Just as I was putting together the biweekly poll question I post on my podcast and blog sites earlier this month, the Review-Journal thudded on our driveway with a World War III headline declaring the Valley is now unofficially home to 2 million people.
Beyond acknowledging the fact that it’s a mystery to me how the housing market could possibly be crashing—and more spectacularly than almost anywhere, they say—if we’re having an unabated parade of new arrivals, I returned my focus to the audiences who listen to and read our Internet work and respond to our polls.
What you need to know about them is that they are a very large contingent of Vegas-loving people delightfully obsessive about this city. It is an incomparable but enormous groupie community centered around a unique geographic and cultural concern, with every minor change in land ownership on the Strip, every legal battle Downtown, every planning commission hiccup being thoroughly stewed over by attentive devotees throughout cyberspace.
So, I wondered, why do they live where they do? Or, as I asked in the poll with all due deliberate snark, “If you love Vegas so much why don’t you live here?” Of course, I must make the caveat that this is a totally unscientific survey except to say that it’s a self-selected group of people who are, by definition of being in my audience, enthralled with some aspect of Las Vegas.
I came up with 17 possible answers, from “not a U.S. citizen” (a gratifying 8 percent) to worries about cost of living, traffic and future water shortages (4 percent each) to the evidently least important, “the dating scene sucks,” which came in at just 1 percent and may have been something you wouldn’t know or think until you got here. Interestingly, only 6 percent chose the one that my father and sister claim to be their big impediments, that they’d never be able to control their gambling.
There is a space for comments on the poll, and that’s where it gets fun. One poll answer was “Oh, but I do live here—and hate it,” a choice selected by 2 percent of folks. A fellow named Mike who clearly availed himself of this one wrote: “I do live here, and I don’t enjoy it. I hope to move to a city that isn’t an endless sprawl of master-planned communities and shopping power centers. It was fun for the first year, I’ll admit. But then you see the flaws, and your friends from out of town wonder how you can live in such a place. Oh well.”
Mike was quizzed by another poster as to why he lives here, then, and he would only say somewhat cryptically that his transplant was “forced.” Maybe that’s why the housing market sucks, because so many people are forced to move here and don’t intend to stay?
Sneaking into the double-digits for reasons keeping away many Vegas-lovers were work and family reasons (screw ’em!) and the summer heat (get over it!).
About which we have the thoughts of a woman named Susan, who wrote: “I moved here from Long Island, New York, almost five months ago, right in the midst of the 100-degree temperatures. My feeling? Stay indoors! I did when it was 10 degrees in New York! Dust is a heck of a lot easier to clean off your car than snow. I don’t miss the snow at all. I still can’t understand how people in this town think the housing costs are too high. Try finding a two-bedroom apartment for under $1,000 [a month] on Long Island. Good luck!”
The No. 1 reason made the most sense, really. Coming in with 16 percent of the vote was “I want to keep it as my favorite visiting spot.” It’s one reason why my partner Miles and I don’t live in California’s wine country or a place like central Europe; too much of a good thing always cheapens how special something is, makes you take that which you love for granted.
This response was typified by a listener named Bay Loftis of East Tennessee, whose sister lives in Las Vegas. The pair do a sister-act weekly podcast called Grits To Glitz (www.gritstoglitz.com) on which they contemplate the differences between their locales. Bay wrote:
“I love to visit Las Vegas. I do. I’m incredibly glad my sister lives there so I can visit her and get away from the madness that is the Strip. But I’m Southern. It’s really hard to get a Southerner to leave the South. We have biscuits and gravy, and it doesn’t seem to matter that there’s more or less alkaline in the water. But if we go west, and we eat biscuits west of the Colorado River, well, that is gross.
“So we remain Southern, and we continue to love visiting Las Vegas. And aren’t you glad? I mean, if we lived there, we would no longer contribute to your economy as tourists!”
Sigh. I guess. I just want someone to buy my damn money pit, er, Panorama condo. Oh well.
Read Steve Friess’ daily blog at TheStripPodcast.blogspot.com and catch his weekly celeb-interview podcast at TheStripPodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected].