Vegas Built It -- Now Will They Come?

LAS VEGAS (Dec. 3) -- Maria Gomez lives about as far away from the Las Vegas Strip as you can and still see some of its pulsing light. For most of her 20 years here, she's waited tables at local chain restaurants in the region's sprawling suburbs, entirely disconnected and disinterested in the gambling or tourism industries that have made her town world famous.

Nowadays, though, there's one thing that's top of her mind: CityCenter. Will it provide an economic spark that puts her husband back to work? Will it help them keep their house? Will it save Sin City and all that surrounds it?


It's an awful lot to ask of any one enterprise. But these are desperate times for many of the 2 million residents in the region, who are facing the nation's top home foreclosure rate, a Nevada-record unemployment rate and sales tax revenues so grim that the legislature likely will be in special session to confront the shortfall after Christmas.

Amid this sea of misery emerges the gleaming CityCenter, an $8.5 billion, 67-acre complex at the heart of the Strip. It opens in stages this month with a 1,500-room hotel-condo, a 4,004-room casino resort, a pair of tilted yellow-checked condo towers and a 47-story Mandarin Oriental that is half luxury hotel and half million-dollar residences. Oh, there's also 500,000 square feet of shopping and $40 million in public artwork placed throughout all of the above from such luminaries as Maya Lin and Henry Moore.

Folks like Gomez read the papers, watch the news and pray -- literally -- that the project can jumpstart this historically resilient town.

"I just lit a candle at church for CityCenter," Gomez said.

The 50-year-old said she's behind by at least one but possibly two mortgage payments and let the cable TV and landline phone service lapse last month. "If people like it and they come, things will get better," she said.

CityCenter's owner, MGM Mirage, stokes such hopes by posing as the town's panacea.

"If we don't do this, who's going to do it?" MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren asked in an interview with Sphere.com last month. "Who had or has the money? Who has the time? Who has the development expertise? Who has the land? Who has the reputation? There is no one but us.

"Do you think Steve Wynn is going to rip up his golf course and do something to drive visitation to Las Vegas in the next couple years? No way. He won't do it. Does (Las Vegas Sands CEO) Sheldon Adelson have any land? Is Harrah's Entertainment going to do anything other than hopefully fix up some of the older buildings? Who is going to take this community to the next level if not us?"

If he sounds a bit defensive, that may be because for every Maria Gomez, there are many others in Las Vegas who wish CityCenter well but believe the grandeur is inappropriate in this era of austerity.

"Who is going to buy those condos? Who has that kind of money?" asked Darrin Forth, 22, a student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "This is the best idea right now, adding thousands of new rooms to the Strip when they can't fill the ones that are already there?"

Las Vegas visitation in 2009 is on track to hit about 35 million, down from the record of 39.2 million in 2007 and back to the level of 2001 when the 9/11 attacks destroyed the last quarter of the year. There are about 141,000 hotel rooms now, and occupancy has resided in the low-80-percent range for most of the year. Room rates now average $92 per night, 23 percent lower than the 2008 average, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. And 2008 was 10 percent below 2007.

Murren predicts CityCenter will give the city a 7 percent visitation bump in 2010 as the economy recovers and curiosity-seekers flock to the most expensive privately funded construction project in U.S. history.

MGM Mirage has grappled with how to roll out its new creations in a way that is uplifting to the community. There was a small soiree Tuesday for the bow of the hotel-condo Vdara, a black-tie party is planned Friday night at the Mandarin Oriental, and fireworks will go off Dec. 16, when the Aria Resort Casino opens.

Even that, restrained by Vegas opening standards, sounds profligate to some.

"I just don't see how anyone celebrates right now," said Quincy Pallini, an out-of-work engineer. "Drink champagne when people can't afford to keep their homes? This is some sort of progress?"

Still, interest is high among locals as even skeptics concede -- and resent -- that their fates are entwined in MGM Mirage's. It's difficult to conceive of another city of this size as singularly focused on one prospective solution. But Las Vegas, which used to view itself as impervious to economic downturns elsewhere, has suffered a bruised ego and a hard crash from its high-flying, pop-culture-zeitgeist first half of this decade.

"I used to think that nothing could ever go wrong here, but then everyone made a ton of terrible decisions and here we are," said Elizabeth, a blackjack dealer at a major resort who feared for her job if her full name was used. "Even if I wanted to live somewhere else, I'm underwater on my house so bad. So all we can do is hope."