The cynic’s guide to living in Las Vegas

By J. DeVoy

I’ve lived in Las Vegas for about a year now and am ready to publicly come to grips with this reality.  Professionally, living in Las Vegas is the best thing that could ever have happened to me.  I have generally been impressed by the judiciary and the matters handled in the District of Nevada.  It will never be the Western District of Wisconsin or Eastern District of Texas, but the court has been primed to become an intellectual property litigation mecca in the future.  But who cares about that; nobody wants to read bragging and high praise.  So I’m going to focus on bashing Vegas for not meeting my idiosyncratic demands in several areas.

Vegas housing is terrible.

I need to qualify this statement.  If you’re paying more than $4,000 per month in rent, you can get a really pimp place in Vegas.  Since most units rent in the $700-$1400 range, though, I’ll center the discussion there.  For the sizable majority of people, the housing is uninspiring, if not soulless and awful.  Compared to New York, LA and San Francisco, it’s a bargain, but the houses are hellish.  Each is a soulless, wall-to-wall carpeted diarrhea fecal explosion of cheap-feeling, monotone Pottery Barn crap, designed to be as inoffensive as possible.  Many ostensibly “nice” communities are plagued with construction defect litigation as well, leading to serious doubts about whether the homes are even safe.  To make the most use of the desert land, most houses are packed together in a community plan like sardines in a can.  There are high-rises, and they are very reasonably priced compared to larger cities, but they have their own drawbacks.  About half of the high-rise apartments are on the strip.  Unless you work on the strip, or don’t work at all, this may be the most inconvenient location in the city.  The other option for high-rise living is Downtown – where, instead of traffic on the strip, one must contend with a zombie apocalypse-style infestation of homeless people and other ne’er do-wells.  I’ve never been on Fremont street without seeing the cops force someone to the ground and roughly arrest them.

Speaking of Downtown Las Vegas, check out this video of a 5-on-1 street fight.  This happened in the yuppie bar area I normally go to, right on 4th Street and Fremont, by Neonopolis, Downtown Cocktail Lounge (where I’ve taken several professional contacts) and a few hundred feet from the Ogden, one of the nice high-rise buildings aggressively marketing its apartments.  And Zappos is going to move there?

Being in a desert, I can understand the dearth of hardwood floors in the area.  But there’s no concrete?  No stone?  I want a house that looks scary and uncomfortable to live in, so that I can fill it to the gills with uninviting, black leather scandinavian furniture.  My living space should be a prop that I show to people so their blood runs cold and they neither want to stay there nor ever visit again – not some place for kids to feel like they can sit on the carpet and smear their sticky hands everywhere.

You have to drive… everywhere.

Las Vegas is not car friendly.  I cannot think of a single neighborhood or community where you could comfortably and efficiently live without a car.  In other places where I’ve lived, one could live without a car.  In fact, I had done so – but it was not always convenient, or a particularly good use of my time.  In Las Vegas, this is impossible.  The goal of life then becomes how to minimize driving, and finding a place to live in which one can reach every important destination without spending more than 20 minutes in a car.  These destinations re-prioritize with age, making it even more important to rent, rather than buy.

A scary corollary to this reality is that Las Vegas natives do not know how to walk.  Once one ventures off the strip, to a local casino or shopping area, watching the gait and shuffle of passerby will reveal who has spent most of their lives in Las Vegas.  People who have lived in the car-dependent culture for too long (and naturally without much exercise) have a certain heavy, shambolic step that reveals they do not actually know how to walk – a result of virtually never having to do so.  This leads to a host of other physical and pscyhological problems in both men and women, but I’ll leave such skewering to hellions such as Roissy, whatever he’s calling himself now, and Roosh, who have well-tread such ground.

That tiny water issue.

Las Vegas is just one of several cities living on borrowed time, stealing its lifeblood from the Colorado River.  Nevada has basically reconfigured the whole state so that its water table will flow into Lake Mead, which provides Las Vegas with most of its water.  In recent years, Lake Mead has had serious problems with falling water levels.  This year, rainfall had increased, and Las Vegas had stopped growing – and in fact shrank slightly – giving the strained lake a brief respite.  Still, strict water use restrictions remain in effect.  I do not believe this is sustainable, nor a viable long term solution – especially in the (unlikely) circumstance that Vegas recommences economic growth.

The transient, rootless people suck, and make the community suck.

For a city with about 2 million people in it, Las Vegas feels like a place with 500,000, and might as well be Milwaukee.  Just like Cleveland and Milwaukee used to be company towns with most of their jobs provided by steel and manufacturing companies, large gaming interests provide Las Vegas with its economic engine.  I do not see an intrinsic problem with this, although the casinos’ best interests are served by not improving or beautifying much of the area.  Rather, it’s the 1.5 million other people who transition through Las Vegas like a goth phase in high school that make it so inauthentic.

I’m not saying that the citizens of Las Vegas need to rise up and demand a symphony orchestra.  Community efforts have slowly but surely been effective in revitalizing the arts district.  Most people, however, do not contemplate the fact that the may be in Nevada for a long time.  This leads to things like the public schools being terrible, utter ignorance of things like Nevada’s underwhelming anti-SLAPP statutes, and the city being carved up into gated fiefs run by home owners’ associations and community-level master associations.  Rather than being created organically, Las Vegas is cultivated for landowners to make money off of employees of large casinos, who then spend their money at smaller, local casinos for diversion, after paying rent.  The system works, but it prevents the kind of creative and efficient land use that one can see in other cities with limited footprints, such as San Francisco or oceanfront Miami.  I do not think I’m alone in preferring coherent urbanism over a sprawling desert hellscape.  But without adequate planning and foresight, the urban vision has failed to launch.

A number of professionals and others I’ve met in Vegas tend to generally agree with my view.  Part of the issue is that a significant portion of Las Vegans do not suffer from status anxiety like residents of other cities do.  In Las Vegas, only 2 in 10 people have a college degree, which is markedly lower than other major cities.  While a college degree has poor (and increasingly worse) predictive value concerning economic success, native intelligence and business aptitude, there is a correlation between large populations of educated people and urbanism – a kind of nascent desire to be more like Europe.  If Las Vegas had more people with college degrees, regardless whatever kind of dumb rich kids held them and whatever for-profit toilet they attended, there likely would be a greater demand for urban living.  This is not to say that the majority couldn’t be persuaded, either – many would be open to and see the benefit of living in a denser, clean urban area where cars and driving were not merely optional, but unnecessary.  But, when so many people transition through Vegas within 2 years of arriving, it is hard to reach a bloc of people willing to stay and fight.  Even for people who stay for the long haul, there is something to be said for keeping to one’s self and focusing on a job, career or family within prevailing conditions.  I don’t agree with it or even respect it, but I can understand it.

Conclusion

My gripes aside, I’ve enjoyed Las Vegas.  If you actually work, can be reached by phone on Friday, and are smarter than the average bear, you will pwn.  The city does, however, have many faults that will not only exacerbate, but actually validate whatever arrogance you may feel from hailing from the West or East coasts.  While skeptical, I am told that there is more to life than work.  There are plenty of options in that respect too, and I have had many an enjoyable hike and/or bike ride.  There are, however, systemic problems facing the city that will not be resolved until the majority of its population is locked in for the long haul – even in numbers smaller than the total population count.