Word: huges
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...they've been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it's willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through foreclosure. Since that takes about nine months, many of the owners even rent out their old house in the interim, pocketing a profit. (See pictures of modernist houses available for rent...
...says. The new house, like so many she deals with, was trashed by the previous owners, who were angry at being foreclosed on. The doorknobs, hinges and copper wiring were stolen, as were the appliances and carpet. The owners even left their dogs behind. (Abandoned pets have become a huge problem for local shelters.) "You couldn't walk into that house without holding your nose to keep you from vomiting," Boemio says. She and her husband had to spend $7,000 on appliances and carpet to qualify for a Fannie Mae loan...
Leaving the condo with the sale apparently finished, Boemio drives into a huge subdivision in western Las Vegas, one of the hardest-hit areas. The houses look nice enough, but every third one has a for-sale sign, and there are almost no cars in any of the driveways. She picks a house at random, and we go to the back. She figures the odds are high that a squatter has left a door or window open. Indeed, the bathroom window has already been pried open, and the screen is bent, so I bend it a little more and squeeze...
...banks were begging him to take their money, given his massive success in building the first Vegas-style hotel and casino in Macao, China, in 2004. Adelson didn't hesitate, taking all he could get and building an entire mini-Vegas in Macao called the Cotai Strip, along with huge casinos in Singapore; he also doubled his Vegas space by adding the Palazzo to his Venetian hotel. In a short time, he has accumulated a debt-to-earnings ratio of 6.8 to 1 in the U.S. Then the loans stopped coming, and his stock price sank from...