Pressemitteilung Las Vegas Stripped

18.03.2009, The City That Seemed Immune To Economic Reality Now Has An Excess Of All The Wrong Things

CBS) Hard times are hard to take in ANY city. But it's pain mixed with irony for residents of the city that seemed to defy the laws of economic gravity. Our Cover Story is reported by John Blackstone:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On stage at the Tropicana, Janu Tornell is part of the fantasy world that is Las Vegas: a showgirl flaunting her feathers in the Folies Bergere.

But for Janu and for all the dancers here, there's a real world they have to face after the curtain closes … a world with a collapsing economy.

"You would hear about everyone else and you felt bad for everybody else," she said. "But it was just something that hadn't hit home. And now, it's hit Vegas."

Ever since Vegas sprang from the desert in the 1940s it seemed a place immune to the economic ups and downs of humbler cities. There were always more customers for every new hotel, casino and show.

The Folies Bergere opened at the Tropicana hotel in 1959, but almost fifty years of feathers and high-strutting are coming to an end. Battling bankruptcy, the Tropicana's owners announced they are closing the Folies for good.

"And they simply informed us that due to the economic situation, that, you know, we had to close," Tornell said.

Tornell is among one hundred losing their jobs.

"Now it's hit all of us as a whole, the cast, the crew, the wardrobe," she said. "We won't have our little home to come to every night."

Miles from the Strip, Tanya Rucker worries she won't have her little home to come home to, either. Like nearly 60 percent of the people in Las Vegas with a mortgage, she owes more than her house is worth.

"I'll be honest, I paid $226,000 for it," she said. "And now, I think they're selling for, at the most, $180,000, some maybe $170,000."

A single mother with a four-year-old daughter, her income has dropped dramatically as fewer people come to the spa where she works.

"When I first moved here, I think that I thought the grass would be greener here," Rucker said. "And it was, for a long time."

Vegas has long been the place where people came to find work when they couldn't find it anywhere else. And when the rest of the country was booming, Vegas boomed even more.

"Between 2003 and 2007, we saw housing prices essentially double in the Southern Nevada area," said Jeremy Aguero, an economic analyst in Las Vegas.

"We were growing faster than everybody else. We were selling more houses. We were building more office buildings. We were building more hotels than anyone else in the nation."

Now this city of excess has an excess of all the wrong things.

"On a per-household basis, we have among the nation's highest rates of foreclosure, the highest rate of unemployment claims," Aguero said. "You see the lowest rate of population growth in probably 50 years."

And then there's the city's well-cultivated image of sinfulness and extravagance that just doesn't seem right in these difficult days. Even the President said so.

"You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime," he said at one appearance.

"I guess I do have a beef with the president, what can I tell you?" said Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. He's pushing for a presidential retraction.

"I think that the president owes it to us to straighten out the record," Goodman said. "I think he should say that Las Vegas is a great place to have a serious business meeting, and then everything's even."

But Mayor Goodman, no stranger to extravagance himself, points out that after those serious business meetings there is still fun to be had here.

"People are having a rough time out there and they need an escape," he said. "You need to get away from the pressure of these challenging economic times and, yeah, Vegas is a perfect place to come to."

"Better to lose your money in Vegas than lose it on the stock market right now?" asked Blackstone.

"Well, at least you got some play when you're playing in Vegas!"

As a symbol of Las Vegas extravagance, it's hard to beat the City Center project, still under construction. The complex of condos, hotels, restaurants and a casino has gone billions of dollars over budget. Even as its developers have been struggling with financing, it's become a beacon for job seekers - a place that's actually hiring.

At the project's career center, interviewers are screening candidates for jobs as maids, chefs and casino supervisors. Tanya Rucker (left), looking for a way to keep up with her mortgage, is hoping there might be a job for her.

"Spa inventory manager," she said. "I've done inventory before."

But with area unemployment at 10 percent, there are already 90,000 applicants for the 12,000 jobs here.

"I feel a little bit comforted knowing that there are other people in the same situation, knowing there are a lot of people looking for work, and under-employed," she said.

Elena Allred knows all about that when she interviews applicants at City Center Last year she was laid off after 28 years with the same casino.

"There's so many of the same stories," Allred said. "People just lost their jobs, some people have been looking for work for a year. I kind of wish that I could just, you know, make a miracle happen and give something to all of them."

For all the hope at City Center there is also a cloud over the project. Its developer, MGM Mirage, is at risk of defaulting on its huge debt, while during the past year and a half, the company stock has gone from as much as $100 a share to a low of less than $2.

In the dressing room at the Folies Bergere, Janu Tornell demonstrates a showgirl's flexibility. She is already working part-time as a language teacher in French and Spanish at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"And in-between numbers," she said, "I'm grading my papers."

But that doesn't make losing a job she loves any easier.

"It's saying goodbye to something that, you know, is so special," she said, tearing up. "Sorry," she laughed.

And Las Vegas is losing something, too: Its sense of economic invincibility. Las Vegas now sees that what happens in the rest of the country … can happen here, too.

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