Las Vegas Shows Strains of Population Boom

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 29, 2004 -- -- About 36 million people visit Las Vegas every year to get away from what they regard as "ordinary America." But people are increasingly taking up permanent residence in the neon metropolis, where desire meets money and where instinct replaces restraint.

Las Vegas is the last place in America where someone with little or no skills can live a good, middle-class life, said Hal Rothman, author of "The Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century."

"When the widget factory in your hometown closes, you can come [to Las Vegas] and find a job that will pay you a decent wage and let you own a home and let you aspire to more for your children," he said. "And that's really novel in post-industrial America."

The city estimates a new home is completed every 20 minutes, as 5,000 people move to Las Vegas every month. Las Vegas is currently building 88 new schools, and the number of hospitals has tripled in the past several years. There are so many new roads the police have to use a new grid map every couple of weeks.

In this service town that needs more of everything all the time, the powerful Culinary Union, which represents unskilled workers in food service and housekeeping, is virtually an employment agency for the city's hotels.

Las Vegas perfected the service economy long before the rest of the country. It is the salary -- plus tips, plus union-negotiated health care benefits -- that pays middle-class wages to all sorts of people without a high school education.

"You can go to other towns that have casinos that are not heavily unionized and the jobs are pretty crummy," said D. Taylor, the Culinary Union's secretary-treasurer. "I think what Las Vegas has proven is that you can have a successful union, have successful companies and have a better town."

Restaurant worker Jose Castillo left a minimum-wage job in Los Angeles to work in a Las Vegas casino restaurant. He now owns a house.

"I don't think there is any other way I can describe it how Vegas has been good to us," he said. "Good pay, great benefits and the jobs are great."

Retirees Lured to Las Vegas

Retirees comprise 25 percent of the population. They come for the warm weather and the affordable lifestyle. But they require more of the city's resources as they get older.

"In Nevada, in truth, nobody pays for the future right now," Rothman said. "We simply do not get the kind of revenue we need to accommodate the kind of growth. I think what happens when you don't end up with the infrastructure, the wheels come off the cart."

There are certainly strains. Housing prices shot up over 50 percent last year, though they settled down when speculation didn't pay off. Las Vegas needed 2,000 new teachers last year alone. There are not enough hospital emergency rooms, and the nursing shortage is greater in Las Vegas than anywhere in the country. There is also a never-ending argument about conserving water.

"Unless we begin making plans, people in Las Vegas are going to be spending almost as much on their water as they will be on the land on which their house is built," said Patrick Shea, former director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Rothman agrees.

"Water is a commodity," he said. "Someday you'll be able to buy it off a shelf, but it's a lot like oil. We use oil to heat Boston, but that oil doesn't come from Boston. It comes from Saudi Arabia."

Las Vegas will simply continue to develop. The city limits may someday be in California, which is only 50 miles away.

Peter Jennings filed this report for "World News Tonight".