If you have not been to Las Vegas in a while you should visit Las Vegas to see the change in the town. It is not so much the visual change although you will see more homeless people and street performers hoping for a “tip”. More like the change in the way the town is percieved. Once a gambling meca the powers to be have turned the town into a destination where some of the finest hotels in the world and finest restaurants flourish. Here though amongst the oppulance is a clear example of rich vs. poor.

From a standpoint of a Elvis street performing impersonator as to what the town needs to do to reclaim its shine in an insightful article from NPR which follows is a story about how the town might resurrect itself.

7:00 pm ET Rodrigo Gonsalez walks along the Las Vegas Strip as he finishes up a night of impersonating Elvis. Gonsalez, a welder by trade, turned to street performing in the absence of construction jobs in the city. Las Vegas‘ unemployment rate is down …

Of course, there’s no question about what’s No. 1: gaming.

And if people elsewhere praise the job-creating powers of small business, in Las Vegas, big business, big hotel owners, historically drive the economy.

Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, cites a common rule of thumb — the ratio of population growth to increases in the number of hotel rooms is 6 to 1.

People up in the Silicon Valley need to be coming down here because the weather is perfect — it’s the ease of everything here.

- Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman

If you look at the imaginative high-rise hotels in Las Vegas — mock-ups of Venice, Paris, New York City, Luxor, Camelot — and keep that 6-to-1 ratio in mind, you can feel how Las Vegas became, as it used to be, the fastest-growing city in America.

These days, the hotels are full, thanks to low room rates, but it’s widely, if anecdotal, observed that the tourists are spending less than they used to.

When tourism fell off in the recession, work on a planned new hotel-casino, the Fontainebleau, stopped. Then the Sahara — a mainstay of the Strip since 1952 — closed its doors last year. It had employed 1,050 people. And with over 1,700 rooms, apply Goodman’s 6-to-1 ratio, and you can see that the Sahara’s end was very bad news.

That raises the question: Shouldn’t the metropolitan area of 2 million start diversifying its economy? Goodman says, yes.

“We definitely want to attract the businesses into the state in the different industries,” she says. “[Information technology] is incredibly important and programming and people up in the Silicon Valley need to be coming down here because the weather is perfect — it’s the ease of everything here.”

Signs Of Economic Hope

The city of Las Vegas is home to just under 600,000 of the area’s residents, but it has managed to keep alive a kind of local public works program, flying in the teeth of the downturn.

A symphony hall, the Smith Center, is going to open next year — that’s something this showbiz capital never had. And its construction has provided more than 3,000 skilled jobs.

There’s also going to be a new city hall — the old one, where Goodman’s husband, former mayor Oscar, held office for 12 years — is going to become headquarters for online retailer Zappos.com, which is planning to employ 1,000 people there. Zappos moved from San Francisco to suburban Henderson a few years ago. And now it’s moving downtown.

Zach Ware of Zappos met Siegel at an offbeat, cafe-cum-art gallery and lending library called The Beat, where there’s a collection of vinyl albums that the customers can play on an old-fashioned turntable.

Ware says Zappos’ anti-hierarchical, informal ways fit well with Las Vegas.

And, he said, there’s a real advantage for a business that runs 24-7 to be in a city that never sleeps.

“That’s what’s so nice about Las Vegas,” he says. “We see it as this really vibrant, rich community that also happens to have this 24-hour infrastructure. Not only because of the Strip directly, and the tourists that are there, but because of the people that work there. They work three full shifts and they need to eat at 4 o’clock in the morning. Not because they’ve been out all night but because they’re getting up or finishing work.”

Rob Lang says the Las Vegas area has some other natural opportunities to diversify. For one thing, he says, because so many people in the area still have lives in Southern California or elsewhere, they tend to do some things back home like seeing a doctor or going to the hospital. In the rush to build so many casinos, so fast, the region didn’t grow normally.

“We only have about 60 to 65 percent of the predicted medicine we should have,” he says. “Backfilling medicine would add 10,000 to 20,000 jobs in that sector alone. So there [are] prospects of diversifying the economy by just right-sizing the rest of the economy to what would be predicted for 2 million residents.”

And there are some big Internet businesses nearby, including much of what we call the cloud — as in cloud computing.

You might not believe how the town seems to be in limbo. Not sure of itself and where it might be going. yet there is the usual hustle and bustle on the strip and downtown, the crowd somehow seems different. it is always great to visit las vegas just for the food and a change of pace. The best thing would be to visit Las Vegas to see the change in the town for yourself.

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