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Las Vegas Update: Down Economy

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As Boom Times Sour in Vegas, Upward Mobility Goes Bust

During the boom years, Las Vegas wasn’t just a place where gamblers could hit the jackpot, but where hard-working hotel maids and cocktail waitresses could, too. The city offered something almost no other place in America did: upward mobility for the working class.

Now, that is evaporating.

The recession has jolted Las Vegas in a fundamental way. Like other job-creating cities in the Sunbelt, Las Vegas saw its population, income levels and housing prices surge over the past decade. And like those cities — including Phoenix, Orlando and San Diego — it’s been battered in the bust.

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But by many measures, Las Vegas’s rise and fall has been more dramatic than most. Last year, Clark County’s population declined for the first time in more than two decades. More than 10,000 people left Las Vegas between July 2007 and July 2008, according to Keith Schwer, director for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The unemployment rate in the metropolitan area tripled from 4% in May 2007 to just over 12.3% in June 2009, higher than the national rate of 9.5%. And after the median price of existing homes rose by 122% in sales between 2000 and 2006 — more than double the national rise of 49% — sale prices fell by 30% between last year and this year.

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For Las Vegas Chefs, the Odds Grow Longer

IN the late, lamented boom, waiters at luxury restaurants here could make $150,000 a year and more thanks to the electrifying arrival of high rollers renowned as “the whales.”

Robert Martinez, a 33-year-old waiter at Rao’s in Caesars Palace, said these heavyweights “had wads of $100 bills and gave them to everyone on the staff, and tipped generously on $12,000 to $15,000 checks.”

Bodegas Emilio Moro – Malleolus 2006 Red Wine

But now, said Kevin Carter, a 49-year-old waiter at Craftsteak in the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, “the whales have migrated.”

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Last year, a fourth of the country’s highest-grossing restaurants were in Las Vegas. But the feast has transitioned to famine. Fewer revelers are arriving, and they are spending less. With the economy reeling, more than 5,000 food and restaurant workers are unemployed here.

“We look out and we see every jet coming and going,” said Michael N. Baker, 50, a waiter for eight years at the Top of the World restaurant in the Stratosphere Casino Hotel tower. “They used to be stacked up all day long,” he added. “Then there was nothing out there. That was scary.”

Many of the town’s 2,900 restaurants are beset by fabulousness fatigue.

“It was gold, and suddenly it became fool’s gold,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting firm that bears his name.

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Down and out in Las Vegas

With Americans cutting back on luxuries, and the price of transport rocketing, the so-called “Vegas vacation” is facing the axe. This week, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, major hotels were taking stock of a fall in all-important room occupancy rates from their usually impressive 95 per cent levels to nearer 80 per cent.

More worryingly, new figures showed gambling revenue has also dropped – a further 3 per cent this month – starting a price war between worried firms anxious to lure punters back. Hotel rooms, which last year averaged $130 each, now go for less than $100 (£50).

At the vast Planet Hollywood resort, the clatter of fruit machines and poker chips was this week replaced by an uneasy – and, for Vegas, very unusual – calm. A large if slightly tatty double room could be found for less than $80.

No tourist resort can afford to lose its buzz. Yet the slump now runs so deep it’s starting to hurt even the town’s Elvis impersonators, wedding chapels, and sex industry. When money’s tight, the prospect of stuffing another $20 bill into a lap-dancer’s gyrating stocking-top somehow doesn’t seem quite so enticing.

“This year already we’ve seen the Minx closing, the Mensa club closing, and the Crazy Horse closing,” says Dolores Eliades, owner of the OG, the second biggest “adult cabaret” venue in the world. “By another 12 months from now, I expect another two or three major venues will have gone.

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Less Vegas: The Casino Town Bets on a Comeback

I have come for revenge. For years, I’ve hyperventilated at restaurant “tasting menu” checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury to strip-club ATMs and pushed far too many chips to the dealer. On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs to serve it and — at least according to a sign in the Cheetahs dressing room berating the strippers for undercharging — get some kind of deal in the VIP room. For the first time ever, it is possible to complete a monetary exchange in Las Vegas and feel bad for the other person.

I, however, feel guiltless about taking advantage when someone is down, and Vegas is way down. This has been the first major recession Vegas has experienced since it became a real city. After two decades as one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the U.S., Las Vegas has seen its population growth flatten. It’s got the highest foreclosure rate of any major metro area, and the unemployment rate jumped from 3.8% to 12.3% in just three years. Even if you have a job, it’s not a good time to have your wage be dependent on lavish tips. The No. 1 convention city has also had a wave of cancellations from the AIG effect — companies don’t want the bad publicity of being seen in Sin City. Just as Las Vegas was the epicenter of the extravagant consumption of the past 20 years, now it’s the deepest crater of the recession over the last year. And while I do want to get my money back, I’m a little worried about seeing the dream sucked out of our most American city, the one with the optimism and possibility of New York City in 1900. The one I’ve, embarrassingly, come to love.

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The Rest is Up to You…

Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com

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