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In another installment of the “neighborhood series”, I decided to hit one of the places that few tourists know about, and frankly, most of Las Vegas wants to keep it that way.

That fact of the matter is, yes Virginia … Las Vegas does have a Skid Row.

Neighborhoods like Skid Row are not unfamiliar to me at all.   I’ve lived in mostly urban areas for my entire life, and I actually lived “on” Skid Row in Los Angeles for a number years, and my rapport with the surrounding community was actually quite good.

While I did not live in a tent on the street myself, many years ago I was able to procure a “loft” (a/k/a the corner of an old 1920’s office building converted to residential use) on the East Side of Downtown LA for a monthly cost that was practically free.

Coming from the East Coast, I thought the owners of the building were crazy for letting such large units go for such an insanely low price.   I was within walking distance to every major subway line, Pershing Square, Broadway, Grand Central Market, and much of Los Angeles was mine for the taking without having to climb into an automobile.

The same unit would have cost me three times as much in such undesirable places as Port Morris in The Bronx.

It was around this time that I became baptised into the Southwest lifestyle.  Not West Coast, but Southwest.

While prices in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco generally rose the closer one got to the urban core, the converse was true in Southern California.

In Los Angeles, prices were almost wholly regulated by distance or barriers from the undesirables. Malibu and Mulholland trumped Downtown or Central Hollywood even though they were generally a pain in the ass to get to and were prone to mudslides and floods.  LA was all about seclusion.

When I moved to Las Vegas, I quickly found the city to be more or less Los Angeles … with more casinos and far more hostile weather.  The blueprint for both cities was similar.  Build exclusive fringe suburbs to isolate the haves from the have-nots in a pattern of urban reversal.

Demonize the central city, and sell people on the concept of white folks, strip malls, shopping malls, and walls as some type of desert nirvana.

Of course, nobody wanted to say as much, so elaborate fake cities and even fake minorities were built in these fringe areas to assuage the hipster fears of these new residents.

“Can I still vote Democrat?”, they wondered.

“Yes you can!” was the resounding answer from developers as they flooded these areas with healthy and “earth-friendly” stores such as Whole Foods, and stores with intellectually misspelled names such as “Anthropologie”.

Never mind that Green Valley is as white as West Virginia, you can’t possibly be a redneck if there is a “P.F. Chang’s China Bistro” within a 5 minute drive.

People sometimes ask me why I dislike places like “The District”, and that is why. It’s a half-assed, guilt-free attempt to convince suburban folks that they are anything but, while encouraging sprawl, and promoting flight from the actual city while leaving it to decay.  These developments are hotbeds of hypocrisy as so-called “progressives” gather and promote their ideals sufficiently cushioned from the harsh realities of real “diversity”.

“But Rex, people should be free to live where they want.”

This is true, and they are free to live there.  That being said, I should also be free to hate those places.

I watched for decades as my hometown became a clusterfornication of satellite cities and it now has some of the worst traffic in the nation with a deteriorating urban core which is soiled, and thrown away like a morning maxi-pad by millions of daily commuters who give their tax money to jurisdictions in Virginia and Maryland.   It’s also why I will never, ever acknowledge those people as “Washingtonians”.

If you abandon it (or worse, never lived there in the first place), it’s no longer yours.

I digress …

When I first got here, I noticed another similarity that Las Vegas shares with Los Angeles.   A sizable homeless population complete with its very own Skid Row.

There was one notable difference.  Vegas’ Skid Row is almost out of the city limits.  Locally referred to as the “homeless corridor” or “Tent City”, the area is centered around Foremaster Lane and is one short block from the city of North Las Vegas.

Foremaster lane has been in the news recently as Metro PD has been tasked with “taking back the area”.  They have been erecting barriers along surrounding streets preventing folks from erecting new tents, and they are trying to completely eliminate the tent city that does still exist.

Homelessness is yet another skeleton in the closet of Vegas.

Las Vegas has an estimated 13,000 homeless people, which for a city of 560,000, makes us #1 per capita in the USA.

D.C. comes in a distant per-capita second at 6,000 homeless (at 581,000 people), and in 2007, Nevada as a whole had the second highest homeless population per-capita, trailing only the city of Washington DC.

This is something that you don’t see in the slick promotional ads.

Now, I get crap quite often for writing about these things.

“Tourists don’t want to see the gloom and doom side of Vegas.”

Perhaps the critics are right, but this is every bit as “real” a part of Las Vegas as the glimmering casinos.  You can get the slick, shiny s**t in ten thousand other places, but if you want to see what goes on behind the facade, the choices narrow significantly.

This is where I sometimes come in … to the chagrin of many.

This is the truth, and this is what’s real. I like the beautiful side of Las Vegas as much as the next person, but I’m not a promotional arm of the city.   In addition to the Blackjack tables, swimming pools, strip clubs, and shows … this is exactly what I see on a daily basis living here.

I think it’s necessary for people to see. Especially locals in more fringe areas.

R&R partners (the LVCVA’s contracted advertising arm) has received $400 million over the last five years for such gems as “Your Vegas is Showing” and “Take a Break”.

That’s almost $31,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in Las Vegas.

Perhaps the homeless don’t “deserve” four hundred million dollars in taxpayer money, but in all honesty, neither does R&R.   I have zero doubt that I could have put ten homeless people in a room and come up with an entire slew of superior slogans over the last 5 years.

Say what you want about the disadvantaged being a drain on taxpayer resources, but corporate welfare and government employment (another nice name for “welfare”) is a far, far larger drain on your paycheck than the homeless will ever be.

In any event, Metro PD is on a mission lately. Exactly what kind of mission is not exactly clear.  They have been busting prostitutes on The Strip for the better part of the year, they recently busted a strip club, and also raided a topless pool at the Rio a week ago.   They have been doing everything possible to take the “sin” out of “sin city” and now they are aggressively pursuing the homeless.

Exactly what the end game is … I do not know, but what I do know is that the overall crime rate in the neighborhoods seem to be increasing while law enforcement appears to be preoccupied with an agenda all its own.

As Metro continues to push people out of their homeless encampments, the question arises as to where the people will go.

In my opinion, disrupting our Skid Row is counterproductive. Its current location is out of sight of the “progressive people” in the valley, and even farther out of sight of the average visitor.   Most of our tourist population is still blissfully unaware of our seedier underbelly.   As the present location is centered around a myriad of social service buildings, it seems to be the perfect place for those without a home to camp.

Dismantling this city-within-a-city only increases the chances that the displaced will encroach upon the areas trodden by the more privileged, and if that happens, I don’t think the city will have anyone but itself to blame.

I stopped and spoke with a few campers on Foremaster, and in between being asked for spare change, I was told tales of hyperthermia in 115 degree weather, and rampant police abuse.

“They would put us to sleep like the dogs in the animal shelter”, one lady told me, “they don’t even see us as human”.

I asked one man where he would go, and he said “I don’t know, do you have any suggestions?”

“The Wynn has one hell of a parking garage”, I said, “and I’ll tell you another thing, the bathrooms in the Encore are second to none.”

“Steve Wynn is a mother$*#%er”, another gentleman said as he took a swig from a brown paper bag.

It was hard to argue with him. Just because people are homeless does not mean that they aren’t bright.

I laid out a scenario in which the Encore bathrooms would be perfectly sufficient studio apartments, complete with AC, running water, and maid service, and this invoked a few smiles.

I was not trying to make fun of their situation, belittle, or ridicule them.  Sometimes, all you have is levity, and if you simply treat people like people, you can have a good laugh with them regardless of their lot in life.  There are millions of people in this country one paycheck or one medical bill away from a tent on Foremaster, and they all have hopes, dreams, wishes, personalities, and yes … even senses of humor.

I wish I had the ability to help the folks on the row, but the issue is far bigger than I am.  There are a lot of bad things in the world, and the vast majority of them are far out of the average person’s control.

As I took my leave of the area, I pondered what would become of the people here.

I actually imagined a gigantic tent city forming overnight in the Encore garage, and I laughed to myself as I pictured Steve’s reaction.

I wondered if he would kick them out, or if he would instead walk around the garage critiquing the new resident’s color choices.

“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.   A yellow tent does not go with a chartreuse sleeping bag!”

Steve might actually try to feng shui the place.

Anyway, another day, another slice of life of our fair city.

It’s not always pretty, but it is … Las Vegas.

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