Las Vegas Effect - Essay Example

Las Vegas Effect Las Vegas is known for its casinos, neon lights, and the site for emergency weddings. In a place where gambling is the main attraction, there's nothing like giving in to the Las Vegas Effect. That's like feeling you've won or you'll win in gambling. In a report in Las Vegas Review-Journal, Lacayo (2005) expounds on the effect of Las Vegas casinos are hurting the economies of other communities by luring gamblers who would be better off spending their money at home, a longtime gaming critic told a House panel on Wednesday.

John Kindt, a commerce and legal policy professor at the University of Illinois, called for a moratorium on building new casinos. He delivered his testimony hours before the opening of the 2,716-room Wynn Las Vegas. Kindt commented that dollars just leave the consumer economy and go into slot machines. Furthermore, he exposed that Southern Nevada has a fast-growing economy in part because Southern Californians are gambling their money away in Las Vegas instead of purchasing a new refrigerator at home, "It's just moving dollars around.

Las Vegas has bad socioeconomic effects on Southern California," he said. Truly, the landmark industry in Las Vegas is casino gambling, which its representatives would like you to call the Gaming Industry. For most people, this denotes a four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South called the Strip, which occasionally spills over onto side and parallel streets, from Sahara Avenue at the north end to just past Hacienda Avenue at the south, where it bumps into McCarran Airport. The Industry also implies Downtown, a couple of miles north of the Strip, which was once a genuine downtown, the historic birthplace and commercial center of the city.

Although more cluttered by urban reality than the Strip, what Las Vegas promoters now call Downtown is a secondary tourist district of ten major and several minor casino hotels centered on 2,000 feet of Fremont Street, east of the railroad tracks and Interstate 15. In 1995-96, gamblers left behind $3.7 billion at the machines, tables, and sports books of the Strip compared to $683 million Downtown, a fact that gives some idea of the relative importance of the two in the industry that created and still runs Las Vegas.

In actuality, Las Vegas has no downtown, no central business district. Residents shop at a few grand-scale shopping plazas and any one of a hundred strip malls scattered about the valley. There are two upscale retail centers on the Strip--the Fashion Show Mall and the Forum Shops at Caesars--but these depend on visitors for most of their profits. What offices there are (Clark County has about 2,100 attorneys, 1,900 doctors, and 2,600 architects) tend to be strung out along the evenly spaced grid of long, straight boulevards or clustered in a few medium-size high-rises, none of which approaches the height or grandeur of the ruling casino hotels.

Las Vegas can mean the City of Las Vegas proper, which includes Downtown, a cluster of public buildings, and the relatively impoverished West Side but not the Strip, the airport, the university, or most of the residential and commercial development of the past 50 years. Considerably enlarged by the annexation since 1987 of a vast new housing development to the northwest, the City of Las Vegas now encompasses 85,000 acres and had in 1996 a population of 377,000. To anyone except local politicians, voters, and taxpayers, however, it would be absurd to talk about "Las Vegas" and not include the 36 casino hotels on and just off the Strip, with their 83,000 rooms (scheduled to grow to 91,000 by 2000), their scores of restaurants, their vast meeting and convention halls, their showrooms and spas and arenas and shops, and their more than 500 acres of covered, often lavishly decorated space in which adult visitors are invited to gamble (David, 1999).