Las Vegas moving 'from a circus act to a regular city'

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2006-02-28-lasvegas_x.htm
By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
LAS VEGAS —

Ignore the Elvis impersonator mugging for the camera in front of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign. Get past the black glass pyramid and faux New York skyline rising out of the Mojave Desert. Look beyond the glitzy neon, gambling and showgirls along the Strip.

Only then will you glimpse a side of Vegas that few of Sin City's 38 million annual visitors see: One of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas is not just growing, but growing up.

For the first time in its brief urban history — Las Vegas is the largest U.S. city born after 1900 — this booming place finally is trying to establish an old-fashioned sense of community. The city has outgrown the chummy world of the 1950s, when Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack ruled, and turned into a full-blown metropolitan area that is attracting families and businesses from other cities.

"It's gone from a circus act to a regular city," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "The experience of Las Vegas now is less Rat Pack and more brats in the car, from Dino (Dean Martin) and his friends and swingers to minivans and shopping malls. It's just a big Western city."

Residents are investing more time and money to diversify Las Vegas' economy and turn it into a place that not only can be a decadent playground for a few days, but also a decent home for a lifetime. Las Vegas still markets itself as an escapist's paradise, but it also competes for doctors, teachers, high-tech talent and others who make a city run.

Philanthropy is on the rise. Medical care is blossoming into a new cancer research center and a $35 million Alzheimer's hospital to be designed by famed architect Frank Gehry. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, is now taxing rental cars to help fund a performing arts center. The 10-story, 1.3 million-square-foot World Market Center, a furniture showroom and convention center, opened near downtown last summer.

High-rise condos and town centers are springing up. Ethnic neighborhoods are growing — Chinatown has gone from one block to a 1½-mile strip. The education level of a community that relies largely on service workers from hotel maids and waiters to croupiers and doormen is finally inching up as more professionals move in.

They're all signs that people in the Las Vegas area — which has a population of about 1.8 million and is adding an estimated 7,000 residents a month — are seeking deeper and longer-lasting connections with their city.

"Those of us who live here are looking for more opportunity to take our kids to do something in a non-gaming environment," says Myron Martin, president of the Las Vegas Performing Arts Center Foundation.

"We're going through puberty," says John Restrepo, an economic consultant. "There are a lot of pulls and tugs from business, governmental side and residents: What should we be as we grow up?"

More attractive to employers

In the grand Vegas tradition, the consensus here remains that growth is good. More than 30 major casino-hotels have opened since 1990, adding more than 40,000 hotel rooms. The Strip, a 4.5-mile stretch lined by the world's most lavish casinos and 102,000 hotel rooms, is extending south to meet demand for more. The city is developing 61 acres downtown into a mix of retail, residential and commercial units.

Now, people want more than just buildings sprouting out of the desert. "Families here have wishes and desires no different from people in Omaha," says Keith Schwer, director of The Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV).

The Las Vegas area still makes much of its money from gambling and visitors who spend about $33 billion a year.

Despite the city's successful tourism campaign trumpeting Sin City's return to its sinful roots ("What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas"), Las Vegas is maturing.

Biomedical and high-tech companies are moving from California and other states. Educated and well-to-do executives who might have once pooh-poohed Vegas as morally moribund and a cultural wasteland are moving here — with their families.

"It is dramatically easier to recruit" for jobs in Las Vegas, says Brian Sullivan, chairman and CEO of Christian & Timbers, an executive search firm based in New York. "Five or seven years ago, the pool of candidates used to be either the guy was divorced or the guy was desperate. Now, there is a family contingent. ... There are kids."

The percentage of Clark County residents age 25 and up who have graduate or professional degrees is up from less than 6% in 2000 to 7% in 2004, according to the Census Bureau. Raising the area's educational level has been difficult because casino and resort industry service jobs pay so well.

"You can get out of high school, go and valet park and you can make $50,000 to $60,000 a year," Restrepo says. "What's the incentive to go to college?"

But jobs that require education are being created in the growing non-gaming sector, which now accounts for half of the area's revenue. And retirees from across the USA are flocking to downtown condos and active-adult communities in the suburbs.

"It has become home to a rapidly growing population that has nothing to do with gaming," says Peter Morrison, demographer at the Rand Corp. "It's becoming increasingly ethnically diverse. It's a new kind of maturity."

Moving beyond gambling

A. Somer Hollingsworth, CEO of the Nevada Development Authority, has lived here since 1953, when Las Vegas was better known for courts that granted quick divorces than gaming, and gambling profits "went out in paper bags back East," he says, referring to the Mafia's ties to early casinos here.

By 2000, Wall Street had embraced big investments in gaming, prompting larger and more lavish resort hotels. World-famous chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse opened restaurants. Casino mogul Steve Wynn brought fine-arts exhibits under the same roof as slot machines. "We had a utopia," Hollingsworth says.

Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Travel and tourism came to a standstill. "Fifteen thousand people lost their jobs just like this, overnight," he says. "It's taken us four years to recover."

The attacks brought home the need for Las Vegas to diversify its economy. The state has been wooing companies aggressively ever since, especially in California — Nevada's larger neighbor and friendly rival. A Nevada billboard towering over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles shows California's state flag with the bear missing from its logo, a not-so-subtle hint that even the bear fled for Nevada's low insurance rates and zero income tax.

"We now are able to recruit companies that five years ago wouldn't even have stopped to say 'Hi,' " Hollingsworth says.

Another plus: No threats of earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes. The city is the main disaster backup center for many firms.

QUALCOMM, a San Diego-based developer of wireless technology, broke ground last year on a 32-acre facility in North Las Vegas. It's working with UNLV on homeland-security initiatives.

Varian Medical Systems, based in California's Silicon Valley, moved parts of its oncology systems business and all of its cargo screening and security operations to Las Vegas. "The proximity of an international airport, the university, the cost of living and the proximity to Southern California's vendor base" sealed the deal, says Lester Boeh, a Varian vice president.

For employees who had to move, "the initial reaction was trepidation," says James Johnson, general manager of Varian's security and inspection products division. Once here, they were excited. "In California, they were struggling with their schools, taxes. Las Vegas is a much more stable community."

When Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002, he went to Los Angeles to have his prostate gland removed.

Guinn's and other high-profile cases put the spotlight on a void in Las Vegas' medical care. Last September, the Nevada Cancer Institute opened. A month later, the center had 1,000 patient visits.

"I grew up mostly on the East Coast in Baltimore," says Heather Murren, president and CEO of the cancer center. Later, she worked for Merrill Lynch in New York City. "Great education, medicine, the arts were all a given."

When relatives who had moved to Vegas needed cancer treatment, Murren realized that "a lot of the things that we had taken for granted didn't exist."

The community quickly lined up behind the push for a cancer research center. Major industries from resorts and banking to developers raised $70 million and the center obtained a $52 million loan.

Diane Gregory, executive director of physician marketing and support services for St. Rose Dominican Hospitals, a non-profit group, has seen a big shift.

"In the '80s, it was very difficult to recruit physicians to Las Vegas," she says. "... People didn't think there were hospitals. We had physicians ask us, 'Do you live on the Strip?' "

Charitable giving also is growing. The Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, the Las Vegas tennis great's outreach program, raises more than $42 million a year for underprivileged and at-risk children. United Way contributions doubled from two years ago.

'Feng shui' comes to Vegas

There is no fourth floor in the Boca Raton luxury condominiums going up near the Strip. That's because under Chinese feng shui principles, "4" represents death, developer Jerry Peterson says.

Here, in the land of cookie-cutter homes, a developer caring about positive life energy and spiritual balance is a sign that urban sensibilities are surfacing. So is the surge of high-rise condos planned downtown and near the Strip.

Housing prices are rising. The median sales price of existing single-family homes topped $300,000 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The U.S. median is about $216,000.

That's still a bargain for Californians, who face prices of $500,000 or more in big markets. When software provider InfoGenesis moved some of its operations here from Santa Barbara, many executives made six-figure profits on the sale of their homes, says Drew Hulburd, a manager. The job-applicant pool is much larger here, he says, partly because of the low cost of living.

Non-invasive Medical Technologies, which has 13 patents for instruments to quickly evaluate medical conditions on the battlefield or after a terrorist attack and other emergencies, moved from Auburn Hills, Mich. Executives rave about the red-carpet treatment they got in Nevada, along with $200,000 in tax relief. Vendors are eager to do business because the company is near hotels and a major airport, says Ann McCaughan, executive vice president.

McCaughan, a nature lover, also enjoys her new setting: "I have more wilderness around me. The largest desert wildlife refuge is 30 minutes from here, and the Grand Canyon is in my backyard."