The relative nearness of Las Vegas
I was talking today to a 15-year resident of Las Vegas, Stephen, and it wasn’t long before we touched upon the explosion of growth in the city. I’ve been here for 31 years – and residents today would not recognize the old glitter gulch that I decided to call home back then.
I told Stephen about the house my sister, Terri, rented back around 1979. It was a little cinderblock home that reminded me of the one-room home from “Little House on the Prairie,” where the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom were all in one incredibly small room. Terri always needed a place for her horses and so she suffered through. Well, that house was waaaay out at Tropicana and Mountain Vista. I can remember my mother and I asking her what the hell she was doing so far out-of-town! Anyone living here now knows that is practically in the heart of the city today.
Stephen’s daughter lives off Farm Road, in the Northwest area — an area he calls southern Reno! And on the south end of the valley, the folks who built the Henderson airport built it a safe 15 minutes from downtown Henderson, thinking that would allow for growth and keep the noise away from everyone. Last year, my friend Andrew decided not to buy a home in Seven Hills because it was so close to the Henderson airport!
So what is relative nearness? When you’re in a long line, in spite of how far back you may be, the longer the line grows behind you, the closer you feel to the front of the line. The homes and airports that used to be so far out of town in Las Vegas are now so centrally located that they cause their own traffic “situations.” Are they too near to the city? And yet, because of our great airport, Las Vegas is incredibly near to everything. It’s just a two hour flight from nearly anywhere on the west coast, and only an hour or less from San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Phoenix, Tahoe, or Salt Lake City. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.
I am launching a speakers bureau and I thought the perfect tag line would be “Featuring World-Class, West Coast Speakers,” as that will eliminate the worry in the minds of any meeting planner about snowed in airports and cancelled flights. And in spite of the fact that we are considered “west coast,” we are still an hour closer to New York City than those traveling from LA. Who could ask for more? It’s good to be near.
