down on our home to move anywhere else. Since hindsight is 20/20, I guess I'll do the only thing I can do: RANT!
The mob wasn't stupid. Where else but in the middle of a wasteland could you legally build a place with the sole purpose of gambling, boozing and getting laid? When we first moved here, Vegas still resembled its depiction in The Stand movie: a deep dusty bowl surrounded by dry brown mountains, The Strip glittering in its center like a cheap engagement ring. For a hundred miles in any direction lay desert inhabited by coyotes, snakes, scorpions and prey-food rabbits, mice and lizards. It wasn't at all unusual to turn up a skeleton from time to time: hapless gold seekers done in by nature a hundred back or done in by a double-tap not so many years (or months, weeks, days) ago. Of course, the biggest predators were and still are down on the valley floor; prey comes willingly, eager to surrender themselves to pleasures of the flesh and the the lure of that gold.
Although we're less than a 10 minute drive from fake Eiffel Tower and New York's mini-me and our mailing address says: Las Vegas, NV, we don't actually live is Las Vegas. The vast majority of us (over 2 million) live in what's called unincorporated Clark County, which covers just a tad over 8000 sq miles. Las Vegas - the actual city - is tiny by comparison with around 500,000 inhabitants residing in about 135 square miles. But here's the kicker: those 135 sq miles do not include its most famous and lucrative attraction: The Strip. It runs on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard thru the unincorporated cities of Paradise, Winchester and North Las Vegas. Confused? Try living here.
On the news last month, Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, defined Las Vegas as an 'adult community'. That really had me fuming. When asked by a local 4th grade class what he would take if he could only have one thing on a deserted island, the previous mayor and former mob lawyer Oscar Goodman (the current mayor's husband) answered: "A bottle of gin".
No wonder it consistently ranks near or at the top of 'Worst US Cities to Raise a Family In" polls.
Las Vegas casts a big shadow for being such a small part of southern Nevada. And if you are going to promote yourself as the adult entertainment capital of the world, shouldn't the entertainment be inside the city limits?!?
The problem, as I see it, is that it was never meant to be a place to actually live. Never meant to be a place for normal people to put down roots and raise a family. I could be wrong but if you want to put down roots somewhere don't you need things like, oh, I don't know - water?!? And then it just got worse: in the late 1990's, people started moving here by the tens of thousands for no discernible reason.
What were they thinking?!? Didn't anybody actually look before they leapt into the U-Haul? The city's infrastructure was already at a very public breaking point. Sure, land might be plentiful but didn't you also need little things like roads, schools, healthcare, water and real jobs? Didn't body parts turning up in suitcases at the mall cause even a twinge of doubt? Evidently not, what with a 42% population explosion in just ten years.
So why? We didn't have a bunch of non-gaming businesses decide to open here and yeah, they were building new casinos but they implode and reinvent those all the time. Oh, and a slew of high-rise luxury condos were going up but there weren't enough rich people to buy them so most of them went bankrupt.
If you look at the median income of Clark County residents, it doesn't take an accountant to conclude most of us can't afford to enjoy our city like the visitors do. What with our soaring utility costs and being foreclosure capital of the country there is not much left over with which to partake. We did splurge on my birthday ten years ago and spent $190.00 on a pair of nose-bleed seats to see Bette Midler. Thank God and the big-hearted casinos that we had a local ID or it would've cost $200.00!
In response to the conservation pleas by the Southern Nevada Water Authority we tore out our beautiful front lawn and put in lame lava rock. And we were repaid by having our water bill increased anyway. But hey! The gigantic Bellagio fountains are still dazzling the visitors! I signed us up for a special rate Nevada Power offers if you limit electricity use between the peak hours of 2-7pm. I couldn't sign up fast enough! We'd replaced our AC unit with the top rated model last year and I was already line-drying all our wash, neurotic about turning off/unplugging everything, had replaced all our light bulbs and set the AC at 80 degrees. Want to guess what our 'special rate' bill was for August? How about almost $800.00. We've watched our home go from the $125k we paid for it in 1998 up to the highest, knock on our front door, cash offer of $317k until it finally floated down to the $98k of the current market.
Gee, if only we could ignore Sin City as well as it ignores us...
So it all started with a guy named Bugsy and a casino called The Flamingo. All these years later the song remains the same. Las Vegas lives to serve one master: the casino industry. The casino industry worships the tourists. The people who live here? We're just playing the hand we're dealt, wishing we'd have known when to fold 'em.
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