Las Vegas Boom Continues Unabated

Having just returned from Las Vegas, I can attest to the development that's going on throughout the city as detailed in this article. Everywhere you look there are massive towers going up that will add thousands of rooms, both hotel and condo, to the Strip and immediately adjacent areas. Here's a sample of what's going on:

Consider the Venetian, which already ranks as the sixth-biggest hotel in the world and the fourth largest in Las Vegas, home to 15 of the 20 largest on the planet. This colossus will assume the top spot once it opens a 3,200-suite tower, now under construction, that will bring its room count to more than 7,000.

Another development, Echelon Place, will have more than 5,000 rooms when it is built on the site of the old Stardust, which its owners demolished last month. The MGM currently ranks as the largest hotel in Las Vegas — and the world — with 5,000 rooms.

At $4.4 billion, Echelon Place would rank as the most expensive development in Las Vegas history — if not for the $7 billion the MGM Mirage is spending on CityCenter. That price is far more than the previous record, set when Mr. Wynn and his financial backers spent $2.7 billion building the 2,700-room Wynn, which opened in 2005.

Even competitors marvel at the scope of the CityCenter project, which MGM calls the most expensive privately financed project in American history. This minicity bordering the Las Vegas Strip will feature six towering buildings that reach as high as 61 stories. Covering 67 acres, it will include a 4,000-room hotel, a sprawling convention center, a half million square feet of retail space and 2,700 condominium units.

While walking through Bellagio I looked at the plans for CityCenter. It's really going to be something. It will be located on the large space between the Monte Carlo and the Bellagio, and will be connected by monorail to both. If I had big bucks, that's where I'd want to live in Vegas. It's right in the middle of the Strip.

There's one big problem that I don't see addressed in the article and that's traffic. Even during slow periods Las Vegas Blvd. is often bumper-to-bumper, and if you don't know some of the back roads (like I do), you can spend an hour trying to go a mile or so. Adding thousands of residents and guests at CityCenter will effectively bring the town to a standstill unless they've got some other roads planned to get people in and out.

The other issue, of course, is water. Vegas is growing rapidly and their water demands must be huge. At some point they've got to get to a point where the water supply won't keep up with the number of people that want to live there.