In the eyes of some, Las Vegas is becoming too much like Los Angeles. That’s fine with me
When IKEA opened a store in Las Vegas this May, it opened some old wounds with it. Locals who dislike the pervasive cultural influence of Los Angeles used the occasion as rallying cry to stop Las Vegas from being remade in its image any further than it already is.
“If you can’t find a way to enjoy this (city) without refashioning it into the place from whence you came, do us all a favor: Go home,” wrote Vegas Seven reporter Al Mancini in an editorial seriously titled “Excited About IKEA? Then You Live in the Wrong Town.” He urged readers to enjoy the only-in-Vegas virtues of the Strip and Downtown and resist the cultural dilution that comes with more L.A.-like touches.
According to this reverse elitism, Las Vegas is in dire danger of becoming the Very Inland Empire. Or, for those who don’t get the reference, I give you the sarcastic words of novelist Steve Erickson, writing about Vegas for Los Angeles Magazine in 2005: “The Ultimate. L.A. Suburb.”
If only.
I loved the 11 years I spent in Los Angeles, and I miss the city terribly. I miss the Griffith Park Observatory, the L.A. Zoo and the Museum of Contemporary Art. I miss dogs in baby carriages, waiters with movie scripts, and vegan drive-throughs. Even though I was born in New York, L.A. always felt like home to me. It still does — and Las Vegas never has. Even after 11 years here, it still feels less like a home and more like a decision I happened to make. I suspect this is true for many Las Vegas residents.
At least I no longer have to miss IKEA.
The relationship between Las Vegas and Los Angeles is a complex one, fraught with resentment — ours, mostly. It’s been going on for years, a special subset of the wider griping about “Californication” heard around the American West at least since the ’70s. Of our 40 million annual visitors, more come from L.A. (20 percent) than any other city. And which city supplies us with more of our citizens? Duh. From 2013—2014, according to the Nevada tax board, 35 percent of the residents moving to Clark County came from Los Angeles County. No other American region came remotely close.
We need Los Angeles, and many of us resent needing it so badly. Maybe in part because we have an inferiority complex; maybe in part because some L.A. values — nanny-state taxation, nonconflict granola, a problem with AR-15 assault rifles — irritate our libertarian sensibilities; but also in large part because, well, Los Angeles acts a bit like an abusive spouse.
“Does the monorail go to your house?” my friend Dan once emailed, in all seriousness, before flying out for a visit.
To Dan and many Angelenos, Las Vegas is more a state of mind than a place. It’s a monster craps roll, a still-skinny Elvis shimmying in Technicolor, a hooker billboard truck. Vegas exists to be L.A.’s playground, according to Dan, its residents the playground attendants. It doesn’t matter to him that it’s grown into a city with 2 million people who don’t all park cars and take Dan’s dinner order at the Wynn.
Needless to say, that’s not an attitude that will endear Angelenos to Las Vegans.
But I don’t blame Dan entirely. I don’t think the disrespect is entirely undeserved. Las Vegas, still, after 111 years, has very little of the great, civilizing stuff that makes a city like Los Angeles real. Yes, it’s a world capital for musicals and concerts. But it has no legitimate, standalone art museum, zoo or planetarium. It has no real culture, either, other than gambling and a formerly blighted arts district slowly being hipsterized by a single Internet corporation.
What it does have is among the highest national rates for dropping out, incarceration and alcoholism, and the worst education and health-care systems in the nation. A 2015 WalletHub analysis based on livability, education, health and the job market ranked Las Vegas 49th of the 62 largest U.S. cities.
So why don’t I do Al Mancini a favor and go home? Because of one of the only things that really does suck about Los Angeles compared to Las Vegas: the cost of housing. Like many former Angelenos we know, my wife and I are in financial exile, trapped by a still hopelessly underwater mortgage and the reality that returning to the city where we fell in love will force us to raise our 5-year-old daughter in a one-bedroom apartment with audible gunplay outside.
(Some do leave, of course; a 2014 study showed that Las Vegas and Nevada supplied more transplants to L.A. than almost anywhere else; those people apparently have no problem with Californication.)
So, since we can’t import the beach at Santa Monica, the view from Mulholland Drive or 82-degree August days, we try to make Las Vegas livable in some of the ways Los Angeles was for us.
Every month, when they change exhibits, we tour our daughter around the one-room art gallery at the Summerlin Library, pretending to take in the world’s most cutting-edge paradigms of color, media and material use. We take her to PetSmart so she can ogle lizards, parrots and guinea pigs in the flesh and ask us about wildlife conservation and biology. And we stare — along with the other members of the Las Vegas Astronomical Society — at the moon through the meager telescopes at the Cheyenne campus of the College of Southern Nevada, since the bright lights of the Strip ruin our view of pretty much everything else in the cosmos. It’s no Griffith Observatory, but it’s what we have.
As it turns out, life is more complicated than “if you don’t like it, go home.”
So when an inexpensive urban furniture store opens, that’s only a good thing to us. As it is when we get a big-city performing arts center, a major-league hockey franchise and an actual vegan drive-through (at press time, VegeWay was scheduled to open soon on South Jones Boulevard.)
I’m not sure I understand what L.A.-haters are arguing for, anyway. Do they want Las Vegas to remain what my friend Dan wants it to be: a one-dimensional adult playground that transforms visitors into gambling marks, high-school dropouts into cogs of the service industry and attractive young females into sex merchants? If this is going to be a big city, we will inevitably assume more characteristics of a place like L.A.
I can’t wait. After all, there is no real cost to Los Angelization. It’s not like they knocked down Caesars Palace to make room for IKEA. Las Vegas isn’t any less itself because of it.
True, traffic and housing costs will probably increase, as will paid parking, but they’ll never amount to more than a fraction of L.A.’s problems with these issues.
And the progress will be worth it, at least to me and my fellow homesick former Angelenos, because instead of having to go home, we’ll finally be there.