Lessons Las Vegas can learn from the Rust Belt

[ccharles000]

The images streaming from Las Vegas during the past two years — foreclosed homes, long unemployment lines, unfinished eyesores on the Strip — must be shocking but also achingly familiar to many Americans.

For although they’ve come to expect, from media images and their trips here, a dazzling Las Vegas of perpetual change, growth and prosperity, at the same time they know all too well the signs of economic decline.

These are Americans from the Rust Belt — the string of cities from the Northeast to the upper Midwest, whose industrial decline began after World War II and continues today.

Residents of places such as Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit have grown accustomed to the latest news. Another factory headed overseas. Another drive-by shooting in a forsaken part of town. A late-night comedian using the city as a punch line. And, perhaps most painfully, a friend, a neighbor, a son or a daughter joining hundreds of thousands of others and leaving town — usually for the Sun Belt.

Las Vegas residents could afford to look back on those cities, for many of them home, with an air of pity and smugness.

A combination of good weather, affordable homes, plentiful jobs, a live-and-let-live attitude and minimal taxes and regulation had created — seemingly — recession-proof prosperity.

Goodbye to all that.

The recession has hit here harder than just about anywhere else. The depressing data are familiar: Unemployment has topped 13 percent, and is much higher when part-time workers and those who have quit looking for work are included; Las Vegas has more foreclosures than any other large city in America, and our home values have utterly collapsed; the largest foreclosed commercial building in the country is on Las Vegas Boulevard, and, most shockingly, after being the fastest-growing city in America for the better part of two decades, a net of at least 28,000 people have left Las Vegas since summer 2007, according to recent estimates.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/11/lessons-las-vegas-can-learn-rust-belt/

[tonysam]

1. Nevada in general

is dying on the vine.

[Greyhound]

2. What's killing Las Vegas is the corporations that run it now.

Of course, you're never going to see that printed in a Vegas newspaper.

Las Vegas prospered through many recessions and the worse things were in the nation, the better they did. When times are hard, people view escape as necessary, and Las Vegas used to be run by people that knew how to make people happy that they were losing their money. Since the corporations moved in all that is gone, now it's like Disneyland, just pay and pay and pay and while you're paying stand in this line in a pool of sweat while the brat behind you screams and it's parents pretend they don't notice.

[whoneedstickets]

3. Man that is so true...

..the great days of the Vegas bargains on food and booze and cheap rooms to lure you into the games are long gone.

[SoCalDem]

4. My bowling leagues have been going to vegas for 19 years now, and when we first started

rooms were $25-$35 a night..great buffets went for $5-$8 and people could have a really good weekend away for a couple of hundred dollars..Now, even with a group discount for 120 rooms, our rates are at, or over $100 a night and the buffets have not gotten all that much better, but they now cost $15-$20 each..

Sure, Vegas is glitzier and shinier, but "most" people don't go there for that.. They go to win a little money and have a break from home.

and from KIDS!!!

Vegas used to be a playground fro grownups..a place where they could stay out all night, drink too much, and act like irresponsible teenagers :evilgrin:

The hotels used to have distinctive "flavors" and now most of them have "mall food courts" and a few too-expensive restaurants and not much in-between.


Pretty soon we'll probably stop going there for our tournaments.. we have lots of fancy gambling places closer to home, so why waste gas money to get ripped off for hotel rooms we hardly spend time in anyway?

[whoneedstickets]

5. Amazing!

Yeah I first visited Vegas in the 80's too, it was just like you described. My parents used to go in the early 70's. They tell stories about the meals they used to get for a couple of bucks and how they could basically drink free all night at the tables (real drinks too they note!). Now its all part of the revenue stream.

[Selatius]

6. The decline started when large equity firms started absorbing gaming companies.

I generally view private equity firms as nothing more than house flippers. Except, instead of flipping houses, they flip entire companies. Harrah's is a great example. They're owned by one of these equity firms, and their customer service has gone down the shitter. The orientation is now on profits instead of on customers.

If you work for a company that has just been absorbed by a private equity firm, prepare for some jarring and painful changes. They suck the life out of companies and then leave behind pale shadows of companies. The company that makes the world-famous Simmons mattresses is a poster child of a company that has been gutted by these firms.