Las Vegas (MONEY Magazine) - Mixed feelings are practically a civic duty if you live in Las Vegas. You curse the 30 million tourists who clog the city each year, but enjoy the swank restaurants and luxe shopping malls they keep in business.
| Best places to live around Las Vegas
|
|
Summerlin
|
|
|
Downtown
|
|
|
Boulder City
|
|
|
| City stats
|
|
|
|
|
|
You crab about the unfettered growth that's bursting the infrastructure -- the school district must recruit 1,500 new teachers every year -- while admitting that growth has kept the local economy resilient. And as you wilt in the summer heat, you remind yourself how much you hated shoveling snow back where you came from.
For all its peculiarities, what's undeniable is that Las Vegas life offers something a lot of people want. About 10,000 move into Vegas every month, according to state figures. If this influx gives Las Vegas the itchy restlessness of a transient town -- it's not unusual for neighborhood faces to change faster than you can memorize them -- it has also transformed the one-time desert tourist-trap into a genuine big city.
On and off the Strip, Vegas has acquired such metropolitan amenities as a thriving locals-oriented nightlife, enviable shopping and even a few museums. And amid the fields of hastily-erected stucco boxes, some genuine communities have taken root.
Chief among them is Summerlin. Its drawing card is its careful New Urbanist layering of residential, commercial and civic features. The result: a pleasant neighborhood that keeps property values up.
Meanwhile, Las Vegans seeking an alternative to such rigidly planned suburbs have sparked a revival of Downtown, rehabbing '60s-era ranch houses in the MacNeil Estates area and '40s bungalows in the John S. Park neighborhood. Just southeast of the valley lies Boulder City, the only township in Nevada to ban gaming. A slow-growth ordinance safeguards its small-town quaintness and props up prices.
Vegas isn't for everyone. Each month, those 10,000 new arrivals pass another 4,000 or so on their way out. But even that residential churn has its positive side. Combined with the vitality and spectacle of the Strip, it imbues the city with a sense of headlong, unceasing change -- the feeling that something new can happen here, and probably will -- that many find irresistible. As long as they can stand the heat.
|
