The news that Borders Books will liquidate doesn’t just bring the loss of four big bookstores in the valley, but it also indicates the flagging fortunes of the suburban big-box store model of development.
Ronnel Pingul says he was a successful dealer at a Strip casino until he slipped a disc in his back and got hooked on opiates — prescribed painkillers at first, and then heroin.
Here’s a story about how the little guy gets paid: Last month I wrote a lengthy profile of the Cosmopolitan, rooting for this cool new Strip resort to succeed while questioning whether it actually will, considering its $4 billion price tag, its ownership by a massive German bank, and its failure, thus far, to attract enough gambling revenue.
Oh, to be a Republican political operative for a day! What fun to plan the negative ads against John Oceguera, the outgoing Nevada Assembly speaker expected to run for Congress as a Democrat.
At his darkest moment, Jeff Iverson was so enslaved to methamphetamine that he willingly took a three-week jail sentence because he thought county lockup was the only way to get clean, at least in the short term.
Anthony Young is living the Las Vegas dream if there ever were one. When he’s not working as a valet at New York-New York, he can crash at his cool, tile-floored, 12th-floor studio apartment at one of the Veer Towers at CityCenter.
The first time tavern owners tried to overturn the smoking ban, during the 2009 Legislature, I was amazed they even got it out of committee, foolishly thinking Democrats in the majority would never go against the voters who had approved the ban in 2006.
Al Roker and the “Today” show made a surprise visit to Las Vegas this morning, bringing about $1.5 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas.
The Cosmopolitan opened in December, positioning itself as the anti-Strip resort. Six months later, it is still enjoying a strong positive buzz, but nonetheless lost $50 million in the first quarter, primarily because of poor gaming revenue. Here are three things that Cosmo is doing well, and three challenges.
Against heavy odds, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is a runaway hit. Hugely popular with tourists and locals, it still finds itself swimming in red ink. What can it do to turn things around?
Monday, June 13, 2011
There’s little doubt about where the place to be is in Vegas on a Saturday night lately. If it’s early, it’s at Vesper Bar, where you sip a Moscow Mule and watch the beautiful people check in while you check out one of the floor-to-ceiling video art installations.
A letter to this year’s high school graduates: So, let me tell you about the world we adults have made for you. It’s not pretty. As David Hirschman recently pointed out in Ad Age, incomes of most Americans have hardly risen since the 1970s, while the rich, and the very rich especially, have been going gangbusters.
State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, coming off his second legislative session as Democratic leader, is thought to be a lock should he decide to run for Congress.
My warring impulses of naive optimism and fatalistic pessimism are on full display as Gov. Brian Sandoval and Democratic legislative leaders announced a deal Wednesday extending taxes passed in 2009 while enacting reforms of education and collective bargaining.
Of all the problems facing the beleaguered Nevada System of Higher Education, which one seems so urgent that the Legislature would take it up? Perhaps it’s how to deal with deep budget cuts, which will be at least $200 million when you count the loss of federal stimulus money? Or access for underprivileged students? Or graduation rates? Or the division of resources between UNR and UNLV?
CARSON CITY — The goofy carnival known as the Nevada Legislature — with its dozens of simultaneous games of “heads I win, tails you lose” run by a host of clever carnies — will soon come to a merciful close.
Strange notions take hold up here, and one that’s frequently spoken of is that Gov. Brian Sandoval is on the long shortlist of potential Republican vice presidential nominees. We’ll be hearing more of this talk when this dreadful legislative session is finished.
It’s been said that Gov. Brian Sandoval and his staff are miracle workers this legislative session for having managed to hold Republicans together in opposition to taxes. Maybe so.
Dwight Jones, the superintendent of the Clark County School District since last fall, will introduce a hard-charging plan this week to improve the education of Las Vegas’ 300,000 students.
On the Sahara’s final weekend, I walked into a pathetic scene: A bunched crowd of patrons, arms outstretched, reaching and yelling as employees distributed free T-shirts. It was like something out of a disaster zone where the crowd is pushing up against the relief workers giving out sacks of food. Later, I came up with a classic win-win: We should move the state capital to Las Vegas, and make the Sahara the Capitol building.
For several months, I’ve argued that Gov. Brian Sandoval’s plan to balance the state’s budget by cutting funding for teachers, professors, social programs and health care providers would be shortsighted and deeply damaging for all of us, not just recipients of those government services.
With so much attention on how we’re going to improve our schools and universities by cutting their funding, there’s been too little focus on another policy miracle achieved by Gov. Brian Sandoval’s budget: Driving hospitals toward bankruptcy will improve health care.
The scheme is so devious, so underhanded, that it nearly worked. I’m talking about the White House’s secret agreement with Donald Trump that he run for president as a Republican who calls into question Barack Obama’s birthplace. Trump is doing this in exchange for ... what? That I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of, but I assure you I’m getting close. Very close.
Strange times to be a lobbyist for Nevada’s gold mining industry: On the one hand, your clients are raking in hundreds of millions in profits. But on the other hand, with those juicy profits come prying eyes and uncomfortable questions, like, how much do the mining companies pay in taxes?
Things got a little ugly on the floor of the Nevada Assembly this week as legislators debated Gov. Brian Sandoval’s proposed deep cuts to education. On a party-line vote, the Assembly voted down the governor’s recommended budget.
Children taken from homes because of abuse or neglect are separated from their siblings in 20 to 30 percent of all cases in Clark County. This is a little known but deeply traumatic problem for foster children, who are already gasping for air in an unforgiving world.
The public loses again in politics-as-usual Nevada
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
My favorite public policy fights are those in which none of the players evokes sympathy at all. And what a great example we have in the naked power play by big gaming interests to shut down Dotty’s, the neighborhood slot arcades that have popped up across the valley.
Tax preparation volunteers bring relief to many who are intimidated or preyed upon
Friday, April 8, 2011
There’s nothing more loathsome than preying on poor people. And there’s plenty of predators in the federal income tax game. By this I mean both shoddy and legitimate firms that charge exorbitant fees to prepare tax returns of the underprivileged or sell tax “refund anticipation loans.”
Here’s a key question for Las Vegas: If saving and frugality are now thick in the cultural and economic bloodstream, are we in trouble?
Monday, April 4, 2011
Here is the scene at Spago in Caesars Palace on a rainy night in January 2008: A table full of guys, dressed expensively and badly. Although there wasn’t such a thing then as Jersey Shore, this crew would’ve been perfect for the genre.
The Nevada Development Authority is supposed to lure businesses to Nevada and diversify our economy, but lately its CEO, Somer Hollingsworth, has had more success embarrassing the Nevada taxpayers that support the authority to the tune of a $1 million per year.
If Nevada escapes its current morass and in a couple of decades becomes a more prosperous, economically diverse and humane place, historians may view a UNLV conference, oddly enough, as a turning point.
Quite a mess we made of this beautiful valley. Half-finished projects that are concrete and steel corpses of fantasy economics. Subdivisions that appear out of nowhere, desert Leavittowns that manage to be both incredibly dense and totally car-dependent.
State's hiring bump won’t compare with gains expected nationally
Friday, Nov. 26, 2010
Economists have been pleasantly surprised by early estimates of hiring for the holiday retail season. Economists have been pleasantly surprised by early estimates of hiring for the holiday retail season. Nationwide, retailers hired 150,000 workers in October in preparation for the all-important holiday buying season.
In a shake-up at the highest ranks of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the newspaper announced Friday that Publisher Sherman Frederick has left the post and will become a consultant and columnist.
Alan Mallach is a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who specializes in housing policy and urban planning. He’ll give a free lecture at 5:30 today at Greenspun Hall at UNLV about the long-term effect of the foreclosure crisis in American housing.
In the way of recovery, Brookings report finds, are our tourism-dependent economy, unskilled workers
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The worst of it finally appears to have passed. After two years of economic decline, the gross metropolitan product of Las Vegas, which measures Southern Nevada’s total output of goods and services, grew slightly in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report.
Senator wants all parties at table to talk about new revenue, while industry balks
Friday, March 5, 2010
It was a dramatic showdown. State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, trying to close a nearly $900 million budget deficit, demanded that the gaming industry come to the table and contribute.
After first hearing in D.C., lawyer points to lacking regulation
Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the federal investigative body examining the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown, which led to the worst recession since the Great Depression, held its first public hearings last week, calling on the leaders of the nation’s largest financial institutions to testify. It will submit a final report to Congress in December.
Optimism takes a back seat as project managers look for answers
Monday, Jan. 11, 2010
Neil Opfer can see the recession from his window. Opfer is a professor of engineering and construction management at UNLV and lives in Summerlin, not far from the site of the once and future Shops at Summerlin Centre.
Like many others, the lure of easy money drew Tony to the casino again and again — until he realized where his life was heading.
Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009
According to a 2002 report commissioned by the Legislature, there are some 90,000 Nevadans with gambling problems. And Tony McDew is one of them. A few lucky days at the casino got him to believe that gambling was a way to supplement his income.
As Congress considers extending benefit for first-time buyers, troubling report emerges
Friday, Oct. 23, 2009
Nevadans have responded to the government’s offer of up to $8,000 in first-time homebuyer tax credits with gusto, filing more claims and receiving more in tax breaks per capita than anywhere else in the nation. Nevadans have claimed $146 million in tax breaks from the credit. But according to new federal reports released Thursday, the program nationwide is littered with potential fraud, threatening its future.
As Detroit is to automobiles and Pittsburgh was to steel, Las Vegas is to tourism — a one-industry town. How Las Vegas can make like Pittsburgh and grow beyond its roots
Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009
There are too many hotel rooms, too much commercial real estate and too many empty houses, and economists say Las Vegas should learn to live with diminished expectations. We can no longer be sure that we are the city of the future.
Anyone who thinks the Brookings Institution is a lefty think tank need only talk to Clifford Winston, a senior fellow in economic studies. Winston was in town this week to deliver a lecture at Brookings-partner UNLV. He argued that government intervention and regulation rarely make economic sense.
Vegas the logical spot for such development, Brookings says
Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009
A study suggests Las Vegas is an ideal hub for a high-speed rail network and — because of heavy travel between McCarran International Airport and Southern California — is primed for a high-speed rail link connecting the regions.
A bankruptcy judge here, joining judges across the country, is throwing a bit of sand in the gears of the mortgage machine and its ruthless foreclosure blade. She has raised this issue: In many home foreclosures springing out of bankruptcy proceedings, the foreclosure is being triggered by a representative of the lender — a surrogate that may not have a legal, equity stake in the proceedings.
They adapt to the market and the law, as Nevada’s top fraud fighter can attest
Friday, Sept. 25, 2009
John Kelleher’s professional life is beginning to feel cyclical, like the seasons. Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto asked Kelleher, a chief deputy, to head a mortgage fraud task force in early 2007. With so many shady real estate players and dicey mortgages, the new task force kept him busy. Then the foreclosure wave started, and the task force shifted its focus to scam artists falsely promising to keep Nevadans in their homes for a steep fee. Then the fraudsters began offering phony loan modification services, so Kelleher went after them, too.
Economists say extending tax credit for first-time homebuyers is bad policy
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009
No doubt, a big tax break for first-time homebuyers is good politics. Although the politics are a surefire winner, especially here in Nevada, some economists across the political spectrum question whether the $8,000 tax credit is good policy.
When Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid announced his support for the DesertXpress over a magnetic levitation train this summer, that seemed to end Nevada’s long-running train feud. Reid was frustrated with the sluggish pace of planning for the maglev.