I was in Clarke County NV a couple of months ago, for the first time in 35 years or so, to meet some people from the Midwest who are accustomed to going to Vegas. We stayed at the Wynn Towers which is a typical combination of comfortable and grotesque, with cigarette smoke on the ground floor. The entire area is unrecognizable from a time when most of the streets on the Hertz map existed only on paper. But, as you note, the place remains sterile, if anything more so than it was 35 years ago. A combination human warehouse and tourist destination for the Midwest and foreigners.
Europeans still genuinely love the place because 'it's crazy". There's no place in Europe where they can see a complete lack of zoning and aesthetic taste controls.
Pardee was a major home builder there, so I worked on spreadsheets for those projects but I never personally saw them. All of the updated model homes we built first in San Diego first so I flew there a lot. Once changes for the new elevation was locked-in, they'd be rolled-out to Las Vegas, Henderson, Palmdale, the Ventura, Lake Elsinore etc.
The one place in Nevada I used to see a lot of was Reno which was a very nice town, as the Bureau of Land Management for the West Coast was and still is located there. I'd always stay at Harrahs where they were ever so nice and solicitous to young business travelers. And it's close to Lake Tahoe where I used to ski.
We also spent time in Denver, Colorado Springs and Winter Park this summer, again for the first time in 35 years or so. They're still "building" the Denver airport and yet it hasn't visibly changed in 35 years. They now have the bane of human existence, toll roads, though. Like Clarke County, Colorado has probably become more liberal than California, but with guns.
I still like our home base in Los Angeles. The San Francisco area where I grew up is now as costly as Switzerland, which is good for my family's real estate values but makes it otherwise less attractive to me. My nephew are sold on the place and even some friends of mine from Germany have moved there. Something for everyone.
Best wishes on New Years |
