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LAS VEGAS — There are many cities across the country that are beginning to see the first glimpses of the end of the recession.
This is not one of them.
The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.
Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.
Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.
August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.
The Plaza Hotel and Casino, which is downtown, recently announced that it was laying off 400 workers and closing its hotel and parts of its casino for eventual renovation, the latest high-profile hit to a city that has seen a steady parade of them.
“It’s been in bad shape before, but not this bad,” said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “If you look at the gaming revenues, they have declined and continue to decline over the past three years. “
“Sept. 11 set off a two-year slowdown,” Mr. Schwartz said. “But nothing of this magnitude.”
“Our daily room rate average is not what it was. Our hotel room rates are bargains now. People aren’t spending on gambling as they have in the past. Ordinarily Las Vegas was the last to go into a recession and the first to come out. This one is different." Mayor Oscar B. Goodman
“The big players, the ones who gamble the big money, I’m not sure they have it anymore,” Mr. Goodman said.
And in the midst of all of this, standing as a prime symbol of Las Vegas’s taste for extravagant risk — or perhaps of a fateful misreading of a changing landscape — is a huge new “urban community” called CityCenter, which opened next to the Bellagio on the Strip.
Built by MGM Resorts and the government of Dubai, CityCenter is the largest privately financed construction project in United States history. It is an $8.5 billion labyrinth of hotels, casinos, retail malls, meeting rooms, auditoriums and spas spread across 76 acres with 16 million square feet of floor space. Steel and glass, a crush of buildings often rising at discordant angles, it is an arresting display of a new style of architecture and urban planning that has not been seen in Las Vegas before.
CityCenter was conceived before the economic downturn and did not open until last December, an unfortunate turn of timing that dropped 5,000 new hotel rooms into the city when some of the older properties had been struggling to bring people in. Another 2,500 rooms are due to be added when another new hotel and casino on the Strip, the Cosmopolitan, opens in mid-December. (A recent check online found rooms being offered for as little as $38 a night at the Sahara Hotel and Casino.)
Billy Vassiliadis, the chief executive of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said, “People are looking at mall visits and online shopping and saying, ‘Yeah, that could be a problem.’ ”
“Am I worried?” Mr. Vassiliadis continued. “Hey, listen, I wish we could go all the way back to before Atlantic City opened. By my nature, I like monopolies as long as they are my clients.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us...s.html?_r=1&hp
This is not one of them.
The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.
Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.
Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.
August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.
The Plaza Hotel and Casino, which is downtown, recently announced that it was laying off 400 workers and closing its hotel and parts of its casino for eventual renovation, the latest high-profile hit to a city that has seen a steady parade of them.
“It’s been in bad shape before, but not this bad,” said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “If you look at the gaming revenues, they have declined and continue to decline over the past three years. “
“Sept. 11 set off a two-year slowdown,” Mr. Schwartz said. “But nothing of this magnitude.”
“Our daily room rate average is not what it was. Our hotel room rates are bargains now. People aren’t spending on gambling as they have in the past. Ordinarily Las Vegas was the last to go into a recession and the first to come out. This one is different." Mayor Oscar B. Goodman
“The big players, the ones who gamble the big money, I’m not sure they have it anymore,” Mr. Goodman said.
And in the midst of all of this, standing as a prime symbol of Las Vegas’s taste for extravagant risk — or perhaps of a fateful misreading of a changing landscape — is a huge new “urban community” called CityCenter, which opened next to the Bellagio on the Strip.
Built by MGM Resorts and the government of Dubai, CityCenter is the largest privately financed construction project in United States history. It is an $8.5 billion labyrinth of hotels, casinos, retail malls, meeting rooms, auditoriums and spas spread across 76 acres with 16 million square feet of floor space. Steel and glass, a crush of buildings often rising at discordant angles, it is an arresting display of a new style of architecture and urban planning that has not been seen in Las Vegas before.
CityCenter was conceived before the economic downturn and did not open until last December, an unfortunate turn of timing that dropped 5,000 new hotel rooms into the city when some of the older properties had been struggling to bring people in. Another 2,500 rooms are due to be added when another new hotel and casino on the Strip, the Cosmopolitan, opens in mid-December. (A recent check online found rooms being offered for as little as $38 a night at the Sahara Hotel and Casino.)
Billy Vassiliadis, the chief executive of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said, “People are looking at mall visits and online shopping and saying, ‘Yeah, that could be a problem.’ ”
“Am I worried?” Mr. Vassiliadis continued. “Hey, listen, I wish we could go all the way back to before Atlantic City opened. By my nature, I like monopolies as long as they are my clients.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us...s.html?_r=1&hp
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