Word: building
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...turn out of my hotel's full parking lot, veering onto the Strip, I come across something rarely seen in Vegas: frozen construction projects. I pass cranes abandoned at the site of the Echelon, a huge, multibillion-dollar project of four hotels that is now just three buildings of nine floors of concrete and steel beams sitting idly on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I pass three more abandoned sites - 63 empty steel floors of the Fontainebleau, a sad unfinished shell that was supposed to be Caesars Palace's Octavius Tower and two cranes halted...
Just as Americans did with their houses, casino owners borrowed way too much money to build hotels that were way too big. Economists like Yale's Robert Shiller have warned that the next big wave of failures in the U.S. recession will be in commercial real estate - and once again, Las Vegas is headlining. Even worse, the bottom fell out as casino owners were building, so a number of them couldn't replace construction loans with the financing that was once readily available to complete and open hotel-condo-casino projects. Deutsche Bank foreclosed on the $3.9 billion Cosmopolitan Hotel...
...year by pumping $140 million, almost a quarter of its monthly revenues, into the project. MGM sold off Treasure Island at a bargain price: Phil Ruffin, the buyer, paid the equivalent of $225,000 for each room on the property; CityCenter's rooms cost about $1.5 million each to build. Even if CityCenter is a big success and people want urban density as a part of their Vegas experience, experts like Bill Lerner, a gaming analyst at Union Gaming Group, figure it will be five to 10 years before Vegas needs more than the 150,000 or so hotel rooms...
...build yourself out of this mess," says Jeanne Woodford, former warden at San Quentin and former head of the CDCR. "The state can't afford it." Apparently, California only accounted for the construction costs and never included the operating expenses. "So even if those places are built," says Woodford, "where will California get the money to staff them? We're broke. How the heck are we going to operate these prisons? Most prisons cost from $150 to $200 million a year to operate. There's just no money...
...face of the challenge, U.S. officials have earmarked $4 million to help bolster Mexican prisons, part of an aid package to support the fight against the drug armies. Calderon has also promised to build more pens to cope with the burgeoning numbers. But some working in the prison system say the difficulties in the controlling the inmates will not be solved by raising more jail houses; the crisis, they say, also stems from profound problems in Mexico's justice apparatus. More than 41% of the nation's total prison population of 220,000 has not even been convicted and sentenced...