Word: townes
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Others, like MGM Mirage, are in too deep. The few operating cranes in town are scattered among the 9,500 construction workers still crawling over CityCenter, an $8.4 billion, five-skyscraper, ultra-luxury project that is the largest privately financed development ever in the U.S. Although the company has managed to keep the project going through a desperate battle for financing deals with Dubai World, a number of people who signed up for condominiums are looking to bail. So MGM Mirage, which owns the most properties on Las Vegas Boulevard - the Strip - ducked and weaved around bankruptcy for six months...
...crash. "Guess what, a______s of Las Vegas. That's what gambling is about. That's what investing is about," she says. "It's greedy. But we're all doing it. Because why not?" It's very hard, she says, to suffer as the one honest person in a town of successful con artists...
...roof, which, the custodian tells us, haven't been used by anyone in months. Newport Lofts is one of a cluster of several luxury condos that were supposed to be part of a revitalization of the downtown area. Apartments in Newport Lofts - Boemio's client, an out-of-town investor, paid $600,000 for one - are now listed for as little as $179,000. And this particular apartment isn't exactly in great shape. A squatter slipped past the doorman and, even more impressively, got a locksmith in to switch the lock and give her keys...
...lawless right now in the Wild West. There's even a real estate agent (and the figures and details are slightly changed here to protect him) whose out-of-town investor demanded that the agent find a way to cover some of the losses he was taking on the $60,000 down payment he'd sunk into a house. So the agent created a separate contract, never shown to the bank, that said the new buyer had to purchase a $60,000 Persian carpet from the seller - a check his mortgage company, which was sucking up hundreds of thousands...
...this bad, why, then, does every Vegasite I meet still talk as if he or she is about to go on a winning streak? The people in Vegas aren't nearly as depressed as those in far less devastated cities. "This is a town built on hopes and dreams, and people don't give up hopes and dreams when there's a recession," says Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Anyone who has ever stood at a craps table knows that losers always believe they're one roll of the dice...