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Oscar Goodman has been crying about Obama's speeches hurting Vegas, but he doesn't seem to want to blame the casinos for jacking up prices and nickle and diming everyone to death.
It also doesn't help that a couple big companies own pretty much all of the casinos. They use this "slow economy" bullshit to pay their employees less and work them harder with the threat of losing their jobs.
Las Vegas had the chance to bring in high tech companies many years ago and bring in income that was more than just tourism and gambling. They fucked it up and kept building these large lavish hotels, with the prices continuing to climb. Every hotel had to have "high end " shops and expensive restaurants, even the dumpy casinos that would have been better off being imploded and rebuilt from scratch. The city could only handle so many of these without something giving, now we're seeing a thinning of the herd.
TheDoc is right, a bunch of LA douchebags came in, brought in their shitty overinflated real estate speculation, stupid laws and fucked it up. Builders started building house closer together to squeeze in 2-3 more houses per lot and flooded the market. Out of town construction employees came in to grab the booming construction job market, then just up and left, leaving the local guys.
Vegas is definitely one big mess, but it's also an opportunity. I'm looking at houses that were selling for a retarded $500-600K now being listed in the lower 300s and in some cases even lower than that. Good. A lot of them were just out of town speculators anyways. casino employees couldn't really afford them anyways.
Vegas isn't dead, it's just undergoing a marketing correction...
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