Word: nevadas
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...recession is hitting Las Vegas on all fronts. Nevada legislators have struggled to close a deficit of more than $1 billion in the 2009 budget. Budget projections for 2010 and 2011 also look grim. Construction on Boyd Gaming's $4.8 billion Echelon resort was stopped last August just as three of its towers reached the 12th floor (the tallest would have risen to 55 stories). Construction won't resume until 2010, though the cranes will remain towering above the site (it's cheaper to leave them in place - and these days no one else in town needs them...
...same month a year earlier. In November the county issued 80 new home permits, down from an average of almost 500 permits a month in 2007. Housing prices have deflated with a deafening groan. Keith Schwer, who runs the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, estimates that 50% of homeowners owe more than what their home is worth. Perhaps the only positive note is that housing prices have returned to more reasonable levels. "We're getting back into the affordability range," Schwer says. "The only problem is we don't have credit...
...Nevada's unemployment rate jumped from 0.4% to 8% in November, the highest rate since 1984, and Schwer says it could rise to 10% next year. The figure translates to more than 111,700 unemployed Nevadans, according to the state's Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. (The national rate is 6.7%.) Meanwhile, the city's largest food bank, Three Square, which supplies food to nonprofits throughout the city, budgeted $250,000 for purchasing food in 2008. The total food need for destitute families throughout the Las Vegas Valley is closer to $1.3 million...
What happened to recession-proof Vegas? The short answer is that the city placed most of its bets on the tourism industry. For a long time it paid off, but, says Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, "if you ride a fast horse, you have the likelihood of greater volatility...
Over the past four years, Nevada was growing jobs at two to six times the national rate. In the past decade, the state's population increased 50%, with new residents attracted by steady employment, no personal income tax and housing that seemed to grow ever more valuable (home prices increased 135% between 2000 and 2006, according to Standard & Poor's). "We thought we had decoupled from the national economy," says Schwer. Unlike the rest of country, Nevada hadn't had a downturn since the 1980s...