Dec. 13, 2007
Two million reasons: Why some Vegas-lovers won’t live here
By STEVE FRIESS
Just as I was putting together the biweekly poll question
I post on my podcast and blog sites earlier this month, the
Review-Journal thudded on our driveway with a World War III
headline declaring the Valley is now unofficially home to 2
million people.
Beyond acknowledging the fact that it’s a mystery to me how
the housing market could possibly be crashing—and more spectacularly
than almost anywhere, they say—if we’re having an unabated parade
of new arrivals, I returned my focus to the audiences who listen
to and read our Internet work and respond to our polls.
What you need to know about them is that they are a very large
contingent of Vegas-loving people delightfully obsessive about
this city. It is an incomparable but enormous groupie community
centered around a unique geographic and cultural concern, with
every minor change in land ownership on the Strip, every legal
battle Downtown, every planning commission hiccup being thoroughly
stewed over by attentive devotees throughout cyberspace.
So, I wondered, why do they live where they do? Or, as I asked
in the poll with all due deliberate snark, “If you love Vegas
so much why don’t you live here?” Of course, I must make the
caveat that this is a totally unscientific survey except to
say that it’s a self-selected group of people who are, by definition
of being in my audience, enthralled with some aspect of Las
Vegas.
I came up with 17 possible answers, from “not a U.S. citizen”
(a gratifying 8 percent) to worries about cost of living, traffic
and future water shortages (4 percent each) to the evidently
least important, “the dating scene sucks,” which came in at
just 1 percent and may have been something you wouldn’t know
or think until you got here. Interestingly, only 6 percent chose
the one that my father and sister claim to be their big impediments,
that they’d never be able to control their gambling.
There is a space for comments on the poll, and that’s where
it gets fun. One poll answer was “Oh, but I do live here—and
hate it,” a choice selected by 2 percent of folks. A fellow
named Mike who clearly availed himself of this one wrote: “I
do live here, and I don’t enjoy it. I hope to move to a city
that isn’t an endless sprawl of master-planned communities and
shopping power centers. It was fun for the first year, I’ll
admit. But then you see the flaws, and your friends from out
of town wonder how you can live in such a place. Oh well.”
Mike was quizzed by another poster as to why he lives here,
then, and he would only say somewhat cryptically that his transplant
was “forced.” Maybe that’s why the housing market sucks, because
so many people are forced to move here and don’t intend to stay?
Sneaking into the double-digits for reasons keeping away many
Vegas-lovers were work and family reasons (screw ’em!) and the
summer heat (get over it!).
About which we have the thoughts of a woman named Susan, who
wrote: “I moved here from Long Island, New York, almost five
months ago, right in the midst of the 100-degree temperatures.
My feeling? Stay indoors! I did when it was 10 degrees in New
York! Dust is a heck of a lot easier to clean off your car than
snow. I don’t miss the snow at all. I still can’t understand
how people in this town think the housing costs are too high.
Try finding a two-bedroom apartment for under $1,000 [a month]
on Long Island. Good luck!”
The No. 1 reason made the most sense, really. Coming in with
16 percent of the vote was “I want to keep it as my favorite
visiting spot.” It’s one reason why my partner Miles and I don’t
live in California’s wine country or a place like central Europe;
too much of a good thing always cheapens how special something
is, makes you take that which you love for granted.
This response was typified by a listener named Bay Loftis
of East Tennessee, whose sister lives in Las Vegas. The pair
do a sister-act weekly podcast called Grits To Glitz (www.gritstoglitz.com)
on which they contemplate the differences between their locales.
Bay wrote:
“I love to visit Las Vegas. I do. I’m incredibly glad my sister
lives there so I can visit her and get away from the madness
that is the Strip. But I’m Southern. It’s really hard to get
a Southerner to leave the South. We have biscuits and gravy,
and it doesn’t seem to matter that there’s more or less alkaline
in the water. But if we go west, and we eat biscuits west of
the Colorado River, well, that is gross.
“So we remain Southern, and we continue to love visiting Las
Vegas. And aren’t you glad? I mean, if we lived there, we would
no longer contribute to your economy as tourists!”
Sigh. I guess. I just want someone to buy my damn money pit,
er, Panorama condo. Oh well.
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