Two Million Reasons

Here's this week's Las Vegas Weekly column, which is largely about, um, you.

Two Million Reasons: Why some Vegas-lovers won’t live here

By STEVE FRIESS

Just as I was putting together the biweekly poll question I post on my podcast and blog sites earlier this month, the Review-Journal thudded on our driveway with a World War III headline declaring the Valley is now unofficially home to 2 million people.

Beyond acknowledging the fact that it’s a mystery to me how the housing market could possibly be crashing—and more spectacularly than almost anywhere, they say—if we’re having an unabated parade of new arrivals, I returned my focus to the audiences who listen to and read our Internet work and respond to our polls.

What you need to know about them is that they are a very large contingent of Vegas-loving people delightfully obsessive about this city. It is an incomparable but enormous groupie community centered around a unique geographic and cultural concern, with every minor change in land ownership on the Strip, every legal battle Downtown, every planning commission hiccup being thoroughly stewed over by attentive devotees throughout cyberspace.

So, I wondered, why do they live where they do? Or, as I asked in the poll with all due deliberate snark, “If you love Vegas so much why don’t you live here?” Of course, I must make the caveat that this is a totally unscientific survey except to say that it’s a self-selected group of people who are, by definition of being in my audience, enthralled with some aspect of Las Vegas.

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