Viva Las Vegas
Las Vegas can be a scary place to live, sort of like Bakersfield except with continuous sunshine and slot machines in every corner market.
William Anderson, chief economist for the state of Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation noted on Friday, 18 September 2009, that the jobless rate in the Nevada area continued at a record-breaking pace in August with unemployment in the gaming and construction industries topping out at 13.4 percent.
The jobless rate in the Reno, Nevada area is at 12.4 percent, however. Why the discrepancy between north and south? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Las Vegas Sun explains:
Anderson said, “There are certainly a number of factors accounting for the high unemployment rate in Southern Nevada compared to the north.”
The Las Vegas area “is more concentrated in those industries or sectors which have been impacted the most by the current recession,” he said. “For instance, as of August, 8.7 percent of all jobs in Southern Nevada were in the hard-hit construction sector, compared to 5.7 percent in the Reno metro area.”
He said the gaming and recreation sectors in the Las Vegas area have been harder hit than in Reno. “In the Las Vegas metro area, leisure and hospitality establishments account for nearly 30 percent of all jobs in the region.” In the Reno area, that percentage is 17.4 percent.
The problem is simple: Vegas is too heavily invested in gaming and construction projects related to gaming (building new casinos and resorts) than their brethren to the north. But that still doesn’t stop the locals here from vicious scapegoating where the loss of construction jobs is concerned, mouthing off in the comments section at the Sun online every opportunity they get:
The illegals have taken jobs from taxpaying American Citizens and must be deported ASAP. We have a huge population of illegals that are allowed to exist right along side taxpayers in Nevada. They have invaded the United States and are costing taxpayers billions every year. If you tolerate illegals than you should be ashamed of yourself. Illegals have stolen jobs from Americans for far too long and should be deported.
The “illegals have ruined everything” argument has spread across the Las Vegas Valley like an insidious virus. And you know what? It’s a sad and tired sentiment, the last hateful gasp of a white middle-class in America who refuse to assume any level of personal responsibility for their own failures. Almost 10 years into the 21st century, many people in many job sectors are discovering that the chores and services they provided, jobs that they took for granted would always be there when they wake up in the morning, is an illusion. It’s somebody else’s fault, they believe, and, more often than not, that somebody else is a non-white.
In Willy Vlautin’s outstanding Nevada-based novel Northline (2008) the character of Jimmy Bodie, a young, unemployed construction worker (and a skinhead to boot) explains the sentiment that has washed over many Southern Nevada residents and, by rote, over many other pockets of the United States whether we choose to accept it or not:
I mean, look at Vegas. The population’s almost tripled in twenty years. That means from when you were born it went from around 400,000 people in the whole county to maybe 1,700,000 now. It was a dump to begin with, then you add all the fucking new people. And the Mexicans come in like fog, cover everything, get in everywhere. They fuck up their country and then they come here. Our border controls are fucked. The INS is fucked. They should stay and fix their own fucking country … Pretty soon they’re gonna ruin everything. Leaving dirty diapers in parking lots, pouring motor oil down drains, throwing trash in the reservoirs, ruining houses, neighborhoods. The fucking rich people start it all and then they go and live in the goddamn suburbs in gated communities. They never have any contact with them in the first place except when they need their lawns mowed or their houses cleaned or food served. Put all the Mexicans back in Mexico. And the blacks? They have no respect for themselves. Their men abandon their women. Look at my old neighborhood. The Mexicans and the blacks moved in and now it’s a fucking cesspool. My grandma got so scared when her neighborhood went to shit that she now lives in an old folks’ home. My grandpa built her goddamn house by himself in the 1950s. The whole thing for her, just the way she wanted it. Brick by fucking brick, after work he did it. He was a damn welder. All day long he was busting his ass for someone else and then he comes home and builds her a house. She hated leaving, she loved that house, but there were three murders on her street in less than five years. She had to get an alarm system. My dad put bars on her windows. In the end everyone was so scared about her being there and finally we made her leave. You don’t see that happening in white neighborhoods, do you?
Comments
It’s a little more complicated than that, Rodger. It’s not just the gaming construction that’s fallen by the wayside here—it’s the housing construction as well. For a decade, Vegas had the kind of real estate boom that for most cities comes along once in a century—house values rising sometimes 400% in the space of five years. This was the fastest growing city in the country for a while, and there was no reason to assume it would stop that quickly.
Then, of course, the recession hit. The gaming industry has been drastically affected—take a look at the ten-car train wreck that is the CityCenter project, put together by MGM Grand and Dubai World—but the resultant housing drop-off has been far worse.
Not everyone here blames illegal immigrants, but there is a lot of frustration in the construction industry at the fact that the larger contractors who build here hire unskilled, non-unionized illegal workers. At no time has this practice been as highlighted as in the aforementioned CityCenter project, where unskilled workers installed concrete rebar *upside-down* in an entire tower of the project, forcing the complete teardown of the project above (I believe) the 24th floor.
This isn’t the fault of immigrants, of course, who are just trying to get work anywhere they can. It’s the fault of the contractors. But the fact is that Vegas, like most of the American Southwest, relies heavily upon cheap immigrant labor for its economic survival.
I’m not suggesting there isn’t racism, or that the workers are being scapegoated for issues that lie at the feet of the construction companies and their hiring practices. Certainly there is racism here—not for nothing was Vegas once called the “Selma of the west”.
But I do think it’s a bit unfair to paint Vegas locals as simply being ignorant middle class crackers who blame all their problems on the poor migrant workers, or to suggest that they’re somehow dinosaurs who haven’t learned to change with the times. Many of these new economic realities are not simply the result of progress, but of extremely poor choices being made by the people who run the businesses that run this city. And Vegas, more than any place on the planet, is a city run entirely to serve the bottom line.
And as always, the residents who live and work here sometimes simply get in the way.
Comment by Josh Ellis from Las Vegas, NV, USA — September 22, 2009 @ 8:50 am
Thanks for that well-considered response, Josh.
I live out in Summerlin on the edge of the desert; everywhere you look out here, there are dusty signs boasting housing tracts and planned communities that never happened. The urban sprawl in Las Vegas (which created many of those construction jobs) simply got out of hand and it took the powerful force of a recession to slow it down. All over town one can see the rusted skeletal remains of commercial real estate projects that were put to death right around the time the recession hit as well.
I agree strongly with your point about the contractors being to blame for hiring undocumented workers and if there must be any hate that is where it must be directed. Let’s leave the immigrants just trying to feed their families alone.
Willy Vlautin used to work construction jobs here in Nevada. When I interviewed him last year for Pop Matters he said that the problem was that the crews manned by undocumented workers simply underbid all other crews, no matter how ridiculously low they have to go in the bidding process to win the job and, he said, they almost always are awarded the contract.
The issue here is simple, good old-fashioned American greed: contractors give the job to a crew manned largely by undocumented laborers and then pocket the difference that they would have paid to an “Anglo” crew. Disgusting, isn’t it? But I guess it’s easier to hate on “the illegals” than to place the anger on one’s SUV-driving next door neighbor who hires those crews.
Comment by Rodger Jacobs from Las Vegas, NV — September 22, 2009 @ 12:48 pm